There’s a moment in every classroom, therapy room and parenting book where the feelings charts shows up.
You know the ones, right? A grid of cartoon faces with neatly labelled emotions like happy, sad, angry, worried, excited etc. A traffic light system. A mood thermometer. The idea is simple isn’t it? Point to how you feel and then we’ll know what to do next.
But what happens when it’s really not that simple? What if the feeling doesn’t match any of the faces? What if you don’t know what you feel in words? What if the sensation inside your body is more like… a crackling radio? A tangled slinky? A haze of golden-orange static?
I’ve come to understand that many neurodivergent people, me included, don’t just struggle with identifying emotions but they experience them differently. And sometimes, our systems for supporting emotional awareness don’t accommodate that, because they assume emotions are linear. That they are always nameable. That they show up on faces.
Emotional experience can be more than a word. It can be a colour. A texture. A movement. A sound. Sometimes it’s silence.
Colour as Language
Instinctively reaching for colour when emotional language doesn’t quite fit, captures complexity. A deep blue might mean calm and heavy or a glittering silver might mean nervous and excited for instance. Colour carries subtlety that binary emotions rarely do. Colour gives room for nuance, for contradiction, for feeling more than one thing at once.
Colour speaks in gradients and for some neurodivergent people that’s exactly how emotion is experienced : shifting hues in motion.
Emotions with Texture
For some, emotions don’t sit in the head or heart but they live in the skin, in the stomach, in the fingertips. Emotional awareness becomes sensory awareness since the emotions arrive in the body before they reach the brain, thus emotional awareness is embodied rather than cognitive.
This kind of awareness isn’t usually reflected in emotional education. Traditional systems often bypass the body entirely asking for verbal definitions and facial expressions instead. This is how we lose access to a deep well of sensory data.
If you're only ever asked to say you're “angry” or “worried,” you might never be invited to connect with how that emotion actually feels. You could start believing that because your emotions don’t look right or sound right, they’re somehow wrong.
Here’s some examples:
“Like pins and needles on the inside.”
“Like soft velvet under my ribs.”
“Like a balloon about to pop.”
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When Emotion Isn’t Visible
There’s a longstanding assumption that if someone isn’t showing emotion in a recognisable way, they must not be feeling it. We are taught to look for the signs of emotion. A smile means happy. A frown means sad. A meltdown means angry.
Except… that’s not always true.
What about when a child is completely still, expressionless and is actually full of joy?
What about the adult whose face stays neutral, but who’s having a panic attack inside?
What about the teen who stim-dances when they’re content, but is assumed to be disruptive and unable to engage?
Neurodivergent emotional expression doesn’t follow neurotypical scripts and because of that I really do believe it to be more honest since it’s less filtered through social expectation.
Communication Beyond Words
Some people can’t name how they feel because the available language doesn’t match their inner world. There are times when I genuinely think that there hasn’t been a word invented for how I am feeling and naming it something for the sake of it, would not do it justice.
Everyone has the right to feel their feelings and to communicate them in a way that works for them.
Maybe it’s drawing a shape. Maybe it’s picking a song. Maybe it’s using body movement or repeating a phrase or simply showing you a colour.
It’s all valid. All emotional communication. Even when it’s not as anticipated.
Rethinking Emotional Literacy
We can all memorise the feeling words or colour in the thermometer as expected.. but is that really what it comes down to? What do we really learn from this?
Emotional literacy is about knowing yourself and noticing what’s happening inside.
About having tools and permission to express that in a way that makes sense to you.
That might mean describing anxiety as “crackly.” Saying “I’m yellow today” instead of “I’m overstimulated.” Needing movement to release emotion, not words. Or sitting with the feeling without needing to perform it.
So What Do We Do Instead?
So maybe, just maybe instead of broadly asking “How are you feeling?” we should ask “What does that feeling remind you of?” or “If that feeling were a colour, what would it be?”
We can and should make space for non-linear, sensory, creative expressions of emotion as a legitimate language because not every emotion fits on a chart and not every feeling wants to be named in the traditional sense.
And frankly, sometimes, “I’m green with sparkles and too many tabs open” is more emotionally fluent than any feelings wheel ever made.
Have you or your child ever experienced emotions in a nontraditional way?
Do you feel in colours, shapes, metaphors or sound?
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