Alextimia: What Do You Feel?

Alextimia affects one in seven people worldwide, affecting more males than females and having decreased significantly in recent decades. For people who suffer from this emotional disorder, it is impossible for them to identify their own feelings, as well as to express them verbally.

The impossibility of expressing feelings, alextimia, has been officially described by the world of psychiatry as a disorder that suffers from “ a type of patient who gives the impression of being different, strange beings that come from a world completely different from the rest., beings that live in the middle of a society governed by feelings ”.

For most it will be difficult to understand this disorder, but not to identify these people. They are usually intelligent people, well developed in technical and material matters although they have great difficulties in facing their own emotions and understanding the importance of those of others.

What are you NOT feeling?

Usually, a patient with alextimia is diagnosed with high-performance autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in many cases due to coincidences in development. However, there are big differences between an alextimic and a person with Asperger’s syndrome. While the first is aware at all times of his lack of understanding of his own and others’ feelings, the second does not have to understand it.

In fact, many behaviors, including empathic behavior, can be understood and reproduced by the second but he will never understand the true usefulness of them beyond rational application (if I give him words of encouragement, I will get him to stop crying).

A person with alextimia has a double tendency to suffer from depressive disorders and, in many cases, a depression can be covered by a forced alextimia. The truth is that these individuals suffer in silence the total misunderstanding of themselves while the environment dismisses them as selfish or indolent.

Their reality is limited by the inability to be sensitive and this translates into a lack of appetite at all levels since, how do you choose what to do in the future if you don’t even know what you want? How to have a relationship if when you think you know what you are looking for, disappointment comes over and over again because neither the other person understands you nor is the partner understood?

6 alexthymy markers

1. Inability to understand what you are feeling at a certain moment.

2. Disinterest in identifying the silences of others.

3. Impossibility of entrusting the most intimate of being to others.

4. Impossibility of finding underlying explanations in movies, music etc.

5. Forced pragmatism : it is difficult to talk about one’s own feelings and those of others, so the person with alexthymia prefers to talk about everyday issues rather than feelings.

6. Confusion between the three negative feelings : fear, sadness and anger.

Types of alextimia

There are two well differentiated types of alextimia. On the one hand, we can speak of primary alextimia, which has a biological origin. It can occur as a result of some type of deficiency because, for example, there is a hereditary factor or because some neurological structures linked to emotions have been damaged due to some disease.

On the other hand, there is secondary alextimia, which occurs as a result of emotional trauma suffered both in childhood and adolescence, and even in adulthood.

Those who suffer from alextimia are not only unable to recognize, interpret and express their emotions and feelings, but also to extract the valuable information they provide. There is yet another effect of this disorder: those  who suffer from it find it more difficult to make decisions and relate.