Finally, I found an abnormality that I don’t think applies to me.

I can definitely relate to this. When I used to restrict and lose weight, it wasn’t because I hated my body – in fact, I really liked it. I didn’t have BDD, for example. It was because I could feel the “fat” crawling on me, I had a very uncomfortable sensation of “messiness” inside, and would try to “tidy it up” by removing any “messy” fat from my body. Basically, when I said “fat” I meant “messy”. Something inside felt “messy”. And I would see physical fat as somehow “untidy” and therefore attempt to strip myself to the bone and therefore feel “cleaner”. All that messiness/uncleaness will have been shame, and the shame will have been tied to other emotions that I’d shoved away.

It was caused by other things as well, that wasn’t the only factor, but I thought I’d mention this as it’s an interesting way to look at alexithymia and see how it works in practice.

Alexithymia should be seen as a spectrum, and it should also be seen as multi-faceted. Not everybody with alexithymic traits fails to understand the motivations of others; and not everybody with alexithymia fails to be imaginative.

There are three constructs here and they are not necessarily related:
– The ability to identify and understand one’s emotions
– The ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions
– The ability to fantasise/think in non-concrete terms

High up on the spectrum you’d see all three, but you can have one trait without the other two.

In my experience, I have the first trait without the other two. I am generally able to empathise with and understanding other people’s emotions and I work in the creative arts. So that’s those two traits scrubbed off.

The first one though has been my reason for needing therapy since I was a teenager. This trait, I understand, can be present if one simply never learned to identify their emotions and to understand them. My experience is that there is a separation between my head and my body. I trust logic – it’s always kept me safe in the past – but emotions are illogical and therefore ‘not safe’. I don’t trust them, I don’t like them, and until recently I simply never cared to understand them or look their way. I also didn’t notice that I was this way until it was pointed out to me that I never say ‘I feel…’ When I’m asked how I feel, I usually don’t know.

So how to emotions feel if you don’t understand emotions? Like physical symptoms. People with alexithymia do still have emotions, they’re not robots, they just don’t know they’re emotions. I have trouble identifying whether or not I am experiencing an emotion or a sickness, for example. Perhaps I feel like I am coming down with the flu, but if I do meditation I am actually experiencing a ‘heaviness’ associated with guilt, for example. This led in my case to psychosomatic problems where I felt very unwell all the time, but there was nothing medically wrong. I had to learn to understand emotions to be able to manage these ‘symptoms’.

The other thing I have noticed is that I am not good in certain social environments because I do not have the signals required to understand when things aren’t fair.

So I will stay in situations that perhaps could be seen as ‘bad’ because I don’t have any impulse to leave. When I look at the way my friends navigate the world, it looks like this:

a) Something happens
b) Friend experiences an emotion – alerting them to whether the event is ‘good’ or ‘bad’
c) Friend understand which emotion they are experiencing
d) Friend understands why they feel that emotion
e) Because friend has information b-d they know what to do about it

A lot of the time, (b) doesn’t happen for me. Sometimes I do feel something but I don’t know what it is so I don’t get past (c). Sometimes I feel something and I know what it is, but I don’t know why it is happening, and therefore I don’t get past (d). Because I don’t have info (b), (c) and (d) I can’t effectively do (e). This causes a ton of issues.

That’s my experience of having an alexithymic trait, anyway.

The reason I started seeing a psychologist again was because of these panic attacks. Never had something like this and it scared me. Heart racing, chest tight, muscles tightening, fear, just all these things. Knew it was anxiety from what I’ve heard (which is what I think those of us that have this bad relate our emotions too, what we perceive as emotions cognitively). So I was supposed to do acceptance therapy so I just blindly started to accept things. Think of it as faith. Just letting go. Well that was overwhelming, like constant panic attacks.

Well then I find out emotions have physical connections. Couldn’t make the link until it happened. To put it simply, I was wrong what emotion it was, but I was crying because I connected a physical feeling to an emotion. Having a physical feeling connected to a thought that I connected to feeling is kind amazing honestly. Like I feel something, this is new to me. I’m 33, it was like hearing for the first time, or seeing.

Later on I freaked out and thought of something terrifying, and thought it’d kill me. And if I have physical sensations associate with these thoughts I think I’ll die. As soon as it happened I had to shut down. I always called it calming myself down. Always was told I was emotionless, when I was younger said I wore a mask, that no one would ever know who I was or what I was feeling (little did I know neither would I really), would say how I’m building this wall. But even then, 13-14 years old I don’t remember these connections.

