Craig (2002, 2009)

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666.

Craig, A. D. (2009). How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 59–70.

Why this matters for the framework

Craig's foundational work repositions interoception not merely as the detection of bodily sensations but as the neurological basis of subjective feeling states — the sense of the physiological condition of the body as it relates to emotional experience. The insular cortex, Craig argues, integrates ascending body signals into conscious awareness, forming the substrate of what we experience as feeling.

For high-functioning individuals, this matters clinically. Alexithymia — the difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotional states — represents a disruption in this interoceptive pathway. The body generates signals, but they fail to complete the journey into conscious emotional awareness. The person functions, performs, achieves — while remaining genuinely unaware of their own internal distress.

This is not avoidance in the traditional sense. It is a somatic processing gap. The armor that runs both ways operates partly at this neurological level — not just psychologically blocking recognition, but disrupting the body's capacity to generate legible feeling states in the first place.

Craig's work provides biological grounding for the competence-distress gap that defines the population this framework addresses.