“I feel something, but I have no words for it”.

Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by an inability to identify, describe, or express one’s own emotions. It is not apathy, which is a lack of interest and is also different than Flat Affect which is an inability to express emotions.

There are two ways that it might affect a person:

• Cognitive Alexithymia: You may be aware you are feeling something, but you cannot put a name to it or articulate it to others.
• Affective Alexithymia: You may have a limited “emotional repertoire” or struggle to experience feelings as deeply as others, though they are still present at a surface level.

Alexithymia can be very frustrating and isolating for a person who has it.

My Experience

This is a tricky one. I don’t have alexithymia, but there are some strong overlaps. I experience emotions in a very different way than NT people. I do have emotions and can describe them, but it is a “translation” of emotional state rather than intuition.

There is a chart I used with a therapist to try to describe my feelings.

See My Experience (Emotions). See my descriptions of Anger and Sadness for examples of how I experience emotions.

I see it like this:

NT Emotion: A felt state that dictates logic. My Emotion: A biological state that requires logic to label.

So my mental state (sad story or anger at corruption) triggers the limbic (emotional system) which in turn fires the appropriate physiological response (tears or adrenaline). My conscious mind sees both the thoughts and the physiological state and I can pattern match to an appropriate emotion. For NT people this is automatic – they don’t need to think about it, they know it.

I do have “externally oriented thinking”, which is a core trait of alexithymia:

• no access to the vibe (internal measure of social state)
• I care about the system, logic and ethics (external measure)
• my emotions are triggered by thought (top-down), so I think about the reason for the emotion rather than the feeling of the emotion – the feeling is how I label it, and the reason is what I consciously experience

but I do have the ability to decode these feelings + mental state to label the emotion, which means no alexithymia. My decoding is near instant for typical emotions – I don’t have lag or difficulty here. I do have some issues around Semantic Divergence where what I mean by the emotion doesn’t sync with the NT meaning.

One time I was asked to describe my current emotional state and it was unusual. I didn’t have a mapping and after some introspection I realized I was feeling two emotions simultaneously (this is somewhat common for NT people, but I think not for me). I was experiencing fear + positive alignment. I was only able to describe it as “high emotional state” (like overload) until I could identify the pieces.