How Do I "Feel My Feelings" When I Can't Find Them? Working the Steps as a Neurodivergent Person with Alexithymia

When recovery tells you to identify your emotions but your brain speaks a different language entirely.

"How are you feeling about that?"

This question haunts me. It haunts me in meetings. It haunts me in sponsor calls. It haunts me in therapy. It haunts me when I'm trying to work the steps and the whole program seems to assume I have easy access to an emotional vocabulary I've never possessed.

The answer is usually some version of: "I don't know."

Not because I don't care. Not because I'm avoiding. But because genuinely, truly, neurologically—I often have no idea what I'm feeling. I know I'm feeling SOMETHING, but asking me to name it is like asking me to describe a color I've never seen.

If you're neurodivergent and in recovery, struggling with the emotional processing parts of step work, you're not alone. This is real. It has a name. And there ARE ways to work the program that account for how our brains actually work.

What is Alexithymia (And Why Do So Many of Us Have It)?

Alexithymia literally means "no words for emotions." It's characterized by:

• Difficulty identifying feelings
• Difficulty describing feelings to others
• Trouble distinguishing between emotions and physical sensations
• Limited imagination or fantasy life
• Externally-oriented thinking (focusing on external events rather than inner experience)

Here's the kicker: 40-65% of autistic people have alexithymia. It's not the same as autism, but they're highly comorbid. And it's also extremely common in people with trauma histories and substance use disorders.

So if you're autistic with a trauma background in recovery? You're basically in the alexithymia trifecta. Lucky us.

The current understanding is that people with alexithymia struggle with both the attention stage and the appraisal stage of emotional processing. We have challenges focusing attention on our internal emotional state AND we're unable to accurately identify what the emotion is and what it means.

It's not that we don't HAVE feelings. Research shows many of us actually feel TOO much—our bodies' way of shutting down emotional awareness may actually be a protective mechanism against overwhelm. We're not emotionless. We're emotion-confused.

Why This Makes Traditional Step Work Really Hard

Let's be real about what the 12 steps ask us to do emotionally:

Step 4: "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves" — requires identifying resentments, fears, and how they affected us emotionally

Step 5: "Admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs" — requires articulating our emotional/moral landscape to someone else

Step 6: "Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character" — requires connecting behaviors to underlying emotional patterns

Step 8 & 9: Making amends — requires understanding how we harmed others and taking responsibility for the emotional impact

Step 10: "Continued to take personal inventory" — ongoing emotional self-assessment

Every. Single. One of these steps assumes you can identify what you're feeling, connect those feelings to behaviors, and articulate them clearly.

If you have alexithymia? This is like being asked to do calculus in a language you don't speak.

Many addiction treatment programs rely heavily on group therapy and 12-step approaches, but people with autism who have alexithymia may respond differently to these methods because they have difficulty articulating emotional problems. This isn't unwillingness to engage—it's a genuine processing difference that gets misinterpreted as resistance.

Additional Neurodivergent Recovery Barriers

Alexithymia isn't the only thing making recovery harder for us. The whole structure of traditional recovery can clash with neurodivergent needs:

Group settings: Sensory overload, social anxiety, fast-paced conversations, eye contact expectations. Large groups can be sensorily overwhelming and the unpredictability may feel anxiety-provoking.

Executive dysfunction: The homework from sponsors, the daily practices, the step work—all require planning, initiating, and completing tasks that our brains struggle with.

Routine disruption: Early recovery is chaotic, and autistic brains need predictability to function.

Communication differences: We may not pick up on social cues, may be too literal, may not respond the "right" way to shares. Our communication style can easily be misinterpreted as detachment.

Masking exhaustion: We're already depleted from masking in daily life—meetings add another space where we have to "perform" connection.

Adapting Step Work for Alexithymic/Neurodivergent Brains

Here's what I've learned about working the program with a brain that doesn't do emotions the standard way:

Start With the Body, Not the Label

If you can't name the emotion, start with physical sensations. "My chest feels tight." "My shoulders are tense." "My stomach is in knots." Build your own personal dictionary that connects body sensations to emotional states over time.

When asked "how are you feeling," it's okay to answer with body states: "I notice my jaw is clenched and I feel restless." That IS emotional information, just in a different format.

