Some people are exceptionally sensitive to the ways the environment affects their body.
The low-frequency hum of air conditioning, footsteps next door, a clothing label rubbing against the skin, the slightest change in the smell of the air—all of these can seize their attention almost immediately.
Yet the same person might sit at a computer for hours and only suddenly realise, once their bladder is painfully full: have I been holding it this whole time?
Or they may not realise they are hungry until their hands shake and they feel dizzy; they may not notice they are full until their stomach hurts. They may only realise they were angry after an emotional collapse, an impulsive remark or an extreme reaction. They may routinely overlook small wounds and chronic pain until an acute injury occurs, or remain unsure for years why they are always exhausted.
On the surface, this seems deeply contradictory: how can someone so “highly sensitive” be unable to feel their own body?
But this apparently contradictory experience is not unusual in neurodivergent lives. It also sits behind one of the most common misunderstandings about neurodiversity in everyday life: “Why do you seem not to take care of your own feelings, yet make such a fuss about everything?”
It can create interpersonal difficulty too. When someone finally names their discomfort, another person may say: you regularly forget to eat and do not even notice when you bump into things, so why are you so sensitive to this particular thing? Are you targeting me, or deliberately making trouble?
These misunderstandings do not automatically disappear in professional teaching or therapeutic settings. In my individual work and teaching, I regularly meet people who find bodily experience difficult to express.
“I don’t know.” “I don’t feel anything.” “I can’t explain it.”
This is especially apparent when working with neurodivergent people. It is easy to interpret these answers as evidence that the person cannot feel their body, or that their capacity for awareness is poor.
Yet at other times, the same person may register uncomfortable aspects of group dynamics and the environment with great sensitivity: the air conditioning is too cold, a current of air keeps blowing across them, a sound nobody else can hear is disturbing them, or something said by a teacher or classmate feels wrong.
Many different processes, rarely distinguished in everyday language, are mixed together here. If we call all of them “body awareness,” we easily collapse very different bodily and cognitive experiences into one.
Feeling a lot does not mean knowing what you are feeling
When we speak about interoception, we often reduce it to “the ability to feel inside the body.”
This produces a common misconception: that neurodivergent people—autistic people, for example—have poor interoception because they may find it difficult to understand and express bodily signals such as hunger, thirst and fatigue, as well as emotions related to bodily signals such as fear, anxiety or anger.
The former is generally described as Interoceptive Awareness Impairment, while the latter is described as alexithymia. This article is mainly concerned with the former; I will discuss the latter separately in the future.
From the moment a bodily signal appears to the point at which we can express it or act on it, several distinct things have already taken place:
- Was the bodily signal received?
- Sensation
- Was it noticed?
- Allocation of attention
- Can different signals be distinguished?
- Differentiation
- Do I know what it means?
- Meaning-making
- Can this experience be organised into language or another form?
- Expression
- Can it change what I do next?
- Action and choice
These capacities are connected, but they do not automatically develop or operate in synchrony.
Some studies have found that autistic participants did not perform worse in perceiving objective physiological information such as heartbeat and breathing, but experienced clear difficulty in subjective reporting, confidence in bodily signals, and the process of interpreting those signals as having a definite meaning (Nicholson et al., 2018, 2019).
In some very basic sensory discrimination tasks, autistic participants may perform comparably to non-autistic participants, or may even be more sensitive.
In other words, someone may clearly feel their heart beating quickly but not know they are afraid. They may feel their stomach tighten but not know whether it is hunger, anxiety, pain or a rejection of the present situation. They may sense their body easily in a quiet, safe one-to-one setting, only for those signals to become difficult to recognise again in conflict, under time pressure or within a complex real-life choice.
The bodily signals of autistic people are not necessarily absent. The difference may lie more in how those signals are noticed, weighted, integrated, interpreted and updated in real time.
For somatic work, then, “improving body awareness” is an extremely simplified description. It seems to assume that the body already contains a complete and clear answer, and that we only need to become quiet enough to hear it.
The bodies we encounter in practice are far more complex. There is no universal exercise for “increasing awareness.” Rather than asking, “Can you feel what is happening in your body?”, we might ask, “How far has this bodily signal travelled?”
Has it been sensed? Noticed? Understood? Can it be expressed? Can it participate in choice?
The precious time before language
A great deal of bodily experience happens before a person can reflect on it, interpret it or report it. The sensation has already happened, while language has not yet arrived.
When someone says “I don’t know” what they are feeling, we may immediately ask what it feels like, where it is, or whether it might be this or that. The words, ideas and redirection of attention we offer may help—but they may also arrive too quickly.
Language illuminates experience, and it can also cover experience over. This is especially important when a therapist or teacher holds language that is more socially recognised. We can easily place our own understanding inside another person’s body without intending to, and then take their agreement as evidence that awareness has occurred or that the intervention has worked.
As facilitators, we need to keep asking whether we are sufficiently sensitive to power.
Sometimes there is not too little sensation, but too much. Signals arrive together, overlap one another and have not yet had time to become differentiated.
At other times, a person’s bodymind has been expressing itself all along through movement, rhythm, posture, sound, image, repetition or silence—not through the single channel of language.
These experiences have gradually led me to stop treating the ability to name a feeling as evidence of whether a person possesses body awareness.
Sometimes I try to open additional routes of expression. I might invite imaginal description: does it have an edge? Is it expanding or contracting? Does it have weight, temperature, direction, rhythm or colour?
Or I might offer a movement-based route: does the body want to approach or move away? Could a small movement be introduced? Sometimes writing, drawing or another form of creative expression can also help us explore these perceptions.
Interestingly, in my observation, neurodivergent people often have a richer “language” in image, movement and creative expression than non-neurodivergent people do, and can access this information more readily.
More often, we do not need to keep asking questions at all. We can remain together for a while and allow these confused, undifferentiated sensations a stretch of time of their own.
For me, this space is not only a highly effective way of working. It is also an ethical position.
As therapists and teachers, can we acknowledge that experience remains real even when it has not been spoken and we do not understand it? Can we hold its complexity without rushing to explain it? Can we refrain from treating silence as emptiness, hesitation as resistance, or atypical forms of expression as an absence of expressive capacity?
To value the space before language is to stop treating language as the only evidence that experience exists.
Our work is never to obtain a standard answer as quickly as possible in order to prove that the work has been effective. It is first to let this not-yet-translated experience exist, and to let it have power of its own.
To recognise that something is already happening there. We simply do not yet know how to know it.
