Alexithymia is a difficulty recognizing emotions, and is sometimes seen along with depression, autism, or brain injury, among other conditions.
It makes me feel overwhelmingly neutral.
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Not quite… alexithymia is being unable to put words to feelings. It’s in the word… a- is not, lex- is words, thymia is feeling. Lacking words for emotions is not the same as not feeling the emotions.
Alexithymia is a common experience, but especially common when other communication barriers exist.
Shows that those psych-whatever-ists knew drat about the (ancient) greek language, because ‘word’ would be ‘logos’ and ‘alexi’ is actually a greek surname of ancient decent, that would mean ‘defender’. The ancient greeks would never have named the condition that way! My impression is that various Freudians and Anti-Freudians converged on the term in the early-mid-20th century as a means to make themselves sound smarter than any of them really were.
Source: As someone named Alexander, I just finally felt vaguely offended enough by the term to start digging a little deeper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7005782/
And also, nothing about the condition as described by modern sources ever made any sense to me - which after reading the article I linked, wasn’t even a surprise to me anymore. Sorry, rant over.
TL,DR: It’s another piece of etymologic fallout from a historic shitslinging match between researchers and practitioners, but one that didn’t get resolved conclusively. Because brains …
It’s from lexis, for speaking, and thumos for heart.
Nothing more fun then trying to explain how I feel and instead just ramble without explaining how I feel. I want to care about things or get excited for things but I just can’t. Is that part of this? Definitely can’t seem to explain how I feel which is frustrating in its own right.
That seems more like depression, to be quite honest. The inability to explain it might be alexithymia, but not being unable to care or get excited for things sounds like depression.
Try imagining this.
You just got some great news. Life-changing news. When telling others about it you don’t act or speak excitedly because you only have a dim feeling of happiness about it. However when climbing the stairs in your home you effortlessly bounce up them and that night when lying in bed trying to sleep your thoughts patterns are all short & jumpy and keep returning to the good news.
You’re having many symptoms of happiness and excitement so the feelings are happening on a biochemical level but they’re just beneath conscious awareness. It’s the physical symptoms without feelings which is the tell.
Of course most of the time it’s much harder to notice physical symptoms because most events are not that big of a deal.
You just got some great news. Life-changing news. When telling others about it you don’t act or speak excitedly because you only have a dim feeling of happiness about it. However when climbing the stairs in your home you effortlessly bounce up them and that night when lying in bed trying to sleep your thoughts patterns are all short & jumpy and keep returning to the good news.
That’s me, 100% 😟
Alexithymia is a broad term to describe problems with feeling emotions.
Didn’t know that
Not quite… alexithymia is being unable to put words to feelings. It’s in the word… a- is not, lex- is words, thymia is feeling. Lacking words for emotions is not the same as not feeling the emotions.
Alexithymia is a common experience, but especially common when other communication barriers exist.
That may be the etymology of the word, but the article describes it differently:
People who do have alexithymia may describe themselves as having difficulties with expressing emotions that are deemed socially appropriate, such as happiness on a joyous occasion. Others may have trouble identifying their emotions.
Such individuals don’t necessarily have apathy. They instead may not have as strong of emotions as their peers, and may have difficulties feeling empathy.
Gotcha. I was quoting the article
That’s affective alexithymia you’re describing, but it’s not the only mind. Cognitive alexithymia is closer to what this person was describing. A lot of the time it’s not necessarily just one or the other, it can be different degrees of both
I got diagnosed as autistic near the beginning of the year, and have been doing intent research on it since. Learning about this made a lot of things suddenly make sense. I struggle to describe my emotions, and often kinda just feel blank until I either feel ‘good’ or ‘bad’. So I started using a number scale, mostly for telling my gf what’s up. 5 is perfectly neutral, 10 is great, 1 is awful. Helps a ton so that I don’t have to try to figure out some abstract way of conveying how I’m feeling in the moment. A lot of the times if we’re in public I just use our code phrase, “the brain worms are at it again”, to tell her that I’m in a negative swing from the bipolar. It’s a gay old time.
Oh man, you just unlocked a memory of me explaining a weird spectrum I had subconsciously developed for emotions - there’s past, present, future - and a negative/positive axis. Past negative is regret, future negative is anxiety or dread. Future positive is anticipation, past positive is nostalgia, and so on. I got into this whole explanation until the person I was talking to interrupted me and explained that most people don’t need a matrix to explain their feelings.
Extreme bouts of gaming can exacerbate this emotional numbness, FYI.
Here‘s a source for this:
“In the long term, if you look at someone’s brain while they’re playing video games, and if you look at the brain of someone who’s played a lot of video games for a long period, there is a numbness and a reduced activation of the emotional processing center of your brain,”
https://spectrumnews1.com/wi/milwaukee/news/2023/02/24/adam-holman-part-3
I dont know how reliable it is but I wanted to at least know if there were sources.
I have been playing A Kinder World, which has an emotional naming subgame. I find it a lot easier to identify my emotions when picking from a list
This is new to me, but absolutely aligns with something I have struggled with all of my life. People have always thought it was strange how I always seemed so… neutral. It’s not that I didn’t feel anything, I felt emotions very strongly in fact, I just usually couldn’t interpret or express them clearly. The best way I’ve found of explaining it, is this: imagine that emotions are colours, like red is anger, yellow is happiness, blue is sadness, etc. what I feel inside looks like one of those balls of elastic bands with every colour just all twisted around eachother so it’s really hard to tell where one strand begins and ends.
It’s only during moments of more intense emotion that I can notice one of the emotions more prominently. And because I don’t feel it often, it’s harder for me to deal with due to lack of practice.
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