Let's talk about "Being Emotional".

And by "talking" i mean: Let's destroy this lazy and harmful oversimplification.

I genuinely can’t stand that phrase: “You’re being emotional.”

It is, fundamentally, an act of intellectual surrender. That phrasing stops the entire line of inquiry right in its tracks.

No one ever sits in a room, totally calm, totally emotionless; that’s just not how our specialized human hardware works. Our brain is a constant emotional furnace, generating feelings (the energy and core components for our choices, our priorities, and our sense of connection) all the time, every single minute of the waking day, whether you call it “mood” or “state” or “visceral data.” We can’t turn it off.

Panksepp’s whole body of work in affective neuroscience established exactly this: motivational and emotional processes are always active in mammalian brains, always running underneath behavior, always there (Affective Neuroscience, 1998). Damasio’s PET imaging confirmed that the subjective experience of feeling is grounded in neural maps of the body’s internal state, and those maps never stop updating (Damasio et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2000).

This is not optional cognitive software. It is the operating system.

So the problem isn’t “being emotional.” That’s true for everyone alive. You’re describing the baseline mammalian condition and framing it as a character flaw. The issue, the actual, tangible problem, is always one of two distinct things: a breakdown in regulation or a breakdown in communication.

That inability to see the distinction is what really messes with a system like ours, the AuDHD ones, and it’s what perpetuates endless, needless shame. If we can even get close to designing workable solutions (which, for me, being in the slog of autistic burnout recovery, that’s all I truly care about), we absolutely need better language. Our highly logical, pattern-matching minds demand surgical precision. “Being emotional” is vague, like bad user experience or the software saying, “There was an error.” Useless. Did the database fail? Or did the cable come unplugged? The error label doesn’t help you fix a damn thing. It just labels the output as broken, not the component.

And the research backs this up in a way that honestly surprised me with how clearly it maps. Autism is associated with amplified emotional responses and difficulty with emotional control, but the emotions themselves are not the problem (Mazefsky & White, Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 2014).

The regulatory machinery works differently; that’s the issue. Meltdowns, shutdowns, those gut-punch reactions to perceived rejection? Not proof anyone is “too emotional.” That’s what happens when a system that processes emotional input at genuinely high intensity doesn’t have the regulatory bandwidth to modulate the output in real time. The database didn’t fail. The error handling did.

For someone, anyone, to simply wave their hand and suggest your reaction is a matter of being “too emotional” is a pure act of erasure. It denies the validity of the data being supplied (the emotion itself) because the mechanism outputting it (your way of expressing, speaking, or physically reacting) doesn’t conform to their accepted social script. That’s all.

If we want any chance of fixing the pattern, finding a pathway to authentic self-acceptance, or designing truly workable, sustainable systems (which is the necessary core of my coaching, by the way; boom, self plug done), then we have to look past that fuzzy label.

Now, many of us in the AuDHD community struggle with alexithymia (a difficulty identifying internal states and emotions). A meta-analysis put the prevalence at roughly 50% in autistic populations, compared to about 5% in neurotypical ones (Kinnaird et al., European Psychiatry, 2019).

That’s significant, that’s real, and it shapes a huge amount of the autistic experience of emotional life. But flip that number. Half of us don’t have alexithymia. Some of us have the opposite problem entirely.

I’m the opposite. I have a profound, sometimes alarming, internal connection to my emotions (which are often so intense I’m buzzing). The problem isn’t the input itself, but the processing capacity. I feel like a massive internal storm, often; my cognitive language simply fails to quickly deliver the precise “wind,” “rain,” and “pressure” labels.

This inability to quickly translate the sensory data means my immediate attempt to regulate the feeling manifests as profound analytical fervor: a desperate attempt to use dissection and logic to understand the internal sensation before a meltdown or shutdown. From the outside, yes, that can look cold or aloof, because the sheer torrent of feeling has caused a total system overload.

I remember distinctly being trapped in multiple circular arguments with my ex. I was sitting there, trying to meticulously and systematically analyze the communication failures, tracking the moments when I used direct candor and it was perceived as a weapon against her, painstakingly tracing the logic. And she would hit me, hard, with the, “You just need to stop being so emotional about everything!”

