Intensifying Connections

Sonny Hallett
19 min readJul 24, 2021

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Some things I’ve learnt about emotions — mine and other people’s

This piece was originally delivered as a talk at Autscape 2021 (July 24th). A recording of the talk will be available eventually (and linked here when it is). This piece differs slightly from the recording as it has been edited for clarity and better readability.

A couple of years ago, Autscape 2019, I did a talk titled Intense Connections, mostly about the ways that we as autistic people can sometimes connect extremely intensely with one-another, and also about Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem and research around that — that is, very briefly, the idea that people who are more similar might connect and communicate better with one-another, people who are more different might struggle to connect, and that this might account in a large part for the ways in which we often do connect better with each other, and also with the disconnect that happens so often between autistic and non-autistic people. I explored what that means for our community, as well as what that might mean for us individually.

Around that time, and since then, I’ve been doing a lot more thinking about how we understand ourselves, how we read others, how emotions work, how all of that might fit together… I’ve done a lot of work myself on emotions, and worked on research around counselling for autistic people. I also got my COSCA certificate in counselling skills and am now a trainee counsellor working on getting qualified, hopefully sometime next year. So today what I’d like to talk about is some of the stuff that’s come out of all these themes and new developments since my last talk: emotions, empathy, working across neurotypes, and some of the things we, autistic people, are often told we can’t do, or can’t be good at, which I want to challenge.

So, let’s start with emotions.

In common with many autistic people, I have long struggled with both identifying and describing how I’m feeling — often also described as alexithymia. And this often isn’t just something that’s restricted to emotions, but also to intero- and proprioception; I might be uncertain about whether I have a headache or am feeling anxious, whether I feel physically bad or psychologically bad, whether I am restless or just need to pee… I might know that I am feeling something but struggle with figuring out what it is, let alone communicating it to others.

I don’t want to dismiss out of hand the idea that some people might innately be unable to identify what’s happening within, or that there might be some innate reason many of us struggle with it more, but one of the things I started to learn and I started getting more in touch with my own emotions and physical sensations, and as I spoke with other autistic folks about this, is that many of us have not had enough opportunities to learn to identify how we feel, because what we feel can often go against expectations, so we are invalidated and told that we are wrong.

An example of this can be growing up trying to describe things like shirt tags as sore, (supposedly nice) surprises as scary, or eye contact as really overwhelming, only to be told that that can’t be right, it can’t be our experience. I also have a related example when it comes to pain — I have EDS, and experienced excruciating pains growing up, but faced with the adults around me telling me that it can’t possibly be hurting, I grew up feeling very confused about what pain is, and what counts as ‘hurting’.

Eye contact can be really hard work for some of us sometimes [a four-panel comic of me attempting to order a coffee in a shop but getting overwhelmed by eye contact, becoming incoherent and dropping all my money].

You can see I’m here conflating physical feelings and emotions, and that’s because I really don’t think it’s helpful to draw a clear distinction between the two, and trying to do so has only added to confusion for many of us. Most of us have probably heard of the term ‘hangry’ — being hungry and as a result feeling angry. Lots of us get grumpy when we’re tired. And the other way around: anxiety and fear can cause stomach upsets and headaches. I get whole body aches if I’ve had an emotionally difficult time. Excitement can cause very similar physical feelings to anxiety and can make us restless or jumpy. Being very tired or super-overwhelmed can feel very similar… some of these states, and other factors, can even make it hard for us to feel physical and emotional states, or feel them more intensely. For example sometimes when I’m very overwhelmed, everything gets to me and everything feels like the world is about to implode any second and I’ll probably turn spontaneously inside-out if one more thing happens… but if I then pass through that point, I might shut down, and stop feeling much of anything at all, from temperature and pain, to sadness or happiness or whatever. Everything becomes muted as my body tries probably to protect me from further stimulus (and turning inside-out).

So I realised, at least for myself, that maybe I didn’t grow up having the tools or validation to understand or communicate my own emotions, and other feelings, and that that might be true for many of us. So how to work with that? I was lucky to find some really great counselling that included a lot of work around focusing on how I was feeling in the moment, really allowing myself to experience those feelings, figure out where they might be in my body, how they are, and then come up with basically any words, ideas, or images (or it could be movement or anything else) to describe them.

