Working on Alexithymia

Post Reply New Topic

Have any of you experienced success at improving in this area if it’s a problem for you?

I’ve become much more aware recently of how much I struggle in this area, and it’s extremely frustrating.

I’ve tried to talk to my counselor about it, but I don’t think she fully gets it. It’s probably because I haven’t been able to give her the full picture. There might be a certain degree of masking going on with me. When she asks me how I’m doing, I usually say: “pretty good” or “not too bad” when I really have no idea at all.

It’s really hard for me to say how I’m doing or how my week was. What constitutes goodness? Unless it was obviously bad (car accident or some other major stress), I don’t know what to say.

I think it’s contributing to some of my indecisiveness and inertia because it’s really hard to know what to do when you don’t know what you want.

My counselor thinks that it’s probably more that I learned to ignore my feelings since I was frequently told they were wrong for whatever reason. There’s probably some truth to that, but I don’t think it fully explains my frequent and utter cluelessness.

Agreed - some truth to that - but your counselor is not clued into how much of this is hardwired in people with autism. You might Google "alexithymia and autism" (minus the quote marks), find an article, and bring it in to her.

To my mind, inability to recognize feelings in oneself is very closely related to what is often termed "lack of empathy." If you don't know what a frown, smile, or furrowed brow means in yourself, how will you know what it means in someone else, and vice versa?

It’s strange, though. I have an easier time understanding how other people feel than how I feel. People often say I’m a kind and empathetic listener.

It’s not that I don’t understand the emotion, but I have trouble knowing if I’m feeling it. I’m not sure if that makes any sense.

I don’t have an ASD diagnosis, just social anxiety so this may not apply to you but I thought I’d share my experience as we had a similar home life. I had the same type of family where it wasn’t safe to have or express feelings and appearing normal was the most important thing.

I have had success in improving recognizing emotions in myself. My boyfriend from university really helped me with this. The first time we had a fight I got super upset and hid in his closet. He tried to talk to me about it but I had no idea what I was feeling inside. He was very patient with me and kept talking to me and asking questions until we got to the bottom of it. He helped me find a path to recognizing my emotions and made it safe for me to express them.

I have a hard time distinguishing my inner state as well. I often don’t recognize that I’m hungry or overwhelmed but I’m working on this too. I often don’t notice minor issues in my body and these things build up until I can’t ignore them anymore, which is not the correct way to have good health I’m learning. I’ve been quite ill the last few years and as I improve certain conditions, I’m finding other conditions are revealed and now I’m trying to pay attention to all of my issues and work on returning my body to a healthy state.

Something that helped me get more in touch with my body and how various emotions felt in it was Self-Regulation Therapy. I think it might be a trauma therapy. When I was going through my burnout a couple of years ago I saw some aboriginal energy healers to calm my nervous system and it was one the things they used with me. You learn to feel these negative things in your body and then they help you dissipate it and you learn to bring space, calm and safety back.

I can relate to a lot of what you say. I actually have trouble recognizing feelings of fullness which probably contributes to my trouble with binge eating.

I’ve been practicing yoga daily for a couple months now, and I think it’s helping somewhat, but I really have to be paying attention to what’s going on which I find challenging. Maybe I’ve become so accustomed to burying stuff that it happens automatically before I can identify whatever feeling I’m feeling.

I’m not very resilient because I’ve not made much progress despite my efforts. Some people are really good at bouncing back from whatever is thrown at them.

I was an overly sensitive kid so maybe that could be part of it.

Judging by my experience of Alexithymia, you're explaining it perfectly well!

And that in itself is important because, as BeaArthur said, the first step to improvements is to know what the problem is, and to be able to explain it to the people who are there to support you - whether it's professionals such as your counsellor, or loved ones.


And this can sometimes be turned the other way around. There may be people who can see your emotions from the outside, even if you can't label them or they're not part of your awareness on the inside. As in leahbear's example, I've found that the key to improvement is to find people who are keen and trustworthy observers who can feed back to me what their impression of my emotional state is. My last counsellor was especially good at this - and it's an important reason why you need to explain this to yours; you may require more feedback than they would usually give.

Whenever I've done this, it's always taken me by surprise just how much my behaviour and speech actually paint quite a vivid picture of my emotions. It can take me quite a while to analyse whether the other person's impression is correct, by linking the feeling to the circumstances which might have caused me to feel that way; and of course, they're not always right. But on the whole, it does seem that if only I could look upon myself from the outside, I'd get a whole lot clearer picture - and that is exactly what this kind of "therapy" is helping me to do.


Yes, there does appear to be a link between this (poor interoception) and Alexithymia, including some scientific research. I wonder if it's possibly why some of us don't seem able to read those observable emotional signs "from the inside". It's not necessarily that we're not experiencing the emotion, or even that our behaviour doesn't change as a consequence - but that the fact that it's happening just doesn't get pushed into our conscious attention for some reason. Your example of not noticing "overwhelm" is a particularly important one, I think. I didn't even think to get my anxiety or depression treated for so many years, because basically, I just didn't realise they were there - even when people around me seemed concerned about my well-being.

