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