In the process of writing this talk, I was struggling quite a bit because I was massively distracted by a woodworking project I was doing, and also it was really nice outside, there might be interesting mushrooms and bugs to find, but I had less than a week to go and I really needed to do this…

The woodworking project I was distracted by [a small yellow, black, and orange grasshopper carved out of basswood, painted, with magnetic joints]

…it felt like sitting inside a hot wet clay pot, digging at the inside of it, getting all this sticky wet clay under my fingernails, and I wanted to get out into the cool air but the clay was really difficult to shift and was taking ages, and although it was kind of satisfying to smoosh around, I wanted to be outside playing with it, rather than trapped inside trying to get through it.

So let’s look at this metaphor: I described the sensory and visual ideas that came into my head as I tried to sense them in the moment, and reading it back, I can see how trapped I feel by the deadline and weight of doing a talk, but also how the substance is still so interesting and satisfying if only I didn’t have to deal with so much constraint and pressure. Also I noticed that the feeling of sitting in a clay pot is because physically I felt hot and cramped, and maybe I needed to go somewhere cooler and change my position… Armed with more specific ideas and feelings to work with rather than just ‘frustrated’, ‘annoyed’, ‘stuck’, etc, I was able to take a different approach in my writing (I wrote up this example), and I also went and stretched-out outside.

And I think that there’s something potentially really powerful about building an emotions dictionary, for all of us who struggle with our feelings and what they are or what they mean.

You could use images or sensory sensations if you’re not a visual thinker; colours, textures, smells and patterns, memories, or references to things you’re into… (lots of us already use reaction gifs!). I used to draw my feelings a lot, as illustrations and doodles, and show them to others — now I realise how much I was both trying to identify what I couldn’t put into words, and communicate them. You could collect them in a book or a journal, and really play with ways to describe what’s happening and the sensations involved, without worrying about whether it makes sense or not, because the important bit to start with is to start to identify them as being there, and what they’re like.

Different images I chose to represent different feelings I experience. Some are from the internet and some my own drawings [images of waves hitting rocks, a dog meme with a resigned expression, a drawing of me with a t-rex head running and going AAAAAH, soft-looking mossy rocks, me as a silhouette filled entangled snakes and wolves, a grimacing balloon, kermit the frog excitement-flailing, calm water ripples]

This isn’t just useful because it might be a starting point for communicating how we are feeling, but also because describing and naming things can help us separate them from other things, and can help us understand them better.

An analogy: I really like going outside and identifying mushrooms, plants, insects, etc. Before I started learning about plants and really looking at them, I’d walk through the courtyard of my block of flats and maybe see some yellow flowers. Maybe there’d be a dandelion in there, because I know those. When I started learning about different plants, their structures, and how they’re related to each other, I started to see the biodiversity and difference in each place I visited: there weren’t just dandelions, there might be hawkweeds, ragworts, nipplewort, groundsel, wall lettuce… and those are just some of the yellow dandelion relatives! It can be similar with feelings, the more we observe and describe our different internal states, the more different ones we’ll learn to identify and notice. This could be really interesting for those of us who really like to categorise, systematise, etc — creating a taxonomy of feelings through language and ideas that make sense to us, so that we can better understand our internal landscape, how our different experiences and feelings interact, and how it all fits together.

!There are many kinds of yellow flowers [public domain photographs of different types of yellow Asters]

What has also been interesting for me as I go further into my counselling training, is just how useful this idea of building our own emotional vocabularies, rather than using the pre-made, culturally-defined, ‘store-bought’ ones can be when working with people of all different neurotypes. I found that actually using standard emotion words to reflect others’ emotional states could often be unhelpfully unspecific and their connotations so individual — angry could mean so many different things, and we each have different associations with anger, based on our own experiences and the expectations placed on us. Some of us might find anger shameful, and others find it liberating. Saying ‘I feel angry’ can mean feeling deeply stuck, needing to do something, wanting others to do something… Folks often seem to really respond to the metaphorical, visual, sensory imagery I use, perhaps because it tries to capture something more specific and nuanced. It can also give us both permission to play more, throw out standard vocabulary if we find it unhelpful, and potentially look at a feeling or situation without so much of the baggage of meaning that conventional emotion words might bring.

