Many Neurodivergent people have a difficult time naming their own emotions or describing how they feel. I am far from being immune to this, despite being a synesthete. For me, when I'm around others, I'm not sure whether their emotions are mine or what my emotions even are. When I'm alone, however, I have a very difficult time even naming what emotions I am experiencing, unless there is a specific trauma-related trigger. I have read that Alexithymia often develops as a trauma response in many cases, and I am basing my information off of my own Autistic experience of it. For example, I can sometimes name loneliness when it hits me, but some of the more basic emotions elude me. It can be difficult to express your emotions, particularly in a neurotypical way, if you're unaware of what you're actually feeling at a given moment. As a mirror-touch synesthete, my emotions get entangled with others and it can sometimes be chaotic trying to juggle another person's emot
I personally do not like or adhere to the term "empath," but I believe I have figured out the explanation for this phenomenon, which I do experience. It's specifically called mirror-touch synesthesia, and is also related to mirror-pain synesthesia and mirror-emotion synesthesia, which I spoke of at an earlier time. Studies show that mirror-touch synesthetes experience heightened levels of empathy because, in addition to feeling at least an echo of another person's pain, many of us also feel their emotions as if they were our own. This sounds an awful lot like the horrific pop psychology term, "empath," but most people attribute it to a supernatural phenomenon if they're not lying about it, rather than a Neurodivergence. It's a lesser known type of synesthesia, but I experience mirror-touch, as well as more "traditional" types of synesthesia where many of my senses blend together. I was actually misdiagnosed with schizoaffective because I d