Not Broken, But Deeply Tuned: Rethinking Emotional Expression in Autism

There’s a common stereotype—one that shows up in diagnostic manuals, books, and online articles that says that autistic people have trouble “reading between the lines” or “recognizing emotions in others”. While these characterizations may apply to certain cognitive processing styles, they risk obscuring a significant dimension of neurodivergent experience: the capacity for heightened emotional sensitivity that resists conventional modes of expression.

What if the real story is not that we lack emotional perception, but that we are overwhelmed by it—flooded by nuance, and disoriented not by apathy but by depth?

Emotions for those of us with autism are experienced in a temporally asynchronous manner—sensing shifts in tone or atmosphere before they are acknowledged by others, or continuing to process a moment long after it has passed for those around them. Our affective world is not linear; it is layered, recurring, and retentive.

For people like me, emotions don’t just appear—they arrive in a wave. I don’t miss what’s felt; I often feel it before it’s spoken. I do read between the lines—and sometimes I live there. I don’t fit the standard model of empathy because mine is not always reactive. I don’t always mirror expressions or speak in the expected tone and in that delay, people sometimes assume I feel nothing and then become startled if I suddenly act intense. Sometimes I carry feelings that aren’t even mine, because I couldn’t leave them behind.

This form of sensitivity is not marked by indifference or absence of empathy, but by overexposure—a condition in which emotional signals are not merely received, but absorbed, magnified, and internalized. The resulting dissonance between internal experience and external expectation can manifest not as emotional flatness, but as delayed or atypical responses. In these cases, silence, hesitancy, or nonverbal expression may represent not a lack of emotional insight, but a struggle to preserve emotional integrity in environments that demand immediacy, clarity, or performative empathy.

Consequently, people like me may resist reductive social cues—smiles, nods, or rehearsed consolation—and instead seek to respond with authenticity. This can result in pauses that appear awkward, or expressions that are misunderstood as disproportionate. Yet within our internal logic, these responses are measured attempts at ethical and symbolic fidelity. We are not “missing” emotion—we are refusing to betray its complexity. To be different in this way is not to be lacking. It is to be attuned to the unspeakable.

— Robert Gervais