Mind the Body Podcast

Why Your Body Feels Different - Neurodiversity, Sensory Overload & Belonging: Episode 7

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 7

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🎧 Episode 7: Why Your Body Feels Different: Neurodiversity, Sensory Overload & Belonging

Over the past six episodes, we’ve explored how body image is shaped by culture, trauma, and attachment.

In this episode, we explore the missing piece: neurodiversity and how differences in sensory processing, interoception, and regulation shape how the body actually feels, not just how it is perceived.

Drawing on the work of neuroscientist Mark Solms, Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, Damian Milton’s concept of the double empathy problem, and Christopher Bollas’ idea of the unthought known, we explore how internal experience, nervous system states, and relational understanding intersect.

In this episode, we explore:

  • How neurodiversity shapes the internal experience of the body
  • Why sensory discomfort is often mistaken for body image issues
  • What interoception is and how it affects emotion, hunger, and self-awareness
  • The impact of masking and the concept of the “false body”
  • The physical cost of suppressing natural regulation and needs
  • How neurodivergence shows up in intimacy and relationships
  • The mismatch between neurotypical expectations and neurodivergent needs
  • The “double empathy problem” and relational misunderstandings
  • Why honouring sensory needs is key to connection and body trust

Key insight:

What is often labelled as a body image problem may actually be a mismatch between your nervous system and the environment you're trying to function in.

