Alexithymia

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What do you think is the correlation between Alexithymia and Autism?
My psychiatrist told me to study Alexithymia for homework.

Can one have prominent Alexithymia without having ASD?

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

That is a really complex question. The research on alexithymia is relatively new and not very significant. Yes, it can be co-morbid with ASD, but there are other processing qualities of autism that can be similar to alexithymia. Whether you can have alexithymia without ASD, I believe that is a possibility.

I don't know exactly about the relationship between autism and alexithymia.
In my therapy, my alexithymia got significantly better with a lot of training.

It's likely I never really learned to name my emotions before because my emotions were routinely misinterpreted by other people - so no coherent connection between my internal states and words could form.

Ok, thank you.
Yes, the only thing my psychiatrist really mentioned to me is that it's a personality trait of many people with autism. I don't know if she is hinting I might be on the spectrum or not. The only thing I know so far that I have is epilepsy. And apparently OCD.

Oh okay, that's good that your alexithymia got better. I figure I could study some words that are associated with emotions and that might help. My emotions feel like usually an ocean of bland things mixed together

My emotions felt like some boiling scary something buried in a pressure container that was about to explode...

My doctors said you can experience alexithymia without being autistic, it’s more a co-morbid than a strict symptom / criteria.
Experiencing this many times and intensely may indicate that you have either psychiatric problems, personality disorders or ASD.

Ooh. I think I get that. As a young child I would get into rages because I could not express my emotions. I could not get them out! It was like they were all pressurized inside and could explode. (As a baby I would not stop crying due to this and once my Mum nearly threw me out the window!)


My Dad would tell me off for these rages and eventually after a certain event when I was about five or six, where I was shocked in what I had done along with the smack behind and telling off... With the shock the rages stopped, but instead I ended up with shutdowns from that age onwards.

I still get these days where it is like internally I am going to explode with a build up of various bottled up emotions that I can't cope with. It is not often but sometimes when things cumilate like this I can do really stupid things but superhuman things physically! My thoughts start racing and I get soo much pressure in my head, and just when I think my head will explode it just stops and I am calm and I fall asleep, as it always seems to happen late at night after a long stressful day!

But anyway. My feelings and emotions. It is only since I have been on this site and read what others have written that I have realized that something is different to the average person and me. I don't know what it is. It is like I have a gap or a blockage when it comes to processing some feelings. They are there but somehow I can't access them or somehow I can't make sense of them unless they scream at me! (Things like anxiety can