So, shortly after I learned that I experience alexithymia (a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions) I made a connection that helped me to realize why I think I might be experiencing it.
The other night, I got mad at my husband for no reason at all really. I was feeling yucky and took it out on him. We sat down to talk about what was *really* going on, and I didn't know. All I knew was that I felt yucky, and I couldn't describe why. We realized that this was alexithymia, and I purposely thought back to when I started feeling yucky, and realized that it was related to my mental preparation for the evening. I formed an idea of how our evening was going to go in my mind, but I denied the fact that I *needed* the evening to actually happen in the way that I was mentally prepared for. I'm not sure if I was embarrassed about needing this mental plan, or if I was just unaware of how important it really is for me to have it in place...either way, I pushed it out of my mind and tried to forget about it. Being that my husband didn't know about it, he started doing his own thing, which was totally different from what I was mentally prepared for. That's when I started feeling "yucky". Being that I was actively denying the fact that I had prepared mentally for a different course of events to happen during our evening, I couldn't connect the negative feelings with the experience, so they didn't make sense to me, and went largely unprocessed. All I could tell was that I felt icky and irritable. As soon as I made the connection and realized where the yuck/ick feelings were coming from, I immediately understood that I was feeling frustrated and anxious. I immediately had words to describe my emotional experience, I stopped denying my need for mental preparation, and I felt better!
I had successfully defeated alexithymia that night. I learned that my alexithymia comes from denying my needs, and than being confused by the emotions that come when those needs are not met. A lot of my needs are considered to be ridiculous by "normal" people, so I think I'm so embarrassed by the fact that I actually do NEED unconventional things, that I try to pretend that I actually do not need them. When these needs are not met, I'm affected...but if I'm denying the need, I guess I'm also trying to deny the negative emotional reaction...which results in there being no name to describe what I'm feeling, or me trying to pretend that I'm not even feeling it in the first place.
I think that it all comes down to the fact that people need to be themselves. Even when NT's suppress their true self, it leads to all kinds of emotional problems. We are who we are, and we need to find a way to embrace that. If the person that we are is "unconventional"...so what? I for one, am sick of trying to be someone that I'm not. I'm sick of suppressing my weirdness and feeling confused and *yucky* as a result. The next time that I feel *yucky* I'll know that it's probably due to another quirk that I'm trying not to have, and bring it into existence so that I can just feel better already!
27 Aug 2012, 7:52 am
