How do you feel at this moment right now? If you struggle with the answer, you might have alexithymia. Hey Alexa. Thymia. Tell me how I feel. [intro music] So, alexithymia is not really a word that you come across every day, and it is sometimes described as emotional blindness. But I don't think that's a great way of describing it, because it's a little bit confusing and not really clear what exactly that means. Alexithymia comes from the Greek meaning literally, "no words for emotions." It's a construct. It's not a mental illness or something you get diagnosed with. It is description for a collection of traits. It describes traits. The inability to verbalize or recognize your own emotions. And this isn't because you're embarrassed , or you don't want to share with other people. It means simply that you're literally unable to realize what it is that you're feeling. Now, this is something that you don't have to be autistic to have. It's estimated that approximately 10% of the general population have alexithymia. However, when you look at autistic populations that figure looks anywhere from between 50 to 80 percent. So alexithymia can be looked at as a way of describing some of the social difficulties that autistic people also have. Now I took the test myself. I am diagnosed autistic and I scored 124, which is considered high on the scale. And from what I've read, it really resonates with me, so I consider myself to have it. I wouldn't actually consider myself emotionally blind, but rather emotionally illiterate. Which is ironic considering that I was a very early reader and could be considered hyperlexic depending on the definition you use. For me the difficulty lies in identifying and verbalizing my own emotions. And a lot of the time it's almost like I have to analyze and rationalize in order to work it out. And then once I've realized what emotion that I have it kind of surprises me. Is surprise an emotion? Now this is one of those things that you can say, "How much does it really affect you?" And you know on a day-to-day basis? Maybe it doesn't affect me. But for the things like building relationships, or being open and emotional with other people It has given me a lot of roadblocks in my life, that now that I understand why that is, I can really look back on my own life and start to understand where it all went wrong. So it really only affects me on a day-to-day basis, when I'm trying to navigate the emotional landscape of others, and my own ability to reach out to other people when I have emotional needs myself, especially as my facial expressions don't always match the emotions that I have inside, which is quite typical for autistic people. For me, It's incredibly difficult to find the words for emotions when they aren't related to a state of bodily function that is a some sort of state of arousal. My heart beats fast and gets excited, so I know that that's love, or at least lust. But identifying whether I love someone... more than just from the physical symptoms, That's where the difficulty starts, and that's when my brain kicks in and starts to rationalize and analyze. Which apparently is not how other people live their lives? Again, when I'm feeling angry at someone, I want to punch them in the face, which happens occasionally. That's obvious, right? You can feel the blood pumping. You can feel yourself. The fight-or-flight sort of instincts starting to happen. but anger in more of a theoretical way: that's something that I I struggle to identify in myself, and I don't think this is because I don't realize that I'm feeling things. I think it's just because what I'm feeling is complicated and in many layers. It's not black or white, I'm not angry or sad or something like this. I'm feeling a bit of this, and this. But then I have to see everything in shades of grey, and so if somebody asks me, "how are you?" I can't really say anything other than "fine." Because to give any further detail would involve probably two hours, and a little bit of crying. So it's more that the complications of my emotions are too difficult to explain in one word. However, I have it on authority that most people don't actually care when they ask how you are, so we can all just keep lying. [happy chiming xylophone] So since the expression of my moods is based on more physical sensations rather than innate awareness, when I'm depressed, all I can sometimes communicate is "I'm tired." "I don't know why I'm tired. I'm just tired." "And my brain feels a certain way." Unfortunately, it seems like because negative emotions have more physical manifestations, So for example: anger, anxiety, fear. These are the ones that seem to be so much more accessible to me, so even to myself it seems like I often have more negative than positive emotions. But in some ways the positive emotions, like happiness, or contentment, are kind of alien to me. I don't feel them anymore than I can paint a picture of them. I really can't paint. Happy is something that I know that I am by thinking about it. I don't feel it. For me to "feel" happy would be something more like feeling euphoric. Or doing shrooms. Now the other way in which it gets complicated is that sometimes it seems like my emotions are actually turned off, and other times I feel that they are way too intense. And both of these situations seem to hinder understanding and expression of my emotions to the people around me. Something I discovered while researching for this video, was that there exists something called an emotion wheel and it has a wheel of all the basic emotions, and then it branches outwards into the more subtle and complex emotions. And something that I realized while looking at this, is that my analytical mind likes to go around the outer edge of the circle. It likes to think about the big abstract emotions, but narrowing it down to those basic simple emotions is something that's really hard for me. So by using this wheel, you can actually almost work backwards. Maybe stick it in a journal somewhere, and when you're looking at it thinking like "I'm feeling... [thinking noises]" Can't even give an example of an emotion. That's how bad it is. "I'm feeling this emotion. That's very abstract." You can narrow it back, and then you go into the center, and you're like "well that is sort of..." "Comes from the emotion of happy." "So that's happy, right." Learning about alexithymia has really helped me understand why I struggled in my therapy sessions, and that's not to say that I didn't benefit hugely from therapy. I think everybody can benefit from therapy, really. Particularly autistic people. I was constantly unable to tell my therapists my feelings, as opposed to constant rumination. And these therapists would tell me "you're being so analytical, you're being so analytical" but Now it makes sense as to why I had to be, because I had no other way to access my emotions. I struggled with it so much that even my own wedding vows were me trying to work out what this feeling of love is supposed to be and how it expresses in my relationship with my husband, and in the end I decided that it wasn't about a feeling, it's about actions. It's about what you do to the other person, how you take care of them. And how they take care of you. Actions speak louder than words, and for me they speak way louder than emotions. If you think you might have alexithymia, and want to try the test for yourself, I have linked it down below in the description box. And if you liked this video, please don't go. I have more videos about autism in a playlist Right here! So click it! Click! Click! You can watch it later, but click! [outro music]
