I don’t know what I am feeling.
This is a weird place to be. You would expect that one would be able to identify emotions. Such an elementary aspect of being human, isn’t it?
However, it is a reality for me. I often do not know how I am feeling. Interoceptive awareness is often listed as one of the main symptoms of ADHD. Now, dear reader, what exactly is interoceptive awareness? Like you, I had been blissfully unaware.
Interoceptive Awareness, or Interoception, simply put is our ability to explain “What am I feeling?”. However, researchers seem to make a difference between interceptive awareness and interoceptive accuracy. Are you able to recognize what is going within, and how accurate are you in that?
To my dismay, some folks are awful at both of those. Yours truly being one of them. There’s a longing in me to just pathologize this “it’s because of ADHD” and leave it at that. That would be easy. Yet, we do not choose the circumstances we are born into, and still must be accountable to our choices regarding them. As the saying goes, *the waves are not your fault, yet it is your responsibility to moor your boat”. As such, we must continue to learn and strategize.
The primary obstacle is that those with weak interoceptive awareness do not have the vocabulary. Yes, we may be aware of the emotional words, and still struggle to make intrinsic connections with them. When I started this journey, I could only explain my emotions as “Big emotions” and “Small emotions”. In hindsight, I think this was a good step. It prevented me from judging them. Big emotions meant these emotion swept me under, and often unnoticed until it had subsided. Smaller emotions were those that I noticed creeping to the surface. I would use a Feeling Wheel to find my path to what it was I felt. Elementary lessons, for sure. It had the added benefit of giving me pause throughout the day, a mindful break to identify emotions. “Let me think”- became my mantra. I still use a “mindfulness chime” app on my phone as a regular reminder to check in on what I am feeling at the time. I am not sure I would recommend this strategy to everyone. It chimes / vibrates at erratic intervals, randomly chosen between 15-45 minutes. It can really interrupt one’s workflow and focus. It is an extreme strategy. However, finding out at 35 that I don’t know how my emotions surface, what emotions I feel, and how to express them, felt a drastic situation deserving of it.
Interoceptive awareness also affects our awareness of physiological needs. Forgetting things like eating and going to the restroom is a common trophe among ADHDers. I can attest that uninterrupted, I can go several hours without a second thought about my body. Unfortunately, this can mean that I find myself dehydrated or fatigued, as if by sudden onset. The danger here is that this awareness also extends to stress, illnesses, and even pain (ever find yourself wondering when or when you acquired a cut or bruise? Regularly) This is the added benefit of the chime. I’m able to take cache of the other goings on.
Recognizing our emotions is yet made more difficult when we incur significant lifestyle changes. What is significant is up to you. For me, a shift from being a textbook people-pleaser, has been significant. It has affected all the relationships I have, none as much as the one within. It feels disfiguring. I don’t recognize who I used to be. It feels suffocating. I can’t see who I am becoming and where I’m going. Everything seems to be changing. The emotions, rituals, and patterns that accustomed me are gone. Hailey Magee speaks in her book Stop People Pleasing about The Valley, a metaphorical liminal place between the past and the future. I find that a very useful metaphor. The valley is solitude. We no longer identify with our old life and do not yet know what life lies ahead. It feels naked. We don’t have our accustomed community or its norms. Unfortunately, this also means that some (or all) of our strategies for processing emotions flicker, if not extinguish.
Without my knowing, people pleasing had become a core identity of mine. Almost certainly as a means to cope with the chaos around me, but that is a question that may never get answered. Who is to precisely say how we adopt certain identities. The fact remained that it had become one. Abandoning that identity became the catalyst for the abandonment of further identities and their associated environments. This also meant an abandonment on any “emotional strategies” I had developed so far (which, if I’m being honest, were mostly maladaptive).
And yet, there is a strange nostalgic pull towards the maladaptive strategies of my past. For brief moments, all the resentment and sorrow gets a fresh paint and in the face of the emptiness I see in front of me, that past seems preferable. The snake of self-doubt starts constricting my thoughts, to the point of suffocation. Perhaps I am being selfish by advocating myself, I might tell myself. The concept that I am allowed to need more than the bare minimum to survive seems incomprehensible. I begin to consider that, of course, my worth among my friends and family is limited to the value I provide- how selfish of me to think otherwise. The awful/amazing thing is that as these thoughts pop in my mind, they have a perverse pull towards it. There’s a part of me that wants to accept it. How easy it would succumb to the snake and welcome its embrace. Sure, I would be resentful and unhappy, but I would be back in a familiar dynamic. And it would be so much easier. No one wants to go through the valley.
And still, once we recognize this impending autolysis in us, the journey into the valley has begun. For the appeal the nostalgia may bring, we see through it. There’s a sort of refreshing distance we start discovering. The identity that defined us so well, doesn’t fit right anymore. You look at them like clothes you wore in elementary school. They are familiar yet with a spark of awe. It feels almost unimaginable that we were that person at one point. Our new lens lets us take stock.
Of course, like any call to adventure, we’re free to ignore this newfound lens. There is nothing saying we need to continue the journey. And if we choose not to do so, we can find solace among many others who chose the same. Change is scary.
But I digress, what does this have to do with interoception? Well, one of my strategies for recognizing my needs was through others. It wasn’t 100%, but I figured if others were hungry, I probably ought to be as well. Except, replace hunger with every emotion. Naturally, if others didn’t mirror the emotion that I needed to feel, it was an extremely frustrating experience. Except, I wouldn’t be able to convey that either! And then, as a people pleaser, I would avoid conflict and wouldn’t mention the frustration to others. They would see my emotions on my face not match my words, and know something was wrong. They would know, despite my insistence that there wasn’t. Which would further frustrate me, because why wouldn’t- why couldn’t- people take me at my word? Did they think I didn’t know my own emotions? Well as you guessed it, turns out they were right. I didn’t know my emotions.
Unfortunate for us, ADHD children, especially ADHD people-pleasing children, have a damned difficult time with emotional boundaries. We teeter between the extremes, we either have them bound in lock and key - numbed and hidden from the world, or we have flung the gates so wide open that everyone (and everything) engulfs us with stress, anxiety, frustration, and sadness. But in either case, we run the risk of becoming completely alien to our own needs and emotions.
In my case, this unintentional two-facedness drove some people away. I now know because, we want friends who share vulnerability and respect each others. If we are good people, we don’t want to see a friend clearly repress things and pretend nothing is wrong for our sake. We want to work through things together, even if there’s conflict- we want to talk, repair, and grow. Be it good or bad, we want to know what they are feeling, and often sit with those feelings with them.
After a lifetime of shuttered emotions, I find myself learning again how to see them in me and in others. I see and share with others that it is human to need others. It’s not a weakness or shame, as is often taught to people pleasing children. It’s also through this, I’ve come to learn that the journey into the valley isn’t only a departure- it’s also the arrival to a different me. And yet, despite the new perspective and prospects of growth...
I still don’t know what I am feeling.