Understanding the Hidden Landscape of Neurodivergent Experience
Imagine standing in a forest where you can see the trees bending in the wind, leaves rustling, branches swaying, but you cannot feel the breeze on your own skin. You know intellectually that wind exists, that it moves through this space, but your own body’s experience of it remains mysteriously out of reach. This is something like the experience of alexithymia: being present in your own life while struggling to identify and name what you’re feeling in real time.
For neurodivergent individuals navigating alexithymia alongside boundary difficulties, the question of consent becomes far more complex than many therapeutic models acknowledge. As counsellors and clients work together to understand past experiences, it’s essential to recognise that struggling with consent isn’t always about having clear feelings and ignoring them. Sometimes it’s about not having access to those feelings in the moment at all.
What Is Alexithymia?
Alexithymia, derived from Greek words meaning “no words for feelings,” describes significant difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions. Research indicates that alexithymia occurs at notably higher rates in neurodivergent people, with prevalence estimates of approximately 50% in autistic individuals compared to around 10% in the general population (Kinnaird et al., 2019). It’s also more common in people with ADHD, though exact prevalence rates vary across studies.
People with alexithymia often experience:
- Difficulty identifying what they’re feeling in the moment
- Trouble distinguishing between different emotions
- Challenges describing feelings to others
- A tendency toward concrete, externally focused thinking
- Difficulty recognising emotional cues from their own body
Critically, alexithymia exists on a spectrum. Someone might have excellent emotional insight when reflecting later but struggle to access those feelings in real time, much like how you might only realise you were walking in fog once you’ve emerged into clear air.
The Boundary Question: When Your Internal Compass Can’t Find North
Think of boundaries as the root system of a tree: underground, often invisible, and also essential for determining what nourishes you and what depletes you. Healthy boundaries require constant feedback from that root system: ‘This feels right. This doesn’t. This is too much. This is what I need.’
For neurodivergent individuals, boundary difficulties often arise from multiple intersecting factors:
Different social processing: Autistic individuals may process social information differently, sometimes struggling to recognise subtle social cues that typically signal boundary violations (Milton, 2012). It’s like trying to read a map where some of the landmarks are invisible to you.
Masking and compliance: Many neurodivergent people develop extensive masking behaviours, suppressing natural responses to appear more neurotypical. This can create a disconnect between outward compliance and internal experience, like a river that has learned to flow in a channel that isn’t its natural course (Hull et al., 2017).
Executive function challenges: Setting and maintaining boundaries requires executive functions like planning, initiating action, and following through. For those with ADHD or executive dysfunction, even when they know a boundary has been crossed, mobilising a response can feel like trying to grab smoke.
Rejection sensitivity: Many neurodivergent individuals experience heightened rejection sensitivity, which can make saying “no” feel incredibly dangerous (Dodson, 2022). The fear of creating a social challenge becomes a weight that keeps you rooted in place, even when everything in you wants to move.
Where Alexithymia and Boundaries Intersect: The Consent Dilemma
Here’s where the complexity deepens. Meaningful consent requires:
1. Knowing what you’re feeling
2. Understanding what those feelings mean
3. Communicating your feelings and needs
4. Having those communications respected
For someone with alexithymia and boundary difficulties, this process can break down at the very first step.
Consider this: if you’re in a conversation, situation, or interaction that feels “off,” and you can’t identify what you’re feeling or why, how do you know whether to consent or withdraw?
It’s like being asked whether you want to continue down a trail when you can’t tell if the sensation in your chest is excitement, anxiety, or something else entirely. What do you do?
The Delayed Recognition Phenomenon
Many neurodivergent clients report a pattern that might be called “delayed emotional processing.” In the moment, they might feel nothing, feel confused, or feel a vague sense of “something” they cannot name.
Hours, days, or even weeks later, the emotional reality crashes over them like a wave that was building far out at sea, and only now reaches the shore.
This delay isn’t wilful or a sign of dishonesty. Neuroimaging research on alexithymia suggests differences in how emotional information is processed and integrated, particularly involving connections between areas that process bodily sensations and those that process emotional awareness (Bird & Cook, 2013). The feelings were there, but the pathway to conscious recognition was obscured.
A client might say yes to something, appear comfortable, and only later realise they felt pressured, uncomfortable, or actively distressed. From the outside, it looked like consent. From the inside, it was navigating in darkness.