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Hello and welcome back to Mind The Body. Before we get into this episode, I want to say that I've never felt entirely comfortable with labels. It can sometimes feel like they box people in or minimize our experiences, but I also know that having a word for what you're going through can be profoundly powerful, even freeing sometimes, especially if you spent a long time feeling misunderstood. I was six years old when I was first told that my brain worked differently. The diagnosis was hyperkinetic disorder, what we would now call A DHD, and at 11 dyslexia. So I didn't come to this understanding late in life, I grew up knowing, labeled early. And in many ways that made it harder because I was the odd one out because I carried the knowledge of being different long before I had any language for what that meant or any framework for what to do with it, what I didn't have language for, not then. And not for a long time after was what that difference did to my relationship with my body and with my sense of belonging. Even though a lot of people have these experiences, there's still not enough research connecting neurodiversity school environments and body image. Luckily, school settings are changing. And there's a growing awareness and more support now than when I was in school in the 1980s, but there's still a long way to go. This is an area where we need much more understanding. Because you see, when you feel fundamentally different on the inside, when your nervous system processes the world at a different frequency to everyone around you, you look for other ways to fit in other ways to feel acceptable. And other ways to belong if learning or socializing feels harder because your brain works differently, it's natural to search for relief and a sense of belonging elsewhere. For some people, focusing on the body becomes a way to find comfort, a sense of control, or even a way to feel like they fit in or are good at something when school feels hard. The body can offer a kind of certainty and belonging that's missing from the classroom. And sadly, that was my experience. And then for 15 years I lived in the modeling world, a place that didn't really care about what you thought or felt. And perhaps that sounds a bit harsh, but it was the reality at the time. This was the time of Kate Moss and her famous quote. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. I wanna be honest about something that I think might get lost in how I've spoken about that chapter of my life before. Some of what drove me toward that career wasn't confidence. It was the opposite. My body when it looked right. When it was acceptable, when it was approved of, gave me a sense of belonging that my internal world couldn't reliably provide. That was its own kind of masking, and it's why this episode matters to me personally, not just professionally. Because this isn't only a story about women. It isn't only a clinical observation. Neurodivergence shapes body image across all genders, and the drive to use appearance as a passport to belonging is one of the most secretly devastating things it can do. Over the past six episodes, we've explored how body image is shaped by culture, trauma, and attachment. Before we go further, I wanna say that not all body distress is rooted in trauma. Not all body preoccupation is about attachment, and not all regulation difficulties are relational. Sometimes the missing piece is neurobiology. So today I want to explore three interconnected things. First, how sensory processing and interception shape how your body actually feels from the inside, and how that's often misread as a body image issue when it isn't. Second, how masking the exhausting process of appearing neurotypical creates a particular kind of false body, which I'll talk more about in a moment. And it goes. Far deeper than appearance. And third, how all of this shows up in intimate relationships and why understanding neurodiversity is essential for creating truly safe, intimate spaces. This episode is about finding words for things we deeply feel, but rarely talk about. So let's begin. We often assume that when someone says, I struggle with how I feel about my body, They mean they dislike how they look, but sometimes what they mean is my body feels too loud, my sensations are overwhelming. I dunno what I'm feeling. I can't regulate inside this body. For some people, it's the simple things like needing to cut off clothing labels, choosing fabrics carefully or loosening collar that can make all the difference. Sensory details, concern, comfort, and daily life. These considerations can be exhausting and are often overlooked by others. To understand why we need to talk about interception. Interception is our capacity to sense the internal state of the body, heart rate, hunger, temperature, pain, emotion. It is how we know we are feeling something, not just what we are feeling. Everyone has an inner world, but for neurodivergent people, the experience of their body and senses can be unique. Neuros psychoanalyst, mark Psalms. Drawing on neuroscience suggests that this ability to sense and feel from within is at the very core of what makes us feel like a self. So when interoception is disrupted, the body doesn't feel like home. And people's experience of interception, how well they can notice and interpret signals from inside their bodies varies enormously. Some people are very tuned in while others find it harder to notice or make sense of what's happening inside. Research has shown that for many neurodivergent people, especially autistic individuals, there can be a disconnect between the body's internal signals and conscious awareness of these signals. This isn't simply heightened sensitivity, it's that the body's messages don't always reliably arrive in a form that can be easily understood. Think about what that means if you can't reliably sense hunger. Eating can become confusing if clothing, textures feel intrusive. Getting dressed can become stressful if emotions feel physically invasive rather than informationally useful. Your body may feel unsafe to experience so. It's not about appearance, it's about sensory processing. For many neurodivergent people, body discomfort is sensory discomfort. The language of body image gets used to describe what is actually a regulation issue. Sometimes when people say, I struggle with how I feel about my body, what they really mean is that