Today's vocabulary word - Alexithymia
"I'm not crazy, my reality is just different than yours."
— The Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland
I recently learned a new term — alexithymia. It is defined as “the inability to recognize or describe one's own emotions.” I am always amazed at how there’s a name for every personality attribute that people exhibit. To cut to the chase, I likely have this condition and need to learn more about it!
What is alexithymia?
Of course, the dogma beyond the fancy name of this condition goes even further as there are five more names to describe the different facets of alexithymia including:
Difficulty Identifying Feelings: Straining to recognize and label one's own emotions.
Difficulty Describing Feelings: Wrestling to find the right words to express emotional states.
Externally Oriented Thinking: Focusing toward external factors and events rather than internal feelings.
Vicarious Interpretation of Feeling: Reliance on others to interpret emotions and provide guidance on how to respond in social situations.
Restricted Imaginative Processes: Orientation toward the concrete world of facts and pragmatics with little interest in fantasy and imaginative processes.
These facets sound familiar to me. Even the last one about Restricted Imaginative Processes is interesting, as most of my reading has been nonfiction, rather than fiction. And even though I prefer the depth of story that reading fiction books provides, I enjoy movies more because seeing how the director visualized the story requires me to imagine less!
Apparently, alexithymia is pretty common. It affects about 10% of the population, with higher prevalence in males. Among those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), it has been observed in 50%-85% of subjects. (source: Wikipedia)
For those interested in more detailed explanations of these facets, an article in Neurodivergent Insights describes them well.
How do people test for it?
Typically, testing for alexithymia can start with a self-assessment tool. There is seemingly one of these kinds of tests for every psychological condition that I encounter. The article linked above provided a link to a test here. I scored a 128 (or “high”) for alexithemia on this test.
To triangulate further, I took another online test here, which claimed to be based on the scientifically-validated Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (2018). It was very similar. While I wasn’t sure if I answered the questions exactly the same way, my level of alexithymia scored as “moderate” (54.29%). As a control, I asked my wife, Marsha, to take it, and she scored “very low” (8.57%). So, unsurprisingly, it seems that I may have this condition.
Why is this important?
The immediate impact of alexithymia and not processing emotions is the effect it has on relationships with others. I’ve been writing about my work on my relationships in past posts. (For an example, feel free to refer back to “Repairing Damage in Retirement.”)
On top of its effect on relationships with others, there is literature about how alexithymia affects a person’s own physical health, including immune system response, autonomic nervous system function (e.g., higher blood pressure and heart rate), and unhealthy habits that lead to medical illness, including eating disorders, gambling addictions, and alcohol abuse. (source: Psychology Today).
These impacts are no surprise to me. Recall that I wrote about my own emotional numbness in a previous post, focusing on its impact on my relationships. And, I’ve suffered my own set of physical ailments, too. My blood pressure and heart rate have always run high!
Am I doing anything about this?
To address refining my own skills at managing emotions, my therapist started with a feelings wheel that I have been working with. I’ve also written before about nonviolent communication (NVC) to help me use words that communicate feelings and needs.
On the one hand, I appreciate that NVC provides a framework or a “formula” to follow to handle certain situations. (There’s a good WikiHow article about how to use NVC.) On the other hand, because of my difficulty identifying and describing feelings, using NVC is more challenging to me, even when the list of “feelings” words is right in front of me. I’ve found an easier “hack” is to start with the needs and then work back to the feelings once I’ve really considered my needs. This whole NVC business is still a bit of a forced process for me, but it’s a part of my psychological journey right now.
Watch this space
I’m also learning that there is a growing practice of how to help people with ASD to help with identifying feelings, which is to potentially start using a different tool — an emotion-sensation-feeling wheel. This tool starts with concrete terms for a physical sensation (like “numb hands” or “tight jaw”) that might be more accessible to people who are less in touch with their emotions. I don’t yet have experience with this tool. I’ll be taking a closer look and writing more as I try to put more of this stuff into practice.
What’s really interesting is that because of my “Vicarious Interpretation of Feeling” (Google Search Generative AI explanation below), I would be interested in anyone else’s guidance on how I might respond here.
Any thoughts?
Steve, thank you for this outstanding post. I learned a lot from it and look forward to hearing about this journey.
You might check out the various somatic therapy modalities. Particularly being overpowered on left brain, I've found it really helpful to connect to body sensations (which you can learn to relate to emotions) and trust them rather than only trying to "make sense" of what's going on intellectually. I've also found that practices that are experiential are another pathway to doing some rewiring that better connects you with inner parts of yourself that have been blocked.