Why This Matters for Understanding Past Experiences
When working with clients who have experienced situations involving consent, it’s crucial to understand that their difficulty saying no, leaving, or recognising a problem in the moment doesn’t indicate:
- That they “really” consented
- That they bear responsibility for others’ actions
- That they were being deceptive
- That they should have known better
Instead, they may have been experiencing a genuine neurological and psychological challenge in accessing the very information needed to make an informed choice. Like asking someone to describe the taste of a fruit they can see but cannot yet taste, they were being asked to respond to feelings they couldn’t yet identify.
Moving Forward: Therapeutic Considerations
For therapists working with neurodivergent clients navigating these issues, several approaches can help:
Psychoeducation: Understanding alexithymia and its relationship to consent can be profoundly validating. Many clients have internalised shame about their difficulties, believing they “should have known” or “should have stopped it.” Learning about the neurological underpinnings can shift self-blame toward self-compassion.
Body-based practices: Since alexithymia involves a disconnect between bodily sensations and emotional awareness, gentle somatic approaches may help build that bridge (Gaigg et al., 2018). This might include body scans, naming physical sensations without judgment, or tracking patterns over time rather than demanding in-the-moment clarity.
Script-based boundary tools: For clients with executive function challenges, having prepared scripts or decision trees can reduce the cognitive load of boundary-setting. Think of these as marked trails through terrain that otherwise feels pathless.
Delayed-processing accommodations: Helping clients understand that it’s okay to say “I need time to think about this” or “I’m not sure how I feel yet” creates space for their natural processing timeline. Not every decision needs to be made in real time.
Validation without re-traumatisation: Clients may need repeated validation that their difficulty with consent in past situations was real, understandable, and not their fault. This isn’t about dwelling in victimhood. It is about accurate attribution of responsibility.
If you’d like more information about our support for therapists, coaches and counsellors who work with neurodivergent clients, click here.
For Neurodivergent People: You’re Not Broken
If you’re reading this and recognising yourself, please know: your neurology is not a flaw. The world is set up with the assumption that everyone processes emotions and social information in a particular way, at a particular speed. When you don’t fit that template, it’s easy to internalise the message that you’re the problem.
But consider the forest again. Some trees grow slowly, taking years to show growth that happens in seasons for others. This doesn’t make them defective trees. It makes them adapted to different conditions, with different strengths. Your processing style may mean you need more time, more space, more explicit communication than others assume. This is information about your needs, not evidence of your inadequacy.
Learning to work with your neurology rather than against it means:
- Giving yourself permission for delayed processing
- Practicing identifying body sensations separate from naming emotions
- Building external supports and scripts for difficult situations
- Trusting that your “later clarity” is just as valid as others’ “in-the-moment knowing”
- Releasing shame for not being able to access what wasn’t accessible
- Building in time into respectful relationships so that you have space to understand how you are feeling before you take action.
- Look at our support for neurodivergent people through our WeTheRooted app and community in case we can help you further
Conclusion: The Weather Clears at Its Own Pace
Understanding the intersection of neurodivergence, alexithymia, and consent challenges doesn’t excuse harmful behaviour from others, but it does provide crucial context for understanding your own experience. You may have been navigating through fog, doing your best with limited visibility, and only later discovering where you actually were.
As you work through these issues in counselling, remember that insight doesn’t develop on a schedule. Like spring arriving when conditions are right rather than when the calendar says it should, emotional clarity comes when your system is ready to integrate it. The therapeutic work is about creating conditions where that clarity can gradually emerge, and learning to be gentle with yourself while that happens.
Your difficulty with consent in challenging situations wasn’t a moral failure. It was a navigation challenge in terrain where your usual compass didn’t work. That matters.
Understanding it can help you build new tools for the future while releasing the burden of any shame you may have been carrying about the past.
References
Bird, G., & Cook, R. (2013). Mixed emotions: The contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of autism. Translational Psychiatry, 3(7), e285. https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.201
Dodson, W. (2022). Emotional regulation and rejection sensitivity. ADDitude Magazine, [While this is a practitioner publication rather than peer-reviewed research, Dodson’s clinical work has brought significant attention to rejection sensitivity in ADHD]
Gaigg, S. B., Cornell, A. S. P., & Bird, G. (2018). The psychophysiological mechanisms of alexithymia in autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 22(2), 227-231. https://doi.org/10.1177/136236
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M. C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519-2534. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803
Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C., & Tchanturia, K. (2019). Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 80-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurp
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887. https://doi.org/10.1080/096875
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