they don't feel at home in their own body or their nervous system. I've noticed that this experience is often explained mainly in psychological terms, like self-esteem or comparison, but that doesn't always capture the whole picture. For some, there are real sensory or neurobiological reasons behind these feelings, and those aspects can get overlooked if we focus only on the psychological side. Sometimes people dismiss what someone else is feeling in their body by saying it's not real, not important, or not as strong as they describe. This can cause neurodivergent people to doubt their own experiences, even what they feel in their bodies. If this resonates, here's what I want you to consider. Your body image struggles might be about how your body feels and whether you've been able to experience attunement in the world around you. Because when sensory needs are met, the relationship with the body can change and you can build body trust. Which brings me to the second piece, masking. In earlier episodes, I talked about the false body. A false body is shaped by early relational experiences rather than by authentic feelings from within. So instead of growing from the inside out, it develops from the outside in. In response to what your earliest relationships were able to support or couldn't make room for. This kind of masking adds another layer entirely. Masking is the process of suppressing parts of yourself, your movements, feelings, or needs to adapt to your environment, to fit in, to avoid rejection, to stay safe. For many neurodivergent people, it becomes so automatic that you forget you are doing it. And I say this not just as a clinician, I've lived it. For years, the modeling world gave me a structure I could succeed within clear rules, measurable outcomes. For a long time that felt like belonging, but modeling also deepened my disconnect from my body. I learned to hold unnatural poses for hours to look warm in summer clothes while shivering in the cold winter. Squeeze my feet into shoes way too small and walk as if nothing hurt. Endure long shoots hungry and tired, yet expected to act vibrant and energized. I became skilled at ignoring my body signals and overriding my own needs because that's what the job required. And maybe you've noticed this in your own life too, The habit of tuning out your body signals or pushing down what feels natural doesn't just happen in one context. It can spill into everyday moments. You suppress, skimming the repetitive movements that help you regulate your nervous system. You force eye contact. You modulate your tone, your expression, your volume. You make yourself stay present in conversations that are already overwhelming you. You are essentially inhabiting a neurotypical body, a body that sits still a body that doesn't need to move, A body that can manage prolonged social interaction without shutting down. But that's not your body. That's the body you've been taught is acceptable. And here's what matters. Masking isn't just a social performance, it's a somatic one. You are physically suppressing your body's natural responses, needs and expressions. The cost isn't just mental or emotional. It's deeply embodied. When you've spent your whole life masking, you lose connection with what your body actually needs. You stop being able to identify internal cues. You push through sensory discomfort until you're in complete shutdown. And this has profound implications for relationships because when you've spent your whole life performing a neurotypical body, you bring that into intimacy too. You might push yourself to tolerate physical affection. When you are all touched out, you might suppress your need for alone time because you've learned that needing space means that you are cold, distant, difficult. You may push yourself into a spontaneous situation where your nervous system desperately needs predictability. This connects closely with everything we've explored about attachment and regulation. It's important to acknowledge that this isn't about assigning blame, most parents who found it challenging to support a neurodivergent child were drawing from what they themselves had learned. Often they didn't have access to frameworks or language to understand their child's experiences. Consider a child who struggles with the texture of a certain food, a parent wanting to do what they believe is best, insists the child finish in that moment. The child may learn often unconsciously that their bodily signals are less important, that meeting expectations or complying with rules comply. This is Miss attunement a gap between what the child's nervous system needed and what the adult around them had tools to provide. As trauma researchers, like Bessel VanDerKolk notes. Losing connection with the body doesn't always come from major events. Often it can develop gradually through repeated everyday experiences like not feeling heard or having your needs overlooked. For neurodivergent people, that accumulation is often quiet, ordinary, and entirely unintentional. You develop a body that's hypervigilant to others' expectations. A body that's constantly scanning, am I acting normal enough? Am I too much? Is my face doing the right thing? That leaves no capacity for actually being in your body, for experiencing pleasure, for authentic connection. Unmasking isn't just a psychological process, it's a somatic one. It's reclaiming your authentic body, learning what it actually needs to feel safe and alive rather than just acceptable. So here's what I invite you to consider. What parts of your embodied self have you been suppressing to appear acceptable? What would it mean to let your body move, express itself, regulate itself Authentically because healing in this context isn't about forcing ourself to love a version of our body shaped by masking. It's about gently uncovering what's true for us beneath all those layers, and beginning to reconnect with the body in a way that feels more honest and supportive. Now the third piece, and this is where it comes together. How does Neurodivergence show up in close relationships? Let me give you an example. Your partner wants to be spontaneous. They surprise you with a weekend away and they think it's romantic, but you haven't had time to prepare to know what to expect to manage your sensory environment. And instead of feeling loved, you feel panicked, then guilty for not feeling grateful. Then your partner feels rejected and suddenly