Dutch Uncle: Stop Waiting to “Feel” Your Way Through Life: A Reality Check on Emotion Blindness

Here’s Your Wake-Up Call

You know that mate who always knows exactly how they’re feeling? The one who says things like “I’m feeling melancholic with a touch of wistful nostalgia”? Yeah, that’s never going to be you. And here’s the thing: you’ve been wasting years trying to force yourself into their emotional operating system whilst yours runs on completely different software.

Let’s get brutally honest about what emotion blindness (alexithymia, if we’re being fancy) actually means when you’ve got ADHD: You’re navigating life with a broken emotional GPS whilst driving a Ferrari with dodgy brakes. You don’t know you’re angry until you’ve already sent that career-limiting email. You don’t recognise you’re overwhelmed until you’re having a meltdown in Tesco’s car park. And you definitely don’t notice you’re burnt out until your body literally forces you to stop.

Stop pretending this isn’t affecting every aspect of your life. It is.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Your “Mystery” Problems

Those relationship explosions that “came out of nowhere”? They didn’t. You just couldn’t read your own warning signals.

That job you rage-quit without a backup plan? Your body was screaming at you for months through headaches, insomnia, and that constant jaw clenching you ignored.

The friendships that mysteriously dissolved? You probably bulldozed through twenty emotional cues that you were being too intense, too distant, or too something you couldn’t even name.

Here’s what nobody tells you: When you can’t identify your emotions, you can’t regulate them. When you can’t regulate them, they regulate you. And with ADHD in the mix, they regulate you with the subtlety of a wrecking ball.

Your Body Is Keeping Score (Whether You Can Read It or Not)

Right, let’s talk about what’s actually happening in your body whilst you’re walking around thinking you’re “fine”:

• That chronic neck tension? That’s not just “how you are.” That’s unprocessed stress setting up permanent residence in your trapezius muscles.

• The digestive issues you’ve normalised? Your gut is literally your second brain, and it’s trying to process the emotions your conscious mind can’t.

• Those random energy crashes? Your nervous system is doing emotional labour you’re not even aware of.

• The insomnia that’s become your personality? Your body’s attempting to process the day’s emotional backlog whilst you scroll through your phone at 3am.

Your body has been sending you invoices for years. You’ve just been marking them as spam.

The Harsh Reality of Social Navigation

Let’s address the elephant in the room: You’re probably exhausting to be around sometimes. Not because you’re a bad person, but because emotional blindness makes you a bit of a social bulldozer.

You miss the subtle “please stop talking” signals. You don’t notice when someone’s uncomfortable until they’re practically running away. You share trauma dumps instead of appropriate emotional exchanges because you can’t gauge the emotional temperature of a conversation.

And here’s the kicker: People won’t tell you this directly. They’ll just gradually stop inviting you to things, stop confiding in you, stop considering you for opportunities that require “soft skills.”

WHAT’S BEHIND THE PAYWALL:

You’ve just had the wake-up call. Now here’s the actual survival system.

You’ve learned that your body’s been keeping score whilst you’ve been marking the invoices as spam. That your “mystery problems” aren’t mysteries—you just can’t read your own warning signals. That you’re probably a social bulldozer sometimes, and people won’t tell you directly.

What you haven’t got yet: the operating procedures that actually work when feelings are useless.

3. Create Operating Procedures for Common Scenarios – Stop relying on intuition you don’t have. Get the complete protocol system for: important conversations (when to postpone, how to warn others), work stress (hourly monitoring, immediate action triggers), and relationship navigation (explicit feedback scripts, partner communication protocols). No guessing. No “figuring it out.” Just if-then responses that work.

4. Use Technology as Your Emotional Prosthetic – Your smartphone is smarter about your emotions than you are. The complete tech stack: heart rate variability apps for stress detection, mood tracking that focuses on physical sensations not feelings, voice memo strategies that reveal what your words don’t, and calendar blocking protocols that prevent burnout before it happens.

5. Accept Your Operating System – What you can actually develop vs what wellness Instagram lies about. The complete framework for: reliable physical monitoring systems, effective communication protocols that don’t require emotional insight, predictable response patterns, and sustainable energy management. Plus: how to stop apologising for your neurology and start leveraging it.

The Bottom Line + Your Two-Week Implementation Challenge – The homework that catches burnout before A&E. Exactly which strategy to start with, how to do it consistently, and why modifications are self-sabotage. No wellness bollocks. Just what works when you need to think and observe your way through life instead of feel your way through it.

This is the reality check you needed plus the actual system you can use. Every Friday, I publish a Dutch Uncle column that tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear—with concrete strategies that work for brains like yours.