If you work with people, you’ve probably heard it said: Feel your feelings. Sit with it. Drop into your body. These phrases show up often in conversations about nervous system regulation and emotional processing. And the intention behind that guidance is real—we know that emotional avoidance doesn’t lead to regulation, and we know the body holds important information.
But there is a significant gap between knowing that and actually being able to do it, and that gap has a neurobiological explanation.
For many of the people we work with—particularly those with a trauma history, chronic stress, dysregulation, or a neurodivergent nervous system—“feel your feelings” is not a helpful instruction so much as an inaccessible one. When we hand someone a tool they cannot yet use, they rarely think, this approach has limitations. They think: I am failing at something that should be simple.
That is on the approach, not the person.
Understanding how interoception functions—and how trauma and neurodivergence shape it—is essential for effective nervous system regulation.
Interoception: The Nervous System’s Internal Sensing System
Interoception is your body’s internal sensing system, continuously picking up signals from the heart, lungs, gut, and muscles, and relaying that information to the brain.
Sometimes referred to as the body’s “eighth sense,” interoception is how you know you are hungry, tired, anxious, or calm. It is also one of the primary ways the nervous system communicates its current state to the rest of the brain and body.
Much of what we call nervous system regulation relies—consciously or not—on this system functioning with reasonable accuracy.
The problem is that interoception is not always online and available in the way we assume. It can be dysregulated, and when it is, asking someone to tune into their body is a bit like asking them to listen to music when the speaker is broken. The signal is either too faint to detect or distorted beyond usefulness, and no amount of effort or willingness on the person’s part will change that without first addressing the underlying system.
How Trauma Disrupts Interoception & Nervous System Regulation
Following traumatic stress, internal body awareness often becomes dysregulated. For some people, bodily sensations become very quiet, particularly in dissociative states where signals feel distant, muted, or absent entirely. For others, those same signals become overwhelming, creating waves of anxiety or panic in response to ordinary interoceptive input. In both cases, the volume is wrong, and generic body-awareness instructions are not going to recalibrate it.
The person who is dissociated cannot access what you are asking them to feel. The person whose system is hypervigilant to internal signals may actually escalate when directed to pay closer attention to them. What both people need is a systematic approach that meets their nervous system where it currently is, rather than where we hope it will be. Your clients are not failing. Their internal speaker has the volume turned too far down, or too far up, and what they need is someone who understands how to work with that.
Neurodivergent Nervous Systems Process Differently
Autistic people and ADHD-ers often experience interoception in ways that differ significantly from neurotypical processing, and the research is clear that this is not a deficit (Garfinkel et al., 2016; DuBois et al., 2017). It is a meaningful neurological difference, one that shapes how internal signals are received, interpreted, and acted upon. The internal signal-to-meaning pathway simply works differently, and that matters enormously for the kind of support we offer.
Standard regulation approaches were not built with these differences in mind, and when we apply one-size-fits-all body awareness practices to neurodivergent clients, we are not honoring how their nervous system actually functions. This often leads to frustration on both sides and a quiet assumption that the client is somehow not ready for this kind of work. In most cases, they are ready. The approach just is not right for them.
Effective Interoceptive Training Is a Skill, Not a Prompt
Asking someone to feel their feelings is a prompt. It is not training. Actual interoceptive training involves systematically rebuilding a person’s capacity to receive, process, and interpret internal signals in a way that respects the current state and developmental hierarchy of their nervous system (Schore, 2016). It requires understanding where someone is before deciding what to ask of them.
It also requires working with the other sensory systems involved, because interoception does not operate in isolation. It functions alongside proprioception, vestibular processing, and external sensory input, and these systems are deeply interconnected (Craig, 2015). When they are not integrated, regulation remains effortful and inconsistent regardless of how motivated or self-aware a person is. This is why scattered body-awareness practices so often produce scattered results. Sequencing matters. The current state of the system matters. Neurobiological readiness matters. Without attending to these things, we are essentially hoping our clients find their way to regulation by chance.
What a More Sophisticated Approach Looks Like
What I am describing is not about making the work more complicated or clinical. It is about matching the approach to the actual state of the person’s nervous system, which means asking: what is this person’s current interoceptive capacity, what state are they in right now, and what sequence of work will build something that lasts?
When practitioners have this framework, the work shifts in a way that is hard to overstate. Clients stop feeling like they are failing. Practitioners stop reaching for techniques and hoping for the best. The results become more reliable because the approach is grounded in how the nervous system actually functions rather than how we imagine it should. This level of sophistication is entirely learnable, and it is what the field needs more of.
Jessica Maguire is a physiotherapist, nervous system educator, and author of The Nervous System Reset. She is the founder of the Nervous System Certification Course and has trained more than 20,000 practitioners globally in evidence-informed nervous system education.
References:
Craig, A. D. (2015). How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self. Princeton University Press.
DuBois, D., Ameis, S. H., Lai, M. C., Casanova, M. F., & Desarkar, P. (2016). “Interoception in autism spectrum disorder: a review.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 17(6), 798.
Garfinkel, S. N., et al. (2016). “Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness.” Biological Psychology, 104, 65–74.
Schore, A. N. (2016). Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Routledge.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