you're both hurt and neither of you fully understands why. Closeness in our culture follows very specific neurotypical scripts. Spontaneity is romantic. Touch is always welcome. Eye contact means connection. Being able to sense what your partner needs without them saying it. That's what intimacy looks like. But for neurodivergent people, these scripts often don't fit. Spontaneity can feel threatening rather than exciting because the nervous system needs predictability to feel safe. Touch can be nourishing at some moments and overwhelming at others depending on sensory state. Not just because how you feel about the person, but because how your nervous system is managing everything else. Eye contact can feel more effortful than connecting and reading unspoken cues, particularly for autistic people, may be genuinely difficult. Not because you don't care, but because your brain processes social information differently. Dr. Damien Milton calls this the double empathy problem. It means that when people see and feel the world differently, misunderstandings can easily happen on both sides. No one is to blame. It's simply a sign that everyone's experience of the world is unique. So what happens? You feel like you're failing at relationships. Your body responses the need for space. The difficulty with unexpected physical contact that shut down after too much stimulation gets interpreted as rejection, as coldness, as something being wrong with you. And you start to manage that interpretation. You push through being touched. When you're already overwhelmed. You stay in the room when you need to leave. You perform presence when you are in shutdown because the alternative, being honest about what your body needs, feels too risky, too strange, too hard to explain. It might be helpful to think of Steven PO's polyvagal theory here. When the nervous system is in a defensive state registering threat rather than safety, the capacity for genuine social engagement and connection is simply offline. You cannot be truly present with another person when your body is managing overwhelm and no amount of willingness changes that neurobiology. By the time you've navigated a day of sensory demands, the fluorescent lights, the crowds, the noise, the unpredictability, your nervous system may have very little left. What looks like distance or withdrawal to a partner is often just a body that has reached its limit, not rejection, depletion. Here's where the reframe matters. If you've been treating your sensory and regulatory needs as a problem to overcome, as evidence of being too difficult, too much, not quite right for closeness, you are fighting your own nervous system, and that creates shame and disconnection in relationships that could otherwise hold you. But what if those needs are valid information? What if honoring them is precisely the condition under which genuine closeness becomes possible? This requires something that can feel counterintuitive. Naming your needs explicitly,, rather than hoping they'll be noticed. For some people having a bit of warning before plans change makes a big difference. It helps them feel prepared.. Others might need some quiet time alone after being around people all day before they're ready to connect. Some find that a firm steady touch is much more comforting than a light touch. And sometimes going quiet when things feel overwhelming isn't about the people around them. It's just a way to manage what's happening inside. For neurotypical partners, this kind of directness might initially feel odd, but in practice, when neurodivergent needs are named and understood, closeness actually deepens because the performance stops and real presence becomes possible. And the question shifts from am I doing this right, to what does my body actually need in order to be here? That's not a small shift. That's the shift that builds body trust. Healing in this context is about stabilizing your nervous system. So what actually helps sensory accommodation, adapting the environment to reduce overwhelm rather than expecting the body to adapt to it. Structured routines that support executive functioning, which is like scaffolding for a nervous system that struggles to self-organize, increasing interceptive awareness that's gently rebuilding the connection between the internal signals and conscious awareness so the body's messages are heard and responded to. And crucially distinguishing self-improvement from self abandonment. The question isn't, how can I become more acceptable? It's what does my body need in order to feel more like home? When regulation improves, body distress often decreases because internal stability increases, and this makes authentic embodiment possible. Let me bring this all together. Although body distress may seem like a lack of self-worth, some of it is actually about wiring. When your brain processes the world differently, your body will feel different when that difference is met with confusion, pathologizing, or cultural pressure to make yourself acceptable. Shame grows. If you recognize yourself in this episode, in the masking, the sensory overwhelm, the sense that your body has always felt different. I want you to consider that your body may not be the problem you think it is. Your nervous system may simply be asking for the kind of support that our culture has never really learned to offer. I spent years not knowing that the restlessness, the hyper focus, the difficulty being still, the things that made me feel wrong were the same things that also made me curious, driven, And alive to the world in ways have come to value. The diagnosis I was given at six told me something was different. It took much longer to understand that different isn't wrong. The psychoanalyst, Christopher Bois wrote about what he called the unthought known. Experiences that are deeply felt but not yet available for reflection, for many neurodivergent people, their body experience has been exactly that. Felt intensely, but never really given a language that fits. I hope this episode offers something of that language this week. Try one small act of unmasking. Let yourself move. If your body needs to move. Wear the clothing that actually feels right. Communicate one sensory need to someone you trust. Notice what happens when you stop suppressing your body's authentic responses. Next time we're exploring body image and chronic illness, what happens when your body changes? Until then, stay curious. Okay.