Today’s episode fundamentally challenges the standard verbal and chart-based approaches to emotional literacy, particularly for autistic and gestalt-processing learners. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that emotion originates in the body as sensory experience—rhythm, texture, and movement—and that language and naming only follow as an “afterglow” of this felt experience. Dr. Hoerricks critiques conventional tools like “feelings charts” and “zones of regulation” for mistaking labeling for understanding and enforcing compliance over genuine sensory fluency. Instead, she advocates for shifting educational and therapeutic practices to prioritise creative modalities such as art, music, play, and gesture as the direct, authentic language of affect, supported by citations from various research articles on sensory processing and creative therapy in autism.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/alexithymia-beyond-feeling-charts

Let me know what you think.

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