The only socially acceptable answers to "how are you?" Are "good" and "fine"

Maybe you don't know how to, phrase the answer more eloquently

But precious lil "most people" don't either


And if they could, then what, publication?






Usually when I answered anything besides "fine" and "good", idiots asked a bunch of annoying questions

They were trying to "help", . But they don't have the skill or authority to "help".



So they should shut the flying f**k up


f**k Rolando Morales penis

I was just watching a talk by a therapist who wrote a book on resilience. She said that self awareness and self acceptance are essential to resilience. That our best protection against stress is relational intelligence within ourselves. We can change our perceptions and heal from shame by rewiring our inner critic. She said that flexibility in how we respond to things in our life can be greatly improved through meditation. Mindfulness brings things to our conscious attention, allows us to tolerate what comes up and then allows us to shift our patterns of how we relate to experiences.

She gave a mindful self-compassion exercise:

When you’re suffering, pause, put your hand on your heart, acknowledge whatever it is and repeat the phrases:

May I be kind to myself in this moment.
May I accept this moment exactly as it is.
May I accept myself in this moment exactly as I am.
May I give myself all the compassion I need to respond to this moment wisely.

Firstly I’m happy to see you back here Trogluddite. I missed reading your insightful posts when you were away over the winter. Yeah I’ve had anxiety as far back as I can remember but had no idea that what I was feeling was called anxiety. When I was going to university I saw a recruitment poster for a research/treatment study on social anxiety where they listed out the symptoms and I was surprised to see that they all applied to me. I’m learning to be kind to myself and learning to listen to my body instead of ignoring it. Yoga has been good for this. I’m going to get back into meditation and I’m adding in some Qi Gong too.

^ Thankyou - I'm very flattered.

You've reminded me of the first time I had CBT. The counsellor said something about getting me back to how I'd been before my "episode" of depression and anxiety had started. I had absolutely no idea what she meant! "Before" what? So that's a factor too, I think, for many of us - the base-line by which we measure our anxiety ends up being sky-high if it's something that we've perceived as our "normal" for so long.

I never know how to answer the question, "how are you?" I've found most people society wise (especially if you run into a motivational speaker) the answer to the question has an expectation to maybe "Good" or better. If you were to say anything less than that to a motivational speaker, be prepared to be "motivatingly spoken to" aka lectured. People who actually do care about you, or some one like a therapist you can be more honest with... but then there's times when it seems like they might just be asking as a pleasantry and not actually wanting to know... ANYWAY I would say more often than not I am the 'same'. People don't seem to know what that means, and theyshouldn't be I dunno that either for the most part. Often when I am asked that question it's not even that I can't identify how I feel, but that there isn't anything there, or is just not that is clear one way or another.

That is one of the ways that I experience alexithymia. I actually think I'm quite in tune with my feelings and emotions and know what they are (though not always the cause) but there are times where its more like a void. I'm not feeling things I know I probably should. This happens when I shut down of course but other times *shrugs* I also I feel too much at times. It's not that I can't identify it, it's just that there is too much information and the feeling of it is too intense so I shut down and am not able to verbalize. Another way I will experience it is like when some small children will smoosh all the items on their dinner plate into a big nondescript lump it symbolizes the vagueness I get with my emotions quite well. When this vagueness happens I can't identify or verbalize anything at all. It's all just goop and I haven't a clue what to do with it.

I also have a disconnect when it's to do with other people. I can understand why they might feel something, I can see the signs of what they are feeling but my brain can't like merg how I know it feels to be sad, with that's how they are feeling even though I can see, thus know that is what they are feeling o_O Sorry if that doesn't make sense. lol

This was me also. I knew I was experiencing something, I knew the physical reactions but the foremost thing I felt was that I needed to hide it. It wasn't until after high school I read a book about various conditions with excerpts from people talking about what it was like for them that I realized what I'd been experiencing all my life was anxiety. My mind was blown, I wasn't some alien weirdo that experienced stuff in a messed up way.... it was anxiety! It was an actual thing! When I mentioned it to my mother she was like "yeah I know you do" Well why the heck did no one tell ME?!

I can't say I've honestly done anything purposely to try and resolve some of this, it's more or less happened in my self exploration. I came to a time where I decided I needed to know me, who the hell I am and how I function and through that I've grown in various areas without main intent to do so. When I made the decided I needed to know me I essentially began to pick apart everything about myself. Not in a negative manner! I just would pluck a thought or feeling out and would just examine it, and ask why. Actually I'd say the investigation of me became a bit of a 'special interest'. So I was/am doing ALOT of introspective thinking and I was doing a lot of observing others.

Something harder I had to make myself do is to recognize when my emotions are headed to a shut down. Then once I recognize it I had to take a breath (breathing exercises like the ones you learn in yoga are handy for this!) and again start to peel apart the 'chaos' to find the emotion.

Learning yoga and mediation was a big help because one of things it taught me was how to control my awareness levels. To have it be broad over my body, singled in a certain part of my body, or to be external.

General education in this realm can help serve too. I mean it's hard to identify depression from sadness without knowing the 'clinical' signs to look for in yourself or others.