“I Feel for You”: Living with Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia

An interview with Adrian Miles

Content note: suicidal thoughts, trauma

“I feel for you” is a saying often used to show empathy for others, but for Mirror-Touch synaesthetes like Adrian Miles, it’s their literal experience.

Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia (MTS) is a rare form of synaesthesia which causes individuals to experience a similar touch sensation in the same part or opposite part of the body to that they witness in another person.

While the primary experience is often described in terms of physical sensations, it can also be accompanied by emotional responses. For example, if a Mirror-Touch synaesthete observes someone getting a cut on their hand, they might feel a similar sensation on their own hand. However, the experience can also have an emotional component. Observing someone in distress or pain can trigger strong empathetic emotional responses, leading to feelings of sadness, anxiety, or discomfort. This is often intertwined with the physical sensations, so the overall experience can be both sensory and emotional.

It is thought to affect 1 in every 50 people, and is more prevalent in the Autistic community.

Typically, the tactile sensation does not register with the same intensity in the MT synaesthete as it does in the person experiencing it firsthand.

For instance, a MT synaesthete may feel pain, but it will be a duller “echo” of pain to the pain felt by the person affected. However, it can still cause frequent discomfort and confusion.

Adrian Miles only learnt a name for the intense embodiment of others they experience much later in life, following decades of mental and physical intrusions.

This is Adrian’s story.

“From as young as I can remember I have always been socially awkward. It’s partly due to being an Autistic Gen-Xer growing up in rural Australia, where social conformity was highly valued and people’s words often didn’t seem genuine to me.

As I matured, I recall being conflicted a lot and always being angry when someone around me was angry or being sensitive to things nobody else around me responded to. It was confusing because I had no cognitive reason for it, it was all sensed. I would be pushed for a reason for my behaviour at school or at home and I didn’t have an explanation, so I was considered ‘difficult’ and often punished for my behaviour.

Looking back, my emotional and tactile sensitivity made me the black sheep of the family as I would reflect to all around me what they were feeling and trying to hide, incurring their uncontainable guilt or anger as it was my behaviour triggering them.

The best way I can describe it is it’s a heightened sense of micro facial expressions, body language and intonation from someone else expressed as these emotions physically in my body.

In order to cope with containing my sensitivity,  I developed multiple addictions to smoking, drugs, alcohol, sex and anger itself. They all allowed me to have some control over my life. In my late 20’s I started seeking help as I was suicidal.

Fast forward to four years ago and I reconnected with a childhood friend. She put me in contact with a psychotherapist with extensive experience of neurodivergence, synaesthesia and PTSD. That’s where my social awkwardness was flipped on its head.

The therapist asked me if I had heard of Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia.

She explained that everyone has mirror neurons – that’s where empathy comes from – but people with Mirror-Touch have a lot more of them and can actually feel the other person’s experiences in their body, like it’s their own. She asked me to try an experiment. Next time I was triggered by an upset person and noticed I was getting upset, she got me to ask in my own head, ‘Is this mine?’

I did, and my mind said, ‘No’ so I immediately calmed down!

Wow, it’s like I had been trained all my life to swim like a fish and couldn’t get it right but she took one look at me and said, ‘You have feathers mate, ur a bird, of course you can’t swim!’

Knowing I’m a Mirror-Touch synaesthete has opened up a door to understanding myself on a whole new level. For example, I now understand why I get sensations when a friend rolls their ankle. For me, it feels achy and uncomfortable.

It’s not a crisp, clean sensation like it’s happened to me, but more like a fuzzy photo or looking through a frosted window. I can tell what it is but it has distance, it’s removed somehow. It’s happening to me, but it’s not mine.

It explains my loathing for shopping centres or other places where lots of people are. It  overwhelms me and burns me out in 15 minutes and I have to spend the rest of the day regulating myself until my body and nervous system get back to some form of normal.

I was sitting on the couch alone the other night and subconsciously started scratching my nose. I stopped after a second as my nose wasn’t itchy, and I was confused by it,” says Adrian. “I looked around and saw my cat sitting at my feet going to town on her nose with her claws like a human would. I recognised then that the itch wasn’t mine as the sensation wasn’t a full itch like I normally experience but a really faded itch.

Having this new understanding of myself has meant I’ve had to put up healthy boundaries for myself, giving myself enough time between Christmas functions, putting time aside to do stimmy things like passions of mine that help me regulate, being more understanding of my needs and finding new songs that make me happy.

Carrying this load of stress for my entire life means I have a slew of health issues now that I will probably be dealing with for the rest of my life.

So this is the double edged sword I now wield. I am insightful, intuitive and can see what even the people I am talking to can’t – but it comes at a price.

I will cry at a sad scene in a tv show or a movie. I will ask, ‘Is this mine?’ and get a ‘No’ answer and the emotion leaves me immediately but it takes time for the physical manifestation of the emotion to leave my body.

I have to be constantly checking in with myself emotionally. I can’t do many social activities as I can feel what my friends are hiding, sometimes even what they are oblivious to themselves, and it takes time to release that again afterwards.

And I see many people around me due to my Autistic pattern recognition who have it too and don’t know.

The bright side of this is my friends who also know they are mirror-touchers and I communicate on a whole different level.

We mirror-touch constantly and can only have such honest conversations that you would normally have with a therapist or partner. It’s so refreshing. It’s like having two people having the same conversation and we will help the other person express what the other may be struggling to. It’s every conversation being a deep connection because you know it, not just understand it cognitively.

And we can also share the physical experience of different situations like the taste of something or the feel of a place, a basic image of a place but it’s a lot more nuanced, a higher level of abstraction than language, that evokes terms like ‘flavour’ or ‘frequency’.

Understanding my MTS has given me a life I have never experienced before and, for the first time, one I want to see through to the end.”