“Today’s episode explores anxiety in autistic empaths, reframing it not merely as an emotion but as a recursive, embodied, and relational system. It highlights how alexithymia, or difficulty sourcing, identifying, and describing emotions, amplifies anxiety by making it hard for autistic individuals to distinguish between their own feelings and external emotional input, leading to hypervigilance and chronic physiological stress. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, emphasises that social contexts are particularly challenging due to a lack of spontaneous social scripts, causing ambiguity and heightened threat responses. Dr. Hoerricks advocates for embodied practices like martial arts or Qi Gong to regulate the nervous system, as traditional mindfulness can be counterproductive, and she also addresses the double bind of empathic overload and the potential for trauma states in autistic individuals living in invalidating environments. Finally, she advises caution with medical interventions that do not account for neurodivergent experiences, advocating for a different kind of mastery focused on allowing anxiety to pass through rather than suppressing it.”
Here’s the link to the source article:
https://autside.substack.com/p/why-many-autistic-empaths-suffer
Let me know what you think.
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