Beyond Behaviour: Updating How We Understand Emotional Dysregulation

Or ... what they don't know can fill volumes

A recent article aims to highlight key emotional challenges faced by autistic children and teens, yet provides an incomplete picture that risks misinforming parents. Whilst it covers concepts like emotional recognition difficulties, rigid thinking, sensory overwhelm, and the struggle to read facial expressions or body language, it omits critical dimensions of autistic experience—dimensions without which any discussion of emotional regulation remains partial, even potentially harmful. This reflection seeks to widen the frame.

Alexithymia: The Missing Link

A significant omission is the absence of alexithymia — the difficulty sourcing, identifying, describing, and parsing one’s own emotional states. Alexithymia is not autism, but research suggests it frequently co-occurs, contributing profoundly to how emotional dysregulation manifests in many autistic people (including me).

Without recognition of alexithymia’s role, we risk misreading external behaviours: shutdowns, meltdowns, or emotional outbursts are often assigned labels such as “anxiety,” “depression,” or “poor coping.” Yet these are interpretive guesses made through a neurotypical lens, and may reflect a clinician’s discomfort more than the autistic person’s inner reality. When alexithymia intersects with hyper-empathy—another common autistic trait—emotional overload arises not from absence of feeling, but from intense, undifferentiated affect, much of it absorbed from others.

Such ways of being call not for stricter behavioural management, but for adapted environments and relational attunement that lower sensory and social threat, enabling autistic individuals to maintain equilibrium.

The Power Threat Meaning Framework: Shifting the Lens

Standard psychiatric models often reduce emotional dysregulation to internal deficits or disorders — flawed internal systems requiring treatment. But frameworks like the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) offer a deeper, more humane perspective: what has happened to a person? What threats are they reacting to? What meanings do these experiences carry?

For autistic children, many so-called “problem behaviours” are threat responses to overwhelming sensory input, relational misattunement, communicative mismatch, or institutional invalidation. Meltdowns, for instance, are not irrational explosions but the body's urgent signal that system overload has reached breaking point. The behaviour makes perfect sense when seen through the person’s lived experience of cumulative threat.

Rather than pathologising the child, PTMF invites us to dismantle the environmental stressors and relational patterns producing threat states in the first place.

The Double Empathy Problem: Mutual Misattunement

Mainstream approaches also perpetuate what autistic scholar Damian Milton termed the Double Empathy Problem: difficulties in communication do not stem solely from autistic deficits, but from reciprocal misunderstandings between differently-wired people.

Non-autistic parents, teachers, and clinicians may struggle to interpret autistic ways of expressing emotion, whilst autistic individuals may struggle to parse neurotypical nonverbal cues, indirect speech, or shifting social rules. Both parties experience misattunement, yet most interventions target autistic people alone for “skills training” to bridge this gap.

In truth, genuine understanding requires mutual adaptation. Professionals must develop greater attunement to autistic modes of communication—gestalt processing, pattern recognition, metaphorical meaning-making—and not demand conformity to neurotypical norms as the only acceptable pathway.

Epistemic Injustice: Whose Voice is Centred?

When non-autistic professionals pronounce definitive interpretations of autistic experience, they risk committing what philosophers term epistemic injustice: denying marginalised individuals credibility as knowers of their own experience. Observing behaviour from the outside is not the same as living within an autistic bodymind.

Without authentic autistic voices shaping these frameworks, guidance remains filtered through outsider assumptions. It is precisely because I am an autistic adult—a gestalt language processor who experiences alexithymia—that I can offer an internal vantage point too often absent from such discourse.

Rethinking Intervention: Beyond Compliance

Whilst techniques like social stories, facial expression training, or emotion labelling may assist some individuals, these tools often rest on implicit assumptions that autistic people should be remediated toward neurotypical norms. They address surface presentation rather than internal realities.

For autistic gestalt processors, who acquire language and meaning in holistic, relational patterns rather than atomised linear bits, many therapy models misalign entirely. Typical therapy sessions demanding real-time verbal parsing may overwhelm rather than support us. We often need time, quiet synthesis, and non-verbal or alternative communicative scaffolds to fully integrate complex emotional experiences.

Effective support requires creating stabilising ecologies: sensory-safe environments, predictable routines, accommodations for processing style, and relational trust that allows autistic individuals to co-regulate safely with caregivers and educators. In doing so, we move from compliance-based intervention toward authentic, sustainable self-regulation.

A Call for Autistic Leadership

The article, though written with care, is rooted in a neurotypical frame. Its omissions reveal the persistent marginalisation of autistic epistemology. The most valuable guidance for autistic children will come not from behavioural containment models but from autistic adults who have lived—and continue to live—these complexities firsthand.

If we truly wish to support autistic children’s flourishing, we must centre autistic perspectives in both theory and practice. Only when we embrace the integrity of neurodivergent ways of being—not merely tolerate them—can we cultivate environments where autistic children are not simply managed but understood, respected, and empowered.