Alexithymia Unmasked: an Unspeakable Experience
The emotions are there, unmuted. The ability to comprehend or verbalise them (even internally) is absent.
Alexithymia: the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions
Emotional blindness. Emotional illiteracy. Communication issues. Words just don’t cut the emotional mustard. I have alexithymia. I cannot tell you how I feel nor comprehend my own emotions through language. It affects my life in the most obscure ways.
Since realising I am autistic as an adult and have borderline personality disorder, something became clear to me. The general perception of emotions and how most people express and talk about their emotions does not apply to me.
That’s not to say I lacked emotion, but my emotions were so elusive, I could not handle them in a civilised way. My perception of my emotions is best described with Lovecraftian cosmic horror: language cannot do them justice as they are complicated beyond human comprehension. However, when you are confronted with them, looking them in the face may crush your sanity.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” — H.P Lovecraft
If my mind was a house, emotions would be an assortment of indescribable mess that’s best crammed into the cupboards or under the carpet, too sloppy to tidy up with order or dispose of properly. In case anyone comes over, I replace the mess with ornament emotions. They have a similar colour and form to the mess I have hidden, but they’re solid and tangible, like the ones other people mention having in their houses. They’re easier to display and don’t get in the way. In my house, these ornaments look superficial but that doesn’t matter since no one else complains.
After a long day, when all my guests have left me alone, the cupboards and crevices burst due to the pressure of the messy emotions. Like a tsunami, the mess crushes the ornaments and messes up everything it touches. One the mess has spilled, there is a brief moment of calm. I may not understand this mess or like it, but at least its authentic. This moment ends when it is time to clean up again and fix the ornaments. Repeat the cycle ad nauseum.
Alexithymia has been linked to emotional neglect. Perhaps the root of my alexithymia is the constant pressure to mask my true self since childhood. Emotional transparency made me an abnormal inconvenience. So, I kept how I felt to myself and eventually forgot all about them. I was too occupied with paying lip service to a version of me that everyone else expected but was not natural to me. In private, my emotions would explode in an outburst or meltdown. These emotions, begging to be acknowledged, were silenced with guilt. If I faked this superficial self, I believed I would grow into it. That backfired.
That’s the problem with emotions, they’re meant to be raw and personal. The strongest, most unpleasant, inconvenient emotions can be worked with through healthy coping methods. Communication, mindfulness, and respecting your emotions are some popular coping methods. Denial only suppresses the problem so long. Denial has a huge part to play in how I cannot even begin to work through my emotions. The first step of dealing with any problem is to pinpoint it. For me, this isn’t possible.
Untranslatable
Our relationship with language is integral to how we think and perceive. This description of Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates how limiting language is a strategy for mind control:
“ ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. […] Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime.[…] In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’ ” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Reading this gave me a new appreciation of language. Take the word “Freedom”. Freedom isn’t a tangible object; freedom is a concept. If you had never learned the word freedom, a translation or a synonym of it, or a phrase or gesture that had the same meaning, it is unlikely that you could want freedom or understand what it means to be free. You could be oppressed and enslaved without objection. Even if you were unhappy, you would be unable to articulate an alternative or a way out.
From this, I wondered: what if there are unspoken concepts that I take for granted because I have never encountered it in vocabulary?
My emotions fit this criteria to an extent. I know they exist. I feel them but then cannot be translated into words. Therefore, I (or anyone else) cannot truly understand them.
If you have alexithymia and manage to pull together a vague description of your feelings, the likelihood is, it will be lost in translation.
I used to believe that even the well-meaning listeners only hear what they want to hear; they have assumptions, and this bias (consciously or subconsciously) twists my words to fit their narrative. While this may be true to an extent, language is not objective and humans are biased by nature.
This reminds me of an English literature game we did at A-level to practice analysing how word choice and syntax can influence sound, meaning, atmosphere, symbolism, pacing, and tone in writing: take one word and list everything it makes you think of. No two people come up with the same list of associations. One word is a different experience for everyone who encounters it. The world shapes your perception and your perception shapes how you view the word. It’s a mutual exchange.
How can emotions, which are supposed to be subjective and authentic yet specific, be communicated in a way that is objectively honest and universally clear? No amount of mindfulness, communication skills, or introspection is going to allow emotions to be communicated without compromising the accuracy. At least, not for me.
I don’t think this will ever change, nor should it as different perspectives should be embraced. But when it comes to relating to and emphasising with the words of others, it must be taken into account. To put my emotions into words by using a logical justification. This does not hold weight when I externalise the explanation by venting.
Brush Me Off. Gaslight Me.
Now that a lifetime masking my raw emotions has taken its toll on my mental health, I’ve been advised to open up about how I feel or work through my emotions myself. The trouble is my intuition has been broken. Who I am has been tainted with how I should be on a internal and external level. Opening up to vent how I feel goes against everything that was ingrained into me. Even introspection and mindfulness are redundant. If I attempted to articulate my emotions to no one but myself, I would subconsciously recite what I am supposed to feel.
Therefore, emotional awareness has been rendered completely inaccessible; a language I cannot learn.
