Alexithymia: Emotion beyond words
Ah, emotions. Those nebulous feelings in your brain and body that colour every experience. For most people, emotions are a straightforward thing. It’s simple cause and effect: a nice thing happens, which makes you feel happy, which you then express with a smile. Alternatively, you watch a film and your favourite character dies - that makes you sad, so you have a little cry. When someone asks how you’re feeling, really asks, a moment of introspection is all it takes to give an honest answer.
For people with high levels of alexithymia, emotions aren’t always so clear-cut. Alexithymia (pronounced ah-leks-ah-thigh-me-ah) is a trait which refers to a person’s ability to experience and describe their own emotions. It is also described as ‘emotional blindness’ (Serani, 2014). The word alexithymia means ‘no words for emotions’. For my fellow etymology nerds, let’s break it down: the a- prefix, meaning not, followed by lexi, the Latin word for word, and -thymia, from Greek word thymos (mind/spirit), referring to state of mind.
Photo by Callum Skelton on Unsplash.
Someone who is alexithymic might find it difficult to explain their internal feelings to another person. For example, they might be feeling “bad”, but unable to specify in what way (whether they’re frustrated, distressed or even lost in a fugue state). It also means they prefer to focus on their physical surroundings - things they can see and touch - instead of their own emotions (Gotham & Williams, 2021). If you asked an alexithymic person to describe a particular memory, they’re far more likely to talk about the location or the events than they are to mention how they or the people around them were feeling at the time.
Alexithymia does not mean someone doesn’t experience emotion! An alexithymic person will usually know when they’re experiencing strong emotion. The emotion’s presence is noted, but the individual can’t actually identify what it is (Thompson et al., 2016). This can create challenges when communicating with others - most obviously, alexithymic people often cannot verbalise how they’re feeling. However, it can also cause problems with identifying how other people are feeling. People who don’t understand the connection between internal and external emotional cues (such as a curled lip showing frustration, or a sigh of disappointment) are less able to identify them in others. While they recognise the other person is feeling something, classifying that emotion is another challenge entirely.
About 1 in 10 neurotypical people experience alexithymia - however, when you look at the autistic population, it jumps to 5 in 10 (Thompson et al., 2016). Research indicates that certain symptoms of autism, such as challenges with recognising facial expressions, are actually caused by alexithymia (Gotham & Williams, 2021). Because of the high comorbidity rates, issues caused by alexithymia are mistakenly attributed to autism.
Alexithymia can impact a person’s ability to understand their own thoughts and experiences, as well as negatively affecting their ability to relate to others. If someone you know has alexithymia, you can make their lives easier with simple strategies like explicitly labelling emotions (Serani, 2014). Rather than asking, “how are you going?”, try something like, “you seem anxious - is something worrying you?”. Instead of, “oh, I’m fine,” be honest and name what you’re feeling.
If you have alexithymia or even just relate to some of the things described here, there are plenty of strategies you can try to make your life easier. However, I’m a blogger, not a doctor, so I’m not going to tell you what to do. Instead, I’ll provide some starting points for further research which I hope can help you out.
Alexithymia Resources
First and foremost: talk to your support network and healthcare team about your concerns. They are the people best placed to help you, because they know you!
Dr. Deborah Serani has written a great list of activities for strengthening emotional awareness which you can read here.
Read a more in-depth description of alexithymia at Healthline (but remember they’re a private media company, so any links or services are there to make them money).
If you prefer visual explanations, @autism_sketches has a cute and simple explanation that you can view here.
If you prefer watching videos or would like to hear about someone’s first-hand experience, Yo Samdy Sam on YouTube has a detailed explanation here.
References
Serani, D. (2014, April 3). The Emotional Blindness of Alexithymia. Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/the-emotional-blindness-of-alexithymia/
Gotham, K., & Williams, Z. J. (2021). Measuring alexithymia in autistic people. Spectrum. https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/measuring-alexithymia-in-autistic-people/
Thompson, N. M., Di Bernadi Luft, C., & Banissy, M. J. (2016). Empathy. In Absher, J. R., & Cloutier, J. (Eds.), Neuroimaging Personality, Social Cognition, and Character (pp. 289-303). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-800935-2.00015-4
