Alexithymia: why some people find it so hard to identify emotions, and how this affects them

Rebecca Ellis, Assistant researcher in Public Health, Swansea University

Alexithymia is a term you may not have heard before. But it describes something many people experience: difficulties in identifying, distinguishing and expressing emotions.

It affects how people engage with their emotions at work, in relationships and even within themselves. It may also change how a person analyses their surroundings and how they interact with the world.

It’s not easy to tell if someone you know has alexithymia. Often, a person may not even realise they have it themself. It’s very much an internal phenomenon that a person experiences.

The term “alexithymia” was first described in research in the 1970s and there is no clinical diagnosis. It is thought to affect roughly 10% of the general population, though. The word itself is taken from Greek roots – “a” (not), “lexis” (words), and “thymia” (soul or emotions) – and translates, roughly, as “no words for emotions”.

Internal states

Alexithymia is closely related to one’s sense of interoception, which is the ability to interpret and label one’s internal states. People with reduced interoception, also referred to as “alexisomia”, can’t easily tell if they are hungry, thirsty, tired, aroused or in pain.

It’s important to point out that alexithymia isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. It differs from person to person. Autistic people, for instance, experience it at a higher rate – between 33% and 66% compared to the general population. It’s also more common among people with obsessive compulsive disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. Some people have always had alexithymia whereas others acquire it through trauma.

Overwhelmed

If a person isn’t able to identify what they are feeling, they may be more likely to suppress or ignore those bodily sensations, and less likely to mitigate any problems. In this way it is harder for them to regulate themselves emotionally and they may experience feeling overwhelmed more often.

One characteristic of alexithymia is an externally oriented thinking style. This is where people focus on what’s happening around them rather than their own emotional processes for information. Someone with alexithymia may need to look back at an event to understand what they were feeling at that particular moment through contextual clues. They often adapt their actions to cope with this in future situations.

For autistic people in particular, alexithymia can make it challenging to interpret social cues such as facial expressions. This may become overwhelming and lead a person to experience meltdowns.

People with alexithymia may also respond differently to events that typically provoke communal emotions, such as the death of a celebrity or a wedding announcement. Reactions that may seem out of place to others can lead to misunderstandings and frustration for those involved.

Emotional awareness

Alexithymia affects how a person experiences and interprets emotions, from noticing physical sensations in the body, to identifying them as specific feelings and deciding how to respond. Understanding at which point someone struggles in this process can help determine the kind of support they may need.

While alexithymia can affect a person’s connection to their emotions, emotional awareness is a skill that can be developed in adulthood and improved over time. Practising naming emotions and physical sensations is one strategy that can help people with alexithymia better understand themselves. Another is learning to identify how these are represented in the body.

This article was first published on The Conversation