So let’s talk a bit more about counselling.

I didn’t originally go into counselling training to neccessarily become a counsellor. I had just done a piece of research with my colleague and friend Colin, an autistic counsellor, on autistic people’s experiences of counselling, and I was thinking about the double empathy problem and how, if non-autistic people might not be doing the work needed a lot of the time to understand autistic folks, what does that mean for professions where people are supposed to be trained to do the work to understand others? The findings of our research showed that there were some real problems with autistic people not being understood or believed, being misread, and not being validated in our experiences when we are in counselling. Those who did have good experiences talked about having accommodating and validating counsellors, some talked about maybe having autistic or similarly neurodivergent counsellors, and counsellors who didn’t make them use the same emotional vocabulary that can be a stumbling block for so many of us. So, I went into counselling training to try to get more insight into how counsellors are trained, and what might be needed in training to make the situation better for autistic people.

Cover image for the counselling report I produced with Colin Kerr and Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh

My expectation going in was still that I probably wouldn’t be very good at ‘people-ing’. That maybe I’d connect well with other autistic people, maybe some similarly neurodivergent folks, but that there’d be a really difficult disconnect when it came to most others. To my surprise, I found that not only have I found a job that I so far feel really excited and passionate about, and actually might be very suited to, I also found that I was connecting meaningfully with pretty much everyone in my class, and in fact I now feel that I could maybe connect meaningfully and deeply with so many more people than I ever expected.

Another thing that I noticed was that, while you might expect counselling training to attract a lot of folks who see themselves as already very good empathisers, there were actually a good number on my certificate who like me possibly struggled with their listening and connecting skills, and wanted to learn to empathise and listen better. Thinking of oneself as already a good listener and empathiser also didn’t seem to be a reliable predictor at all of how much a person might struggle, when it came to the learning curve of listening and responding helpfully, and sensing what might be going on.

This got me thinking about empathy a lot more again, and just how unhelpful a concept it can sometimes be. For instance, a person might be seen as very empathetic because they are more similar to the majority of those around them in their experiences and reactions, and so are predicting others’ experiences and reactions right more of the time in their day to day lives. This can lead to a sort of confirmation bias, where, because they have been predicting correctly a lot, it is put down to an innate ability to read others — which I think often gets called empathy, the flip side too often being that anyone who doesn’t fit those normative expectations are wrong, or a weird anomaly.

Quote from Dr Damian Milton: “Simply put, the theory of the double empathy problem suggests that when people with very different experiences of the world interact with one another, they will struggle to empathise with each other” (source) surrounded by small cartoon shapes agreeing with each other and misunderstanding each other.

I can do something similar when I work with folks with very similar autistic experiences to mine: I might say to someone who describes being an outsider in certain ways “is it almost like growing up without having an instruction manual that everyone else has?” — a metaphor that’s super common in our community, right? That’s not me using magic powers, it’s me making an educated guess based on their description of their experience, and how closely it fits mine and others in my community. Crucially though, it can also be wrong — just as any deduction based on projection of our own or general group experiences can be when applied to different individuals.

So what even is empathy? I don’t think it should be about having the most normative experiences! And while we can sense and pick up on all kinds of cues from others, I’m also really not sure that any kind of accurate telepathic mind-reading is actually a thing — or at least not a thing that we should be trying to rely on unquestioningly. People sometimes separate empathy into cognitive and affective empathy — the thinky-figure-it-out kind and the squishy-I-feel-it-over-the-ether kind. Some suggest that autistic people might develop the former and can’t do the latter, and.. There are all kinds of speculations. I think that many of us (autistic people) might well be quite practiced at cognitive empathy, just as any group of people who have had to spend a lot of time figuring out how others think and feel because we are different and need to learn to survive might be.

However, when it comes to affective empathy, I think we need to go back to what I said earlier about not having the tools to describe feeling states, and also the bias towards majority ways of being: just because we don’t have the words for something we sense from others doesn’t mean we don’t sense anything (and by sense I mean anything from subtle body language and tone of voice to anything else we might not fully understand yet). Also, if our body language and how we express ourselves is different to the majority to the extent that we are routinely misread by non-autistic folks, that suggests again that affective empathy might too often be just about noticing relatable cues and assuming they mean the same for others as they mean for us (e.g. ‘I cry when I’m upset; this person isn’t crying and actually looks really calm, so they can’t be upset — even though they tell me that they are!’).

