Bridging Perspectives: Using Narrative Metaphors to Connect Wide-Ranging World Views

During a therapy session I got asked "how does feeling feel like for you?"

For context, I have alexithymia (literally meaning 'without words for emotions') - put simply this term refers to difficulties with feeling emotions. For some this might mean that they can feel all emotions, they are just muted; for others it might mean a total inability to feel any emotions at all... or somewhere in between. I managed to find a way to communicate what this condition might feel like, which I'll get to later 🎉

Please just take a minute, whatever your neurological landscape might be, and try to explain to an imaginary-someone what feeling feels like to you (or not feeling, as it were). Bare in mind that you don't know how the other person experiences the world. You can start by explaining what feeling a single emotion is like, and build out from there.

Even if you start simple, it's a bloody tricky question, isn't it.

Personally I like putting these things into physical metaphors. Technically we also don't see and touch the same "external" world, but it's the most common ground I've been able to find short of reaching into the other person's head telepathically. Using these sorts of techniques allows us to bridge something called the double-empathy problem; where two people have different foundational experiences of the world, and trying to explain one perspective often seems like it requires knowing what it's like to have the same foundation as the other person.

A major problem in finding common ground between... well, everyone. But especially neurodivergent and neurotypical persons.

With that context out of the way. Here's the metaphor I developed as a solution to the "how does feeling feel like for you?" question:

Consider a simple glass prism. Pure white light comes in, the light starts to split while still inside the prism, and upon exiting it creates a full spectrum rainbow of diffused light. In this metaphor the white light is the pure experience entering your body and mind, the prism itself is your emotional processing mechanism, and the light that comes out at the end are the various things that constitute your conscious emotional experience.

You might even have several different prisms, different ones for different emotion or experience-types. The same light could enter your anger prism and your pleasure prism, at the same time, and then manifest as overlapping rainbows of color in your head at the end. In this example, the output could be how you experience schadenfreude.

For me - with my alexithymia - my prisms are muddy, misty, distorted, partially occluded, or missing to various degrees. So light might come in, get internally transformed, and come out as a dull 2-color "rainbow". It's still technically there, but most people would look at that output and say "that's a really robotic response to something so emotionally charged".

A real example of one of my prisms is the one that processes situations of injustice. For me, that prism is crystal clear and has a curve that amplifies the input. So what comes out at the end is a bright focused beam of red, that's hard to ignore and overwhelms any other colors. I know that that specific shade of red red will mean a clenched chest, obsessive thoughts of revenge, an inability to sleep, and full-body tension. So in this case, I feel a feeling through various intellectual and bodily responses.

This prism metaphor may not resonate with how everyone experiences emotions, but it tries to bridge a gap. For me, explaining this metaphor to my partner helped us better understand that while it may not look like I'm having an emotional response, things are going on on the inside - and it's not a deliberate inhibition or disregard of feelings - instead my emotional responses, and hers, just need a bit more explaining at an intellectual and physical level... Remember that the light entering the prism already starts bending, before it comes out at a conscious level on the other end. That internal bending, for me, manifests as a somatic (or in-the-body) response to events - harder to notice, but still there if I pay REALLY close attention.

Do Mind Me is going to explore a range of metaphors and stories for how some people experience different aspects of a shared world. And for how some of the things we experience are taken for granted.

Hopefully this bridging will allow for personal and shared growth by finding common ground.

Thanks for reading. And remember: do mind me; because everyone is worth listening to.