How to experience emotions?

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Hello everybody, thank you for taking the time to read this. I don't know if this belongs here. If not, feel free to remove it.

I'm almost 30, and for almost 10 years I have difficulties in experiencing my emotions. It seems like it is getting harder and harder as I get older because (I think) stress about real world problems keep pushing my emotions back in my chest. This is a big difference with the first 15 - 20 years of my life when I was a lot more emotional than anyone I knew. I especially have problems with crying. I feel like I want to cry, but the tears just wont come. This gives me the feeling like sharp pieces of glass are trying to find their way out trough my chest. When I think I start crying, I cough real hard for no reason and the emotions are back in place. When I was in elementary and high school everybody (myself included) could make me cry within seconds.
The regular ways that I could find to make myself cry don't seem to work. I don't know if that has anything to do with autism, but I read on various places that for somebody with autism that experiencing your emotions works a bit different. Even though it is almost certain that I have autism to some degree, I can not ask an expert about his or her opinion right now. Therefore I was wondering if somebody with autism recognises anything I wrote and how they coop wit that.

Thanks again for reading. My apologies for possible grammar and spelling errors.

I don't have answer for you. But I face similar issues. Oddly, a few decades ago, I was much more in touch with my own emotions and those of people around me. I await the answer to your post.

Sharing what helped me:
emotions can be felt in the body.
Like you say 'chest'.
Then you also use tactile descriptions like 'sharp glass'.

I use(d) my body as a book on which my emotions are written. Pit in my stomach = anxious. Butterfly sensation = in love.
Eyes itching = sad. Tingling in my head = intellectual excitement.

It helped/helps me to practice daily meditation and self-massage to actually feel what is going on in my body. Then I chose words or images or smells or sounds to describe the different sensations.
I found using senses as tools for description very helpful. I write the discoveries down in my feelings journal.

What also helped (and still does help) me was reading fiction and graphic novels and watching lots of soap operas or 'girly' shows where they use colorful words together with theatrical facial expressions.

hth