AuDHD Flourishing26 Jul 2025

105 Emotions Are Hard For a Reason

The Autistic community has taken many approaches to reframing what the diagnostic criteria calls "Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts." There's the double-empathy problem, for example, in which Autistic people have an easier time understanding each other where allistics struggle and vice versa.

Childhood Emotional Neglect, while a relatively new idea from 2012, aligns remarkably with autistic social "deficits." While I'm by no means trying to draw a single causal line, I also wonder in this episode if maybe some of our social difficulties are actually signs of CEN.

Even if our parents were quite well-meaning, we were more likely to experience CEN via a lack of appropriate mirroring of our internal responses, especially if our internal world was especially intense or complex.

This episode covers the effects of CEN primarily. To learn more about examples of how it can develop, or how to address it, you can read the books below, or search for articles about them.

Books mentioned:

Both are affiliate links

Resources:

Transcript Doc
Email Newsletter: Nothing Wrong With Us
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