Best Life Therapy Blogs - Grief, Anxiety, Stress & More
- posted: Jul. 12, 2025
Blog post written by Emily Albright, LLMSW, Clinical Mental Health Therapist at Best Life Therapy
Welcome back to the Neurodivergent Trauma Series! If this is your first time reading our blogs on neurodivergence, be sure to check out the first blog post on this subject. It’s not required to understand this one, but it might give you some helpful background.
This is the second post in a three-part blog series about how trauma can show up in the lives of neurodivergent people. I’ll break it down into three important areas:
- External factors — things in the world around us, like school, work, and how people treat neurodivergent individuals.
- Internal factors — how people experience emotions and process events differently because of how their brains work.
- Ways to heal and cope — tools and ideas for managing trauma and supporting your mental health as a neurodivergent person.
In this second blog, I’ll focus on internal factors — things inside of someone, such as feelings, thoughts, and how their brain processes emotions and events. I am going to break these down into three categories: Feeling Deeply in a Loud, Bright World, When the World Tells You You’re “Too Much,” and Trapped Inside: When You Can’t Explain How You Feel.
Feeling Deeply in a Loud, Bright World
People who are neurodivergent process emotions differently than neurotypical people. This is because our brains work differently. The neurodivergent brain processes external factors (the world around us) in a way that everything can feel like more: noises are louder, lights are brighter, smells are stronger, and our emotions are bigger. Something a neurotypical person might find annoying could feel overwhelming, scary, or even like dread to us. This is because our brains process those experiences differently, and that can shape the way we feel and react.
Many neurodivergent people have a nervous system that reacts faster and stronger to small triggers. Things like loud noises, surprise questions, or bright lights can quickly push us into fight-or-flight mode. That’s because our brains often have a smaller window of tolerance. This means it’s easier for us to feel overwhelmed because our “calm zone” is smaller. When something pushes us outside of that window, our bodies react with strong emotions like panic, anger, or sadness, and it can take longer to calm back down. It’s not about being too sensitive(!!), it's about how our nervous systems are wired to respond.
One reason it can take longer to calm down is something called emotional stickiness. This means emotions stick around longer than usual. We might stay stuck on a feeling much longer than a neurotypical person would. This can happen with good emotions, like the excitement after getting a good grade, but it also happens with tough emotions like anger, sadness, or anxiety. When those feelings don’t go away, it can be exhausting. It might also make it harder to focus or feel okay again. This can lead to long-lasting stress and trauma, especially if a person feels like they can never fully relax or be themselves in the spaces around them.
When the World Tells You You’re “Too Much”
As we talked about in the first blog post, neurodivergent people are often misunderstood. In that post, we focused on the external factors (the things happening around us) that cause this. Now, we’re going to look at the internal factors (what happens inside a person because of those experiences).
Many neurodivergent people grow up hearing things like “You’re too sensitive,” “You’re too dramatic,” “You’re too loud,” or “You’re too much.” When these messages happen again and again, they can start to feel true. Feeling misunderstood or left out over and over can make someone feel like they don’t belong, like there is something wrong with them.
Those feelings can lead to negative beliefs about themselves, such as thinking they are broken, not good enough, or unlovable. These thoughts often bring heavy emotions like shame, sadness, and self-doubt. When a person carries those feelings for a long time, it can hurt their mental health and make trauma worse.
To deal with this pain, many neurodivergent adults start using coping habits. These might include masking, dissociation, and emotional shutdown. Masking means hiding parts of themselves to avoid standing out or getting in trouble. They might force themselves to act “normal,” pretend to be okay when they are not, or copy how others behave to fit in. Dissociation happens when someone feels disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, or what’s going on around them. It’s like mentally checking out because everything feels too much. Emotional shutdown is when a person stops showing or feeling emotions because it feels safer not to react.
While these coping skills might help in the short term, they can be very exhausting and make people feel even more alone. Over time, this can deepen trauma and make it harder to heal.
Trapped Inside: When You Can’t Explain How You Feel
Another challenge that many neurodivergent people deal with is having a hard time recognizing and expressing their emotions. Remember, we touched on this earlier: it’s not that we don’t feel emotions, we often feel them more deeply and intensely. But it can be tricky to figure out what we’re feeling or how to put those feelings into words. You might sense something feels “off,” but not know if it’s anger, sadness, or anxiety.
