Emotional Regulation
7 terms
Alexithymia
The inability to identify and describe your own emotions. You feel things intensely but can't name them—like having a complex emotional storm inside but only being able to say "I feel bad." Affects 50-85% of autistic people.
Co-regulation
When one nervous system helps stabilize another through presence and connection. Not talking someone through their emotions—literally sharing your calm until their system remembers how to regulate. Like emotional jumper cables: you can't charge a dead battery by yelling at it, but you can share power from a working one.
Emotional Contagion
Absorbing others’ emotions automatically; can be stronger for autistic and highly sensitive people.
Emotional Dysregulation
Neurological differences in how emotions are experienced, processed, and expressed. Characterized by intense feelings that may seem disproportionate to triggers and difficulty returning to emotional baseline—not a character flaw, but brain-based variation.
Emotional Flashback
A sudden, intense emotional state (fear, shame, panic) triggered by past trauma rather than present reality, often without clear images.
Interoception
Your internal body sense—the ability to feel hunger, thirst, heartbeat, temperature, pain, and other signals from inside your body. Many neurodivergent people experience this "eighth sense" differently, making basic needs harder to recognize.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
Extreme emotional pain triggered by perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure. A neurological response common in ADHD where minor criticism feels like physical injury and imagined rejection becomes unbearable agony.