Somatic Therapy for Neurodivergent People

If you find it hard to identify what you’re feeling – either emotionally or with regards to inner body sensations – you are not alone. And while there’s a lot out there about how trauma can obscure our ability to identify feelings, the truth is it’s not always about trauma or something bad happening to you.

Many neurodivergent people struggle with what’s called interoception - your ability to sense what’s happening inside your body. Interoception helps you notice your basic bodily needs – whether you are thirsty, hungry, need to go to the bathroom, or are in pain, for example. It also helps you understand your emotions, which is a key part of emotion regulation and being able to move through the world with ease.

If you struggle with interoception, you might have muted internal signals – whether you rarely feel hungry, can’t identify emotions, and don’t know when to use the bathroom – or amplified internal signals – which might make you feel hungry frequently, heighten your emotions, or amplify pain signals.

Alexithymia and Therapy

Struggling with interoception can cause alexithymia, which is a difficulty distinguishing between emotions and bodily sensations, making them hard to label and make sense of. Research estimates that alexithymia is higher in neurodivergent people – ADHDers and Autistic people alike.

Alexithymia can make therapy a frustrating experience – when you’re consistently being asked what you’re feeling, but you can’t easily describe it, you might feel like you’re doing therapy wrong, you might feel shame or shutdown during therapy sessions, or you might get frustrated at your therapist for not understanding you.

This is especially true in somatic therapy, where providers who are not well-informed about neurodivergence might consistently ask what you feel in your body without realizing that you need extra support or different approaches because of your neurodivergence.

At the same time, therapy, especially somatic therapy, can be really helpful for neurodivergent people because – with the right provider and approach – it can help you identify and name what you’re feeling more easily, as well as help you understand your sensory preferences and needs, including how your sensory environment affects your emotions, behaviors, and reactions. Sensory regulation is a basic need that supports higher levels of regulation like emotion regulation, behavioral regulation, and cognitive regulation.

When you are more able to distinguish your emotions and body sensations you can:

1) Recognize sensory irritants and soothers. Such as what kind of clothing feels most comfortable for you, or what kinds of public spaces overwhelm you and why. This can significantly reduce your stress and anxiety when it comes to going to school or work, for instance, because you will know what your sensory needs are and how to advocate for yourself.

2) Reduce the negative impact of ADHD traits. When you aren’t sure how to manage your impulsivity this can lead to higher rates of anxiety and depression. Working on distinguishing your emotions and body sensations can help you understand what triggers impulsivity, what kind of movement your body needs to work with the impulsivity, or even what sensory input helps you slow down when you feel impulsive.

3) Navigate social situations with Autism. In therapy, you can learn to identify and communicate about your emotions in your friendships, advocate for a more direct style of communication at work, or recover from the exhaustion that comes with masking, for instance.

How Somatic Therapy Can Help Neurodivergent Individuals

In somatic therapy, we can take our time to explore what’s easy or difficult for you when it comes to identifying your emotions and body sensations. We can explore how this has impacted your relationships, work, and other aspects of your life. And we can explore ways for you to begin distinguishing what you are feeling.

My goal as your therapist is to make sure therapy is an affirming place for you. I trust that if you are struggling to identify what you feel it’s not because you’re not trying hard enough, it’s not always because you’ve experienced trauma, and it’s also not a lost cause.

We can start with simple exercises, like noticing what certain textures feel like on your skin – usually, starting with external sensory information is easier than the more internal stuff. We can explore what kind of sensory input you find soothing or irritating.

Down the road, I can also share resources that list different emotions, body sensations, and impulses, and as you start to notice more of what’s happening in your body, we can create a map of what certain emotions feel like for you.

Each session, you can bring back your successes and where you’re still struggling – this is all good data for therapy, so we can decide what’s working, and what else we want to try.

If you’re neurodivergent and curious how somatic therapy can help you, my office is a safe space for you to land. I’d be happy to start by meeting via Zoom for a free 20-minute consultation and we can talk about whether this is the right fit for you and next steps.

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