Many neurodivergent people also experience something called delayed emotional processing. This means it might take hours, days, or even weeks to fully realize how a situation made us feel. For example, you might get through a tough conversation and seem fine in the moment, but days later, feel suddenly overwhelmed, anxious, or upset without immediately connecting it to what happened. Our brains sometimes need extra time to catch up with our emotions.
On top of that, some people experience alexithymia, which means it’s hard to name or describe emotions clearly. While not everyone deals with this, it’s fairly common in neurodivergent communities, especially for those with Autism and ADHD. When you can’t easily recognize or explain your feelings, it makes it much harder to ask for help or communicate when you’re struggling.
When emotions stay bottled up, it can make someone feel isolated, frustrated, or even hopeless. Carrying heavy emotions without a way to name or share them builds up stress over time. And because these feelings don’t always come out right away, others might not realize how much someone is hurting inside.
This struggle to recognize, express, and process emotions is one of the reasons trauma can be so difficult to heal from. Trauma isn’t just what happens when something scary happens, it’s also about how those feelings stay with us. When those feelings stay stuck and unspoken, they can quietly build up, affecting mental health and well-being in deep, lasting ways.
Bringing it All Together
As you can see, all of these internal factors, from intense emotions and sensory sensitivities to feeling different and having a hard time expressing feelings, can pile up and make life feel heavier, especially when trauma is involved.
These internal experiences matter just as much as the external things happening around us. When we understand how neurodivergent people process emotions, handle sensory input, and experience social situations, it becomes easier to recognize what kind of support is actually helpful. Trauma doesn’t just come from big, obvious events, it can also build up from these everyday challenges that leave a lasting mark. I hope you’ll join me for the next post in this series, where we’ll explore helpful tools, supports, and healing practices made for neurodivergent people.
If you or someone you know could use some support, Best Life Therapy has openings and we'd be honored to support you. Therapy can help people gain insight into their thoughts and emotions, identify triggers and develop healthy coping skills. We will explore more ways to heal and cope in our next blog. Check out the Team page on our website to learn more about our therapists. Use the "Request an Appointment" button on the home page to schedule your initial appointment. You will be able to select the therapist you'd like to work with, view their calendar and reserve your appointment all on our website, https://bestlifethrapy.net. Current clients also can use the same button to access their secure client portal. Questions, call 810-771-3457 or use the contact form on our website.
- posted: Jul. 12, 2025
Blog post written by Emily Albright, LLMSW, Clinical Mental Health Therapist at Best Life Therapy
Welcome back to the Neurodivergent Trauma Series! If this is your first time reading our blogs on neurodivergence, be sure to check out the first blog post on this subject. It’s not required to understand this one, but it might give you some helpful background.
This is the second post in a three-part blog series about how trauma can show up in the lives of neurodivergent people. I’ll break it down into three important areas:
- External factors — things in the world around us, like school, work, and how people treat neurodivergent individuals.
- Internal factors — how people experience emotions and process events differently because of how their brains work.
- Ways to heal and cope — tools and ideas for managing trauma and supporting your mental health as a neurodivergent person.
In this second blog, I’ll focus on internal factors — things inside of someone, such as feelings, thoughts, and how their brain processes emotions and events. I am going to break these down into three categories: Feeling Deeply in a Loud, Bright World, When the World Tells You You’re “Too Much,” and Trapped Inside: When You Can’t Explain How You Feel.
Feeling Deeply in a Loud, Bright World
People who are neurodivergent process emotions differently than neurotypical people. This is because our brains work differently. The neurodivergent brain processes external factors (the world around us) in a way that everything can feel like more: noises are louder, lights are brighter, smells are stronger, and our emotions are bigger. Something a neurotypical person might find annoying could feel overwhelming, scary, or even like dread to us. This is because our brains process those experiences differently, and that can shape the way we feel and react.
Many neurodivergent people have a nervous system that reacts faster and stronger to small triggers. Things like loud noises, surprise questions, or bright lights can quickly push us into fight-or-flight mode. That’s because our brains often have a smaller window of tolerance. This means it’s easier for us to feel overwhelmed because our “calm zone” is smaller. When something pushes us outside of that window, our bodies react with strong emotions like panic, anger, or sadness, and it can take longer to calm back down. It’s not about being too sensitive(!!), it's about how our nervous systems are wired to respond.