I was utterly stunned.

Me? Emotional? Inside, I was focused on suppressing the oncoming shutdown and analyzing the broken relational mechanics. It’s what I do. And that casual label? It negated my entire effort to create shared clarity. The sheer, overwhelming injustice of the accusation only drove me deeper into frustrated analytical fugue, because the problem had just been reframed to being me, not the systemic failure.

It pisses me off, profoundly.

Because that kind of lazy language drives people with dysregulated systems to simply repress. And repression, for us, has a very specific name and a very specific research trail: masking.

Research on autistic masking (Bradley et al., Autism in Adulthood, 2021) shows that the suppression of natural responses, emotional ones included, is directly linked to burnout, mental health collapse, and suicidality. The pathway from sustained masking to autistic burnout is well-documented now; Hochschild’s emotional labor framework maps onto it almost perfectly (Mantzalas et al., Autism in Adulthood, 2022; Raymaker et al., Autism in Adulthood, 2020).

Telling an AuDHD person to stop being emotional isn’t just dismissive. It is, literally, the instruction that leads to the thing that breaks us. It leads straight back to people-pleasing, toxic masking, and inevitably, burnout; exactly the state I had to, and am still working on, extracting myself from (with immense and deeply calculated effort).

And here’s the worst part, the part that took me years to see clearly.

After enough time hearing it from partners, parents, teachers, bosses, you don’t need them anymore. You start saying it to yourself. “I’m being too emotional.” “I need to calm down.” “This isn’t rational.”

You internalize the label and it becomes your own internal cop, policing every feeling before it even fully forms. The external dismissal becomes a reflex. You learn to shut yourself down faster than anyone else ever could. And for people whose systems already run hot, who already burn half their cognitive budget just translating their inner world into words other people will accept, that internalized voice doesn’t calm anything. It just adds shame to the pile. And shame, for a brain running rejection sensitivity dysphoria, is gasoline on a fire that was already burning.

That’s the real pipeline. Someone else’s lazy language becomes your self-talk. Self-talk becomes suppression. Suppression becomes masking. Masking becomes burnout. And by the time you’re deep in burnout you genuinely cannot find the original wound anymore, because you’ve been performing “I’m fine” so long you’ve lost the signal under all the noise.

We must be precise in our analysis and in our language; vague labels stop the intellectual investigation our beautiful, intense, pattern-seeking AuDHD brains desperately need to perform in order to solve the problem for ourselves.

Next time you catch yourself (or a partner, or a friend) reaching for that phrase, stop. Demand better. Ask an honest, system-testing, ACT-framed question instead: “What specific action or output of this emotion am I witnessing that is not workable right now?” Or, “How does this surge of feeling show up in a way that moves me away from my deepest values?”

Let the feeling just exist, because it has utility; it’s telling you something needs attention. The ACT framework calls this willingness: making room for what shows up without letting it grab the wheel, and without pretending it isn’t in the vehicle.

But let’s stop accepting the gross simplification that pathologizes your entire, beautiful interior world. It’s time to find a truce with our own mental operating system, by giving every component the exact name it deserves. Name the regulation failure. Name the communication gap. Name the value you were trying to move toward when everything caught fire.

That, right there, is how we can start building back sustainable peace.
That’s infinitely workable.

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Sources:

• Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.

• Damasio, A.R. et al. (2000). Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of self-generated emotions. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1049–1056.

• Mazefsky, C.A. & White, S.W. (2014). Emotion regulation: Concepts & practice in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 43(3).

• Kinnaird, E. et al. (2019). Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 80–89.

• Miller, D. et al. (2021). “Masking Is Life”: Experiences of masking in autistic and nonautistic adults. Autism in Adulthood, 3(4), 330–338.

• Mantzalas, J. et al. (2022). What is autistic burnout? A thematic analysis of posts on two online platforms. Autism in Adulthood, 4(1), 52–65.

• Raymaker, D. et al. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143.