[Alexithymia] - How do Relationships Work?

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I have a friend that feels a range of emotions but fails to distinguish and describe them, he groups all bad emotions as 'scared' and all good emotions as 'happy'. He was asking me about emotions yesterday, and he said that he feels sad when he's not 'with us' (referring to myself and another), so I told him that was loneliness. He seems to be happy, but I can't tell to what extent that's true. He once said that he thought 'love just meant sex'.

How severe/mild is this type of alexithymia? Do people like this value their relationships, or do they remain secretly unattached? How do people with alexithymia (apparently most autistics are alexithymic to some degree) feel about relationships? If they have a friend, can they actually consider them to be close?

I understand his inability to describe emotions. I group emotions as "good" and "bad". The thing about the sad and the lonely is new to me from this thread. Your friend's level of alexithymia is probably moderate to severe. I think that alexithymia tests are not alexithymic enough to measure my level of alexithymia. However, I don't think that I am completely unable to convey emotions to others. For eggsample, I did some fiction writing for awhile, and readers who liked what I wrote said that my writing was full of emotion, but has almost no emotion words. I think that I can eggspress emotions, but not through the standard emotion words, but through another mechanism that is most readily applied in fiction writing.

I'm really intrigued by what you mean by this. How exactly do you write, expressing your emotions? Is it something like desires, needs and wishes?

Do you have friends? If so how do you feel about them? Can you 'rank' them in terms of how close you feel to them?

I'm sort of terrified that one day I'll lose him as a friend (he's 1 of the few real friends I've ever had) and I'm not sure why.

One can be alexithymic and have friends and feel fairly close, but be without the words to describe it. One can feel closeness, but I think other people might feel as if there is a wall up because of the lack of words to describe and express emotions.

What is the difference between alexythemia and just not being very good at linking your emotions to words? Is there any difference or is alexythemia about not having a good connection between emotions and language?

I identify my emotions based on comparing them to other emotions I have felt before, and most of the time I know why I feel them, but I find it hard to put these things into words.

This is good. I definitely don't feel any built up walls, but I am curious about the motives behind relationships. I don't want to develop a really close feeling friendship (from my perspective) if they can't feel close to me, as then it really screws with my mind and leaves me anxious.



Personally I don't know if there's a difference or not as I don't think there's any way I could have alexithymia. I can almost always identify how I'm feeling based on the context of the emotion. For example, if I feel sad because a friend has left my house, I know I miss them and am lonely without them. There isn't really such thing as 'lonely' in terms of emotions.. really you are just experiencing sadness because you are alone. Maybe abstract difficulties are the root cause of this? I don't know.

Last edited by Norny on 28 Jan 2014, 7:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think like anyone else, if you listen, you can hear the value the person places on other people, I don't feel alexithymia as I understand it (relating to having language for feelings, which is about communicating) prevents caring or wanting to be close, though it does make relating and relationships more work and less easy to be successful at. I would listen to how the person talks about others though. Whether with interest and confusion about lost relationships or seems happy to be rid of and blaming them.

I don't express emotions or connect to people well. I understand how other people feel if I understand what they are experiencing, like if something bad has happened, but I don't know how to react.

I've always struggled very much with expressing emotions and identifying them in others and in myself. I am a writer and can write emotions just fine, I think because I'm such a voracious reader, but mostly I end up identifying emotions in myself in physical ways. Like, I have a headache, my stomach hurts, I'm tired, I'm cold. Usually there isn't anything physically wrong with me, it's just that I'm feeling a certain way and it is causing me discomfort... and it's simpler for me to express a symptom like that than it is to explain an actual emotional state. Also, I have a tendency to cry whenever I feel any kind of strong emotion, or smile and laugh during an argument or in a situation that is causing me stress.

Anyway, this does sometimes cause issues with my boyfriend. He ends up feeling sad or guilty quite often, because I have failed to accurately express what I'm upset about. Or I cry about something that isn't really a big deal, but since I don't know how to deal with whatever emotion I'm feeling, I just have a meltdown. Since learning about Asperger's, we have definitely both made more of an effort to communicate more effectively, and generally I think we do pretty well. He is also very intuitive, which helps.

I get very attached to people, but I am not very good at showing it. It is sometimes an issue, so I've been quite up front with my closest friends about this and they understand that sometimes I need them to TELL me what they need from me, because I won't pick up on it. I also make a conscious effort to contact them occasionally, so that they won't feel like they are always putting in the effort to be my friend. While this is not natural for me, I do recognize that without them, I would be lonely and miss them, so even though it takes work to be social with them, it's important if I want to maintain that closeness.

It depends on the person.

Alexithymia itself has a couple of definitions. The one used on this site is the 'looser' definition, meaning it's a spectrum that people lie on, and the tests linked on this website show that.
However, alexithymia can also be a condition in and of itself and it's not defined as being able to describe emotions but rather the inability to perceive the emotion (or feel the emotion) as anything besides physical sensations. This would put it on the severe end of the scale. However, an alexithymic of this definition DOES experience the physical sensations of emotions, unlike someone who's apathetic who just experiences no emotion whatsoever. Alexithymics are highly sensitive in general (like most autistics), so they're not like a sociopath who is poorly sensitive.

The inability to describe or define your emotions isn't the same as the inability to feel them. I would not question your friend's ability to feel loneliness when they're separated from you. From what you say this person's emotional states are likely very jumbled to themselves, which one would expect from an autistic whose other perceptions also get jumbled. I suspect the reason why the emotions can be more muddled than physical sensations, is that physical sensations are based on a relatively unchanging world. Furthermore, the physical world is something that everyone else also perceives in extraordinarily similar ways. Other people can help mold your thoughts about what that color is, what that shape is, etc. But one's emotions are one's own. And they don't always match up nicely to what's going on in the world around you.
Without strong baselines and a strong affirmation of what any given sensation is, people probably define the exact same emotion differently. Now when your brain doesn't sort out the emotion properly for you in the first place, when it mixes it up with other emotions or processes that're going on in your mind/brain, the task of defining your emotions might very well be impossible.