Alexithymia is a difficulty recognizing emotions, and is sometimes seen along with depression, autism, or brain injury, among other conditions.
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.
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
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.