It’s possible to connect with beings with all kinds of different experiences of the world! [Illustration of child-me making friends with a giant ant, a giant weevil, and a smaller but still unusually large froghopper. I really like bugs.]

Counselling though, is likely to be more often about working with people who have an experience that doesn’t follow conventional normative narratives, or at least doesn’t feel like it does to them. Folks don’t often go to counselling for feeling and reacting exactly how they are expected to feel and react, and being fine with that. This means that trainee counsellors whose empathetic skills have relied a lot on the majority bias I described are potentially going to need to unlearn expecting others to react the same ways as them, or expecting to always ‘know’ how others are feeling. Those who have tended to believe that they get these things wrong a lot of the time, and I would include myself here, might find that we have fewer than average expectations about what anyone ‘should’ feel or how anyone ‘should’ react, and that this was actually quite useful when it comes to learning to really follow and respond to what someone was experiencing.

I also like to describe my counselling skills training as being like the social skills class I always needed, and that no autism service was ever going to offer. I think all of my cohort, autistic or not, saw big changes and improvements in how we listen, respond, and are present, as well as in our self-awareness, allowing more possibilities to forming meaningfully connected relationships. We were all starting from the beginning, and there were skills that we learnt that were really in some ways very basic, but I think are rarely recognised as good listening and empathising skills in everyday life. For example, one of the really valuable things I learnt (and maybe this sounds obvious written down) is that people generally really like to be sure that you are listening to them and understanding, when they are talking to you — and that the way to do that can often be to be really, almost ridiculously explicit. We practice summarising and paraphrasing what someone has said, repeating back to them what they described feeling and thinking, checking that we understood right. Yeah there’s non-spoken stuff in there too, which we also check in on, but a key point is that so much of the checking-in and responding is about not assuming either that you are right, or that the speaker knows you are listening and understanding, but instead really checking and demonstrating that your presence and willingness to try to understand, follow and share that space and relationship. It strikes me that this explicitness and checking is very much down to how differently people experience the world, how differently we can read each other, and how important it can be not to make assumptions about others’ experiences.

There are lots of different ways of connecting and checking for mutual understanding. [a watercolour and ink illustration I did back in 2012 of a giant yellow and black caterpillar greeting a friendly white dog (or possibly a very tiny white dog greeting a regular sized caterpillar)]

And a lot of these skills are things almost everyone can learn! I’ve been thinking about a meme that I’ve seen go around about how autistic folks empathise by relating another’s experience to something similar that happened to us, rather than by responding to the others’ feelings— but actually I think everyone does that, in a way. We have just been made more aware of needing to try to refer explicitly to a concrete example, because guessing hasn’t worked out well for us. And actually, the reason folks don’t always like that kind of relating maybe isn’t some deep cultural difference, but more because when we relate our own experience to someone else’s, it can (sometimes, not always) feel like we are making it about us, especially if the feelings and reactions are very different for the other person. It can feel frustrating and invalidating, even like we are telling someone else how they should feel — and this can be true whether we are talking to another autistic or non-autistic person. This doesn’t mean that we can’t use our own experiences as ways to learn about others, but it might be more about remembering to check whether it is the same or different: “did you feel like x (like I did), or something different?”, rather than “oh yeah that happened to me once and I felt like this”.

So alongside these practical skills, and a general experience of working to form deep and meaningful connections on purpose (rather than falling into them by accident), I found that there are possibly also advantages to being autistic, when it comes to becoming a counsellor. I alluded before to not really having many expectations about how others ‘should’ feel and react, and I do think hearing someone describe an experience, such as a job promotion, and not having any real expectation of how that might feel, because of having very diverging experiences myself (it could be brilliant, but also change could be terrifying! Also, what if they liked what they did before and now they don’t get to do that anymore?) can be a really helpful thing when needing to listen helpfully and follow how someone else is experiencing a thing, rather than how one might expect them to. It also seems to mean that not very much surprises or shocks me, as I’m pretty used to humans (myself included, obviously!) being all kinds of weird and baffling.

