XSara wrote:
Alexithymic sufferers can have emotional outbursts (e.g. of rage, sadness), but they don’t connect their emotions to a specific event or memory.
This is an over-generalization. There are many different kinds and degrees of alexithymia, with a wide variety of different causes.
Personally, I experience only a very mild kind of alexithymia. I have no trouble identifying my feelings in retrospect. Nor do I have difficulty with understanding, in retrospect, the causes of my feelings. But I do have difficulty with these things
in the moment.My main problem is simply an attention focus issue. I tend to be so intently focused on the thing I am having feelings
about that I tend to ignore my feelings themselves, beyond the basics of good, bad, or neutral (and sometimes I ignore even those basics).
Another, very different kind of alexithymia is caused by simple ignorance of the names of feelings. For example, back in 1992, Jim Sinclair, one of the main founders of the autistic rights movement,
wrote:
Quote:
I finally started learning to talk about feelings when I was twenty-five. I knew someone then who taught me a vocabulary. She didn't know that was what she was doing. She didn't do it because she wanted to help an autistic person learn to "deal with" feelings. She just happened to be someone who talked a lot about her own feelings. She identified what each feeling was called, and where she felt it, and how it felt, and what her face and body were doing about it. When I asked questions about what the words meant, she explained. When she asked questions about my feelings, and I asked for clearer definitions of what she was asking, she clarified the questions until I could answer them. That's all it took to get started; once I realized that words could be used for subjective experiences too,
By the way,
the article you linked to was published back in the year 2000. Hopefully the shrink establishment has learned a lot more about alexithymia since then.
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12 Jul 2021, 4:15 pm