Use Longer Feeling Lists

Research on alexithymia in recovery actually found that people in treatment benefited from having LONGER lists of emotion words to choose from. Having a greater variety of potential feelings helped them identify what they were experiencing because it made them "really think further" about what they might be feeling.

Carry a feelings wheel or emotion word list. When you're trying to do step work, look at the list and see what resonates. Sometimes recognition is easier than recall.

Give Yourself Processing Time

Studies show that people with alexithymia need "some time and some peace and some reflection" to connect with feelings. Don't expect instant emotional identification. Build in quiet time before and after step work to let things percolate.

Focus on Patterns, Not Single Emotions

Instead of trying to identify what you felt in one specific moment, look for patterns. "I notice I tend to use when I'm in situations like X." "I notice conflict with this person leads to behaviors like Y." Patterns are often easier to see than individual emotional states.

Use External Frameworks

The fourth step inventory structure (resentment → what happened → how it affected me → my part) provides external scaffolding that bypasses some of the emotional identification problem. You can work through the columns even without perfect emotional clarity.

Connect Through Interests, Not Direct Emotion

Many autistic people connect to their inner landscape through passions and interests rather than direct emotion talk. It's okay if your step work looks different—if you write about events and behaviors rather than feelings. The insight can come later as you review what you've written.

Accept "I Don't Know" as a Valid Starting Point

In recovery from alexithymia, the first stage is often "discovering hidden feelings"—realizing there ARE emotions happening even if you can't name them. "I don't know what I feel" is valid data. It tells you something important about your internal state.

Find Neurodivergent-Informed Support

Look for sponsors, therapists, and meetings that understand neurodivergence. There are AA/NA groups specifically for neurodivergent people. Individualized care that accounts for your processing differences will be more effective than forcing yourself through neurotypical approaches.

The Emotional Work IS Recovery Work

Here's something important: learning to identify emotions is itself part of recovery. Research shows that people with fewer emotion regulation skills at baseline were more likely to relapse, while those who developed better emotion identification had better outcomes.

So the struggle to connect with your feelings isn't separate from recovery—it IS recovery. Every time you try to identify what you're feeling, even when you can't, you're building new neural pathways. You're practicing a skill that was never developed because you were surviving instead of feeling.

Multiple studies found that people in recovery viewed the process of identifying emotions as helpful to their recovery, even when it was challenging. Participants described moving through stages: discovering hidden feelings → identifying if the feeling was positive or negative → interpreting what those feelings meant → acting based on the feelings.

You might not be at the "naming emotions fluently" stage yet. That's okay. Being at the "discovering there are hidden feelings" stage is still progress.

What I Wish Sponsors and Recovery Folks Understood

If you're working with a neurodivergent sponsee or recovery community member with alexithymia:

• Don't interpret our difficulty articulating emotions as resistance or lack of commitment
• Accept body-based answers to emotional questions
• Give us time to process before expecting answers
• Provide structure and scaffolding for step work
• Let us work at our own pace with executive function challenges
• Understand that group settings may be overwhelming
• Don't require eye contact or standard social performance
• Recognize that recovery might look different for us—and that's okay

You're Not Doing Recovery Wrong

If you've felt like a failure in recovery because you can't access your emotions the way the literature describes, because step work feels impossible, because you sit in meetings feeling like everyone else speaks a language you don't understand—you're not failing.

You're doing recovery with a fundamentally different operating system. And the fact that you keep showing up, keep trying, keep working toward healing despite the additional barriers? That's not weakness. That's extraordinary persistence.

Your recovery is valid even if it doesn't look like the Big Book examples. Your sobriety counts even if you can't eloquently describe your spiritual awakening. Your healing matters even if you're still learning what your emotions feel like.

We're not doing recovery wrong. We're doing recovery different. And different can still get us where we need to go.

Keep coming back. We do recover. Even those of us whose brains speak a different emotional language. 🚀

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If you're struggling with step work or finding recovery programs inaccessible, please reach out for support. There are neurodivergent-affirming recovery resources and therapists who can help adapt the program to your needs. Your recovery matters too much to give up because the standard approach wasn't built for your brain.

Mars | Space Cadet Collective