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C2V
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27 May 2017, 8:30 am

Can't remember if I've posed this question before -
Anyone who is alexithymic, do you get the confused body sensations? At the moment there is "a sensation" in my stomach. This poses a problem. Because I can't understand what it is.
I have to run possibilities, and some of them will clash - 1. Could be hungry. 2. Could just be GERD. 3. Could be something wrong with stomach, otherwise unspecified. 4. Could be a reaction to what I ate for dinner. 5. Could be autistic general GI issues.
Now - if I take example 1. as likely, and try rectifying this by eating something when actually, it's 3, 4 or even 5 and some extent 2, I'm screwed. Because eating something will make this worse.
Normal people are generally able to identify physical sensations, and I have read that some alexithymics will not understand that a sensation is connected to an emotion (aka you're nervous, you get that twitchy feeling in stomach) but I seem unable to understand what physical sensations mean either. It's not automatic, as the norm - you get a feeling in your stomach say from hunger, your brain interprets this information and concludes you're hungry and you should eat.
Doesn't happen with me. Which may account for my pain insensitivity - I cannot always identify what pain is or what it means. It's fascinating in a way to consider that one requires a normal emotional repertoire in order to understand and interpret physical sensations from the body, and makes me wonder how pure psychopaths deal with this as they may also have lessened sensitivity to pain and possibly no emotional connections to that physical sensation, but at the moment it's a nuisance.
Anyone get this sort of thing? Alexithymics or just autistics? Weirdness. Inconvenient weirdness.


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27 May 2017, 10:17 pm

Alexithymic here,

I experience much the same with my own bodily sensations. The best way I can describe this to health professionals is that I receive a signal from somewhere I'm not exactly sure, and I have difficulties interpreting what they might mean. I've even been to a somatic therapist (focuses on identifying/processing bodily sensations in psychotherapy while bringing up stuff) and it doesn't help much when your therapist does not understand the conflux of being autistic with alexithymia is like when it comes to processing emotions (or lack thereof). I've given up taking the somatic therapy route, and even EMDR wasn't a help for me, and focused on alternative modes of therapy to cultivate more inner-spiritual growth rather than try the psychological method.


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Britte
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04 Jun 2017, 1:48 pm

may or, may not be of help to you, but, since you mentioned it, I can offer that, one of my work associates is a (clinically diagnosed) psychopath, and he knows what the sensation of hunger feels like, in fact, out of nowhere, impulsively, he will drop his pencil and tell me 'we are going to lunch, I'm starving. Come on'. Heh.

but, perhaps, he doesn't have the other possibilities you mention, to have to consider.



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09 Jun 2017, 4:13 pm

It sounds like a problem with sensory processing, specifically interoception.

I have interoceptive under-responsiveness and interoceptive discrimination disorder myself.


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09 Jun 2017, 10:01 pm

Britte wrote:
may or, may not be of help to you, but, since you mentioned it, I can offer that, one of my work associates is a (clinically diagnosed) psychopath,

You work with a psychopath? Is that not dangerous?



C2V
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13 Jun 2017, 12:43 am

^ It's a misconception that psychopathy automatically = violence. Usually perpetuated by TV / movies in order to build simplistic plots to explain a "villain's" actions. Aka, He's a psychopath and that's why he's a mass murderer that our protagonist is a hero for justifiably killing.
Many psychopaths either don't even have violent proclivities, don't act on them, or just act on them in "acceptable" ways. I dated one for a while. He had less violent proclivities than I do, and that's saying a lot. It was genetic -his father was a psychopath the navy employed to remove live limpet mines off the bottom of ships, because he did not understand or process fear at all and they paid well. He was not violent either.


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starkid
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14 Jun 2017, 7:02 pm

C2V wrote:
^ It's a misconception that psychopathy automatically = violence.

Violence isn't the only kind of danger.



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14 Jul 2017, 7:33 am

I think I'm probably alexithymic, or rather, was-- I've gotten very good at identifying my feelings and thoughts now... where was the diagnosis when I needed it? LOL.