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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Alexithymia - 147 points.
Low-Verbal.