One reason it can take longer to calm down is something called emotional stickiness. This means emotions stick around longer than usual. We might stay stuck on a feeling much longer than a neurotypical person would. This can happen with good emotions, like the excitement after getting a good grade, but it also happens with tough emotions like anger, sadness, or anxiety. When those feelings don’t go away, it can be exhausting. It might also make it harder to focus or feel okay again. This can lead to long-lasting stress and trauma, especially if a person feels like they can never fully relax or be themselves in the spaces around them.
When the World Tells You You’re “Too Much”
As we talked about in the first blog post, neurodivergent people are often misunderstood. In that post, we focused on the external factors (the things happening around us) that cause this. Now, we’re going to look at the internal factors (what happens inside a person because of those experiences).
Many neurodivergent people grow up hearing things like “You’re too sensitive,” “You’re too dramatic,” “You’re too loud,” or “You’re too much.” When these messages happen again and again, they can start to feel true. Feeling misunderstood or left out over and over can make someone feel like they don’t belong, like there is something wrong with them.
Those feelings can lead to negative beliefs about themselves, such as thinking they are broken, not good enough, or unlovable. These thoughts often bring heavy emotions like shame, sadness, and self-doubt. When a person carries those feelings for a long time, it can hurt their mental health and make trauma worse.
To deal with this pain, many neurodivergent adults start using coping habits. These might include masking, dissociation, and emotional shutdown. Masking means hiding parts of themselves to avoid standing out or getting in trouble. They might force themselves to act “normal,” pretend to be okay when they are not, or copy how others behave to fit in. Dissociation happens when someone feels disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, or what’s going on around them. It’s like mentally checking out because everything feels too much. Emotional shutdown is when a person stops showing or feeling emotions because it feels safer not to react.
While these coping skills might help in the short term, they can be very exhausting and make people feel even more alone. Over time, this can deepen trauma and make it harder to heal.
Trapped Inside: When You Can’t Explain How You Feel
Another challenge that many neurodivergent people deal with is having a hard time recognizing and expressing their emotions. Remember, we touched on this earlier: it’s not that we don’t feel emotions, we often feel them more deeply and intensely. But it can be tricky to figure out what we’re feeling or how to put those feelings into words. You might sense something feels “off,” but not know if it’s anger, sadness, or anxiety.
Many neurodivergent people also experience something called delayed emotional processing. This means it might take hours, days, or even weeks to fully realize how a situation made us feel. For example, you might get through a tough conversation and seem fine in the moment, but days later, feel suddenly overwhelmed, anxious, or upset without immediately connecting it to what happened. Our brains sometimes need extra time to catch up with our emotions.
On top of that, some people experience alexithymia, which means it’s hard to name or describe emotions clearly. While not everyone deals with this, it’s fairly common in neurodivergent communities, especially for those with Autism and ADHD. When you can’t easily recognize or explain your feelings, it makes it much harder to ask for help or communicate when you’re struggling.
When emotions stay bottled up, it can make someone feel isolated, frustrated, or even hopeless. Carrying heavy emotions without a way to name or share them builds up stress over time. And because these feelings don’t always come out right away, others might not realize how much someone is hurting inside.
This struggle to recognize, express, and process emotions is one of the reasons trauma can be so difficult to heal from. Trauma isn’t just what happens when something scary happens, it’s also about how those feelings stay with us. When those feelings stay stuck and unspoken, they can quietly build up, affecting mental health and well-being in deep, lasting ways.
Bringing it All Together
As you can see, all of these internal factors, from intense emotions and sensory sensitivities to feeling different and having a hard time expressing feelings, can pile up and make life feel heavier, especially when trauma is involved.
These internal experiences matter just as much as the external things happening around us. When we understand how neurodivergent people process emotions, handle sensory input, and experience social situations, it becomes easier to recognize what kind of support is actually helpful. Trauma doesn’t just come from big, obvious events, it can also build up from these everyday challenges that leave a lasting mark. I hope you’ll join me for the next post in this series, where we’ll explore helpful tools, supports, and healing practices made for neurodivergent people.
If you or someone you know could use some support, Best Life Therapy has openings and we'd be honored to support you. Therapy can help people gain insight into their thoughts and emotions, identify triggers and develop healthy coping skills. We will explore more ways to heal and cope in our next blog. Check out the Team page on our website to learn more about our therapists. Use the "Request an Appointment" button on the home page to schedule your initial appointment. You will be able to select the therapist you'd like to work with, view their calendar and reserve your appointment all on our website, https://bestlifethrapy.net. Current clients also can use the same button to access their secure client portal. Questions, call 810-771-3457 or use the contact form on our website.
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