When “How Did That Make You Feel?” Is the Wrong Question
By Iris Walshe | NeuroWave Coaching
I used to ask it.
“How did that make you feel?”
It’s a reasonable question, and for some clients, it opens something up — a word arrives, a conversation flows, we go somewhere useful together.
But for a significant number of my clients, that question lands like a door with no handle.
Not because they aren’t feeling anything. Not because they’re closed off or resistant. But because the question asks them to retrieve something their brain genuinely hasn’t filed in a way that’s retrievable.
Three recent client conversations — all AuDHD — changed how I understand this. And how I work.
“I don’t like things when they are dark.”
One of my AuDHD clients was describing a situation that had clearly been significant for them. I asked how they had felt in that moment.
There was a pause.
Then: “I don’t like things when they are dark.”
Not a feeling word. A colour. A quality. An atmosphere.
My first instinct was to translate it — to push gently toward something more conventional. I didn’t. Instead I followed it. What did dark mean? What had the darkness felt like in the room, in the conversation, in their body? What would it have needed to look like to be different?
What followed was one of the richest conversations we’d had. The client wasn’t avoiding the feeling — they were describing it in the only language that felt accurate. Colour, tone, atmosphere. Their brain had encoded the experience visually and sensorially, not in a neat emotional label.
The moment I stopped expecting a feeling word and started working with what they actually offered, the whole picture came into focus.
“Brain freeze.”
Another AuDHD client, had a difficult interaction at work. I asked about it. The response came back immediately.
“Brain freeze.”
Two words. Completely accurate. And completely stuck — because we both knew something significant had happened, but ‘brain freeze’ didn’t give us anywhere useful to go.
So I changed approach entirely.
What did you do then? And then what happened? And then?
Forensic. Sequential. No pressure to name a feeling — just walk me through the sequence like you’re describing a scene.
Something shifted. The client began to talk. Not about feelings, but about actions and reactions — what they said, what the other person did, where they went, what they did next. The conversation moved. And inside that movement, meaning started to emerge.
Not one word that captured it, but a whole picture that explained it — the build-up, the moment, the aftermath, the pattern underneath all of it.
By the end, the client said: “That actually makes sense to me now.”
That is the goal. Not a feeling word. Sense-making.
Stuck on “overwhelm.”
A third AuDHD client kept returning to the same word in almost every session: overwhelm. And every time it came up, we’d reach a kind of wall. The word named something real — but it didn’t open anything. It didn’t explain what had actually happened, what had led there, or what to do about it. It was a label sitting on top of an experience that was still, in every practical sense, a mystery.
So we stopped trying to work with the word and started working with the events around it.
What had happened that morning before it hit? What time did they get up? Had they eaten? What had the first hour looked like? What came in before the meeting that had already taken something from them? What had they agreed to the day before that meant they arrived already depleted?
Forensic detail. Not feelings — facts and sequence.
What emerged wasn’t just a better understanding of that one episode. It was a map. A specific, personal, genuinely useful map of the conditions that created overwhelm for this individual — not as a diagnostic label, but as a lived sequence with identifiable patterns and real, actionable intervention points.
The word ‘overwhelm’ had been hiding everything useful. The detail around it contained all the answers.
What the science says
There’s a name for what all three of these clients were navigating: alexithymia — literally, ‘no words for feelings.’
It affects an estimated 50% of autistic adults and over 40% of adults with ADHD. And it isn’t a reluctance to engage emotionally. It’s a neurological difference in how emotional information is processed and accessed.
At the root of it is interoception — the brain’s ability to pick up and interpret signals from inside the body. Heart rate, gut tension, muscle tightening, breath. These are the raw data of emotional experience. For many AuDHD brains, this internal signal is weak, delayed, or static-filled. The emotion is happening. The broadcast isn’t being received clearly enough to name.
For ADHD brains specifically, there’s an additional layer: emotional labelling is an executive function task. It requires holding the feeling in working memory long enough to match it to language. In an ADHD nervous system, emotions often move fast — and by the time the question arrives, the feeling has already passed from conscious access.
For autistic brains, the pattern is different again. Emotions can accumulate quietly below conscious awareness, like pressure building in a sealed system — until they exceed capacity. ‘Overwhelm’ often names the moment of breach, not the process that led there.
In AuDHD, both patterns are present simultaneously.
What actually works
The approach I’ve come to use — and which all three of these conversations illustrate — is what I think of as forensic emotional inquiry.
Not how did you feel? but:
- How did that land for you? — spatial, concrete, easier for many AuDHD brains to answer
- What did you do then?
- What happened next?
- Was there anything in your body — chest, throat, jaw, gut?
- If that moment had a colour or a weather, what would it be?
You enter through behaviour, sequence, and sensory detail. You work backwards from the outside in. You let the client describe in whatever language actually fits their experience — and you follow it, rather than redirecting toward what the question assumed.
What you get is not a feeling word. It’s a whole picture. Context. Pattern. Meaning. And — crucially — somewhere to go from there.
A single feeling word, retrieved under pressure, strips out almost everything useful. The full sequence, described in the client’s own language, contains the map.
For coaches and practitioners
If you work with AuDHD clients and emotional inquiry questions consistently hit a wall — it’s not the client. It’s the question.
The clients I’ve described here were not avoiding their emotions. They were offering what they had genuine access to — a colour, a frozen state, a sequence of events. The work was in learning to receive what they offered, rather than redirecting toward what the question expected.
Emotional experience in AuDHD is often intense, layered, and deeply felt. What’s different is the pathway to naming it. When we build our approach around that reality rather than a neurotypical template, the conversation doesn’t close down.
It opens — fully, in the client’s own language.
That’s where the real work happens.
Iris Walshe is an AuDHD coach, equestrian athlete, and founder of NeuroWave Coaching — supporting high-performing neurodivergent individuals across sport, business, and leadership. ADDCA Certified | PAAC CACP 2025–26 | ICF Aligned neurowavecoaching.com
