Part Two: When Images Guide Connection Autistic Knowing in Relationships
By Michelle Labine, PhD
November 2025
What surprised me most, after finally understanding my autism, was recognizing how deeply my imagistic way of knowing shapes my relationships. I’ve always picked up on emotional shifts quickly often long before someone puts words to what they’re feeling but I hadn’t realized that the way I interpret those shifts, through symbolic and sensory images, isn’t how most people experience the world.
It affects my relationships in a very specific way: I often understand what someone is feeling before they say anything, which can make me deeply attuned but also easily overwhelmed. I may respond to the felt truth of the moment rather than the spoken one, which can confuse people who aren’t communicating on that level.
When I’m in conversation with someone, images arrive quickly, layered, and overlapping appearing before I’ve even had time to understand what’s happening inside me. These images flash and flip in rapid succession, more like impressions than thoughts, and they often arrive all at once. They’re usually accompanied by intuition like a tug in my chest, a shift in my stomach, or a knowing that speaks before any words do.
But again, language becomes the bottleneck. How do you tell a partner, “I can feel you pulling away because the moment suddenly looks like a dimly lit corridor”? It rarely lands. And for most of my life, I didn’t try. I simply stayed quiet holding what I sensed internally. The depth of my knowing lived inside me, but the translation into verbal language lagged far behind. The result was that I often appeared distant or overly quiet, when in reality I was feeling too much and struggling to bridge the gap.
Before I understood that this was Autistic embodiment, I mistook my stumbling for emotional incompetence. I assumed I must be bad at communication, or overly sensitive, or “reading into things.” But the truth is that I was reading accurately my brain just delivered the information in a form that others didn’t recognize. My knowing was symbolic; their understanding required linear explanations. And those two things don’t always meet easily.
As I’ve made sense of this part of myself, I’ve learned to honour the images without needing to immediately translate them. Instead of forcing myself into crisp sentences too early, I now say things like, “I’m sensing something shifting here,” or “Something feels tender, but I don’t have all the words yet.” This bridges connection without abandoning my natural way of perceiving.
What’s remarkable is how often others respond positively to this. Because even if they don’t understand the image, they understand the attunement behind it. They feel me reaching toward them, trying to connect, trying to meet them where they are emotionally even if the language is still forming.
This imagistic knowing also helps me see the deeper heartbeat of the relationship itself. I can sense when something is settling, when something is unraveling, when something is trying to grow. I can feel the emotional weather moving between us, the subtle shifts that signal deeper needs, fears, or longings. And when I trust this way of knowing rather than dismissing it as odd or inconvenient it allows me to show up with a clarity that is gentle, intuitive, and deeply attuned.
These images reflect a form of Autistic intelligence that is powerful and often overlooked; they allow me to notice what’s unspoken; they help me understand the emotional arc of a moment; and they allow me to love with precision, presence, and depth.
And in relationships, when someone is willing to meet me in this place, to let me translate in my own time, to trust that my quietness is not distance but processing, this becomes something beautiful. A form of intimacy. A shared rhythm. A way of connecting that is tender and rare.