My psychiatrist picked up on this when I said it, reason she thinks I have this, when I was younger I was abused and when spanked or punched or anything negative happen and I cried I’d get the “you don’t have anything to cry for”, “I’ll give you something to cry about” (even after being punched). Thing is that was normally with spankings when I was little, and then later around 13-14 with fights. Mom told me my father abused me as an infant, and he abused her too (they’d send me and my brother out of the house, come in see her crying but everything was “ok”). So honestly I don’t think I’ve ever made these connections.

I understand very well why no one understands me now with anything emotionally charged. My arguments are normally just factual or logically based so “emotions” kind of throw me off. Even as I type this I have panic feelings (the first feelings I recognized) but think it’s really numerous emotions all hitting me at once, and I have no control. I’m scared. I want to feel these things to experience them, but if I get depressed and feel pain, or feel the terror of my fears, I don’t think I can handle it.

Thing is, people like me don’t know we have this problem. We can think we do, then learn that emotions aren’t thoughts, they’re physical, you just “feel” them. I can’t get my head around it still, hell, people can’t get their head around the fact I don’t feel like they feel. It’s more isolating and lonely than before honestly. At least not knowing you “feel” normal. Knowing leaves me wanting to experience, afraid of experiencing, and a “feeling” (thought I guess) that I am better off with what I know.

MM said: “I spent five years with this condition, and it is worse than hell. At the same time, it is NOT hell, because you really don’t care. Yeah, that might sound laughable, but when you get right down to it, wouldn’t most people agree that not caring – at all! – is worse than the deepest sadness or hatred? Well, now I have absolutetly no doubt about that whatsoever – and that is an emotional reaction! :-) With this condition – and neither do I have any doubt about its existence – you don’t live, you just exist. You don’t feel, you just function. It’s like being in a coma in the sense that, the second you snap out of it, you can no longer imagine what it was like being in it. It’s totally impossible for living, feeling people – myself included – to imagine this kind of existence. I just know it was awful. I snapped out of it one night while sitting around playing a boring computer game (Minesweeper), instead of celebrating Christmas.

P.S. If there are any others out there who want to know how I recovered, feel free to ask, but it won’t help you much.”

Like you said I don’t think talking to you, or anyone for that matter, can help me. I have lived with what I think is this condition since birth. I can remember being different even as a kid in elementary school. I didn’t know any different though, so I thought it was normal and that this was life. It really wasn’t until I got older that I KNEW something was wrong. I am 25 years old now.

Two years ago, June 2012, I ‘snapped’ out of it too. I was driving to the city with my mom and all the sudden it just hit me. Its like the whole world came to life. Everything mattered and I was literally a different person. I went back to school, held down a job (which I was never able to do, nor wanted because I isolated myself) I met my fiance and became a step mom. I began taking skating lessons. I had real friends, that I connected with and knew what it meant to be a friend. I had goals and dreams. My whole life changed from that moment on. It was as if the person that I was for 23 years was some other person. I told my parents that the past 20 years didn’t matter. Everything I had done in those years was fake, and it wasn’t me. They of course were hurt by this and remembered having good family trips and quality family time together. It was the complete opposite for me. Since becoming this new person, I wish I could have erased almost everything that happened previous to the ‘new me.’ I remember I wasn’t resentful though. I couldn’t change the past so I didn’t dwell on it. And honestly I was just so happy to be a normal person that I lived every moment being happy and so excited that I was magically cured! I wanted to start living my life NOW. I remember telling my dad that I ‘snapped’ out of whatever it was and he agreed with me. I told him that I must have had schizophrenia or something and he said he didn’t know about that. But He saw the changes I was going through. Then he posed an interesting, scary question…well if you can snap one way, can you snap back to the old way? I couldn’t even fathom snapping back to the way I was. I literally was just NOT HERE for 23 years of my life. It was like you said, a coma. I had a fiance and a family to take care of now. I had bills to pay and my own home. I had responsibilities for crying out loud. I just couldn’t snap back. Well, a year and a half later (April 2014) it happened. I snapped back. I don’t know how or why. But I am exactly where I was for the 23 years of my life. I’m just not here. I have trouble leaving the house. I don’t have a job. I’m not in school. I stopped all communication with my new found friends that I had made when I was ‘normal.’ I am 100% positive now that there is something wrong with me. Having been normal for a year and a half, I know what it feels like to be happy, to feel stress, to feel anger, to feel excitement, to feel appreciation, to feel thankfulness, and to be a functioning person in society. Having ‘snapped back’ does not leave me hopeful for the future. I often wonder if I will die with this condition, whatever it is, having lived a non meaningful life.

Anyways, I’m glad (and not glad) there are some others out there that can relate.