Humans can vary so much! [an orange and blue line-up of very different cartoon shapes with faces and very different-looking styles and personalities]

I’ve also received quite a bit of feedback around me being very intensely focused, and I suspect that a tendency to focus monotropically and intensely might well be at play here, especially as I have noticed myself experiencing a sort of flow state at times when listening, similar to my other regular experiences of intense focus.

In fact, there are a lot of things about counselling that I think suits me really well, and might suit a lot of autistic folks: I am in charge of my own time and spoons, I only see people one at a time, and we never do small talk. I get to have intensive, meaningful connections with lots of different kinds of people, but it is clearly boundaried, and with a fixed end time. I get to hear about what’s really important to other people, their passions, things they care deeply about, things they worry might make them weird, things they get bafflingly stuck on — all things that I know can be so difficult and meaningful and important. I get to learn about how others think and feel, learn to connect with a range of different people, see how people grow and change, and in doing so I also learn a lot about myself, and also grow and change.

When I was an angry confused teenager, I used to have this idea that there were ‘real people’, who were the vast minority, and everyone else, who were possibly mirages or robots or something alien and inaccessible. Really, it was that I didn’t know how to even start to connect with those others — and them with me. It was an understandable defence against all those people whose experiences I didn’t feel like I could access or remotely understand, and also who too often also hurt me, possibly because they also couldn’t connect with or understand me. It’s so exciting seeing how everyone is ‘real’, and knowing that we probably all have things about us that don’t fit, or are different, or that we aren’t sure about. That there are so many different ways of being. It’s also validating seeing that, even with all this extra connection, it’s still other autistic folks that I tend to connect most intuitively (easiest ‘predictions’ for me!) and deeply with, and who I tend to find the easiest to be around as myself. It cemented for me, if I needed any cementing, that even with all this new connection, I’m definitely still autistic.

The rainbow infinity symbol, which is used to represent neurodiversity, the autistic spectrum, and autistic pride (source).

A big theme in all of what I’ve talked about so far is about figuring out how to do things my own way — our own way. The social skills that I’ve gained are very much my own ways of doing things. I’m still weird, I’m still intense, I still get overwhelmed. I connect with others unimaginably better, but I do it differently: my way. Similarly, I know myself and my emotions better, I like myself better and I have a strong sense now of who I am and am getting to know the things that I like and don’t like — but it’s my way: my own emotional vocabulary, my preferences and boundaries.

I’m excited for a world in which so many more autistic folks might learn to do things our way, rather than ways that we’re told we should do them. And by that I don’t mean each of us individually going off into separate enclaves, but actually collaborating with our different and varied ways of being. A good counselling relationship is, I think, about collaboration and negotiation; building a meaningful relationship together that is based on who the counsellor and who the person coming to counselling are. How they communicate, how the furniture is arranged, the emotional vocabulary, how they come to understand each other, is all going to be built up by the two of them, to create something unique that is accessible and workable for both parties. This is true in our communities too, our work, and in all our relationships: we can all build ways of connecting with each other that are amalgams and compromises composed of our different needs and ways of seeing the world.

This is why we so badly need more autistic and other neurodivergent and otherwise different folks in counselling, in teaching, in all kinds of people-ing professions, to create more opportunities for different people to figure out how to do things in ways that work for them, figure out how they feel, and who they are, without so much weight from normative expectations and majority pressures.

Autistic people have been done such an incredible disservice in being told that we are bad at empathising (or even lack it), in being told that we can’t be social, that we don’t or can’t know our own feelings, in being told that we don’t have theory of mind. Whatever innate differences or challenges we might or might not have, how can we know that these are things we can’t do, when we have so rarely been given the tools and support to really figure out how we might do these things in ways that work for us? Just because we experience and do things differently doesn’t mean that we can’t do them at all, and the world could be all the richer, if more people could have the opportunities to explore, figure out ways and vocabularies that work for us, and help others to do the same.

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Sonny Hallett
Sonny Hallett

Written by Sonny Hallett

I’m a counsellor, trainer, artist, and naturalist based in Edinburgh, UK. My work is focused on autism, nature & mental health www.autisticmentalhealth.uk/sonny

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