The word “empath” is overused these days, so I won’t label myself one. But surprisingly, I have high empathy, just none for myself. I understand the emotions of others more than I understand my own. I often get upset or angry on behalf of the person venting to me and always want to solve the problem for them. The fact that I can feel second-hand emotions that someone else has verbalised is an insightful experience.
Perhaps that’s why I am good at feigning the emotional reactions expected of me: I am a method actor. However, when this performance is over, I have no script to help me navigate the emotions that are unique to me. I struggle to realise which emotions are real and which are fake. Sometimes I trick myself first so I can convince others I feel a certain way. It’s a frustrating habit.
“Happiness” and “Sadness” are too broad for me to relate to. Each time I feel them, they’re drastically different but still do not match the textbook definition.
In rare occasions, I stumble across a term that perfectly summarises an emotion I previously had no words for. That is probably why acknowledging my autism and borderline personality disorder, after years not knowing what I was dealing with, was so empowering.
Another example of scientific jargon that describes my state of mind a lot of the time is dissociation.
But when using this term when speaking to a mental health nurse, who was establishing a support plan for me, it didn’t go down well.
She asked me something along the lines of “what is your mental state like these days?”
“I’ve been feeling really dissociated lately,” I replied.
She asked me what I meant by that. I floundered around unpacking that term and what it meant. I felt like she’d asked a philosophical question in French which I only half understand. My answer probably came across as shallow gibberish. She raised an eyebrow at my inability to articulate my emotions, as if she didn’t believe me.
Her response: “You need to be more specific if you expect any therapist to understand you. Medical terminology is unnatural coming from you, since you’re not trained in psychology. The psychological professionals you speak too will have different understanding of the words you use. For clearer communication, just say you’re tired, out-of-it, dizzy, etc.”
But none of those alternatives summarised it to me. Maybe she was right and I was misusing a word I didn’t understand properly. Maybe it was the best word for me to use as my interpretation of it matched my subjective feeling. Maybe our differing stances on this created a communication barrier.
When you have alexithymia, you are easy to gaslight or be told how you feel by others. We don’t have the vocabulary to argue otherwise. Even therapists, counsellors, psychiatrists tend to get the wrong idea from what we say. This leads to us being brushed off or misdiagnosed.
Self-Deception
Emotional communication, especially in a psychiatric setting, is just one facet of how alexithymia affects my life. What is more significant is I cannot process my emotional state to myself. This disconnection with how I feel makes it easy to spiral into dissociative states, self-deception, and disrespecting my physical and emotional needs.
Like many others with alexithymia, my heightened awareness of physical sensations is how I navigate my emotions.
It’s not perfect. Nuanced physical pain can can sometimes befuddle my perception of it. For example, I cannot tell the difference between the pain of working a muscle and straining it. In the gym, doing as many reps until exhaustion is a dangerous game. On the first leg day in over a year, I broke my calf-raises record with one-hundred reps. The next day, not only did I have an expected case of delayed onset muscle soreness, but I couldn’t put my heels down for a week afterwards.
Despite being intuitively driven, my intuition can be silly at times when feelings are mysteries.
Physical pain is the understandable pain. When you open up about physical pain, people tend to take you seriously and be more empathetic than they would if it were mental. Physical pain often leaves visual evidence on the skin. Physical pain is blunt and honest about where it is, what it is doing, and why. Although everyone feels physical pain differently, there is more information on how to deal with physical pain than emotional pain. Physical pain is rational.
That’s why I have a history of self-harm. My favourite stims involve inflicting pain or intense sensations on myself. Physical pain fills emotional numbness. When I’m overwhelmed with too many emotions I comprehend, I swap it for straightforward physical pain. The kind I can process.
For years, this was my only coping strategy. Anything that focused on mindfulness or identifying emotions to process them felt empty. I’m still looking for a healthy coping mechanism.
If alexithymia is emotional blindness, there needs to be some kind of emotional Braille established before we can hope to find success in traditional talking therapies
Although I can’t always differentiate the different sources of these similar physical sensations, I can describe them. With emotions, the only descriptions that feels genuine are the ones that refer to physical and external cues:
- Increased heartrate and jitteriness: usually indicators of excitement or fear/anxiety. Only context can tell the two apart. Since my life is filled with more panic attacks than excitement, I struggle to enjoy surprises or anything suspenseful.
- Irritability, fight-or-flight, tunnel vision, disorientation, heightened senses: Anger or sensory overload. Because the sensations are specific and overwhelming, they are the easiest emotions for me to pinpoint. The physical sensations are the same but context can tell them apart. If nothing has made me consciously angry, I’m probably exposed to some unpleasant sensory triggers.
- Absence of the above; numbness: Probably happiness or contentment. Could be boredom. Could also be dissociation or a depressive episode. There’s no way of knowing whether I should be grateful to not be plagued by panic attacks and sensory overload or worried that I can’t feel anything.
- An overwhelming blend of most of the above: Meltdown.
This is the best explanation of how I navigate my emotions with alexithymia I can give while maintaining integrity.
If you also have alexithymia, let me know of your experience in the comments. Maybe one day we may establish a language that allows us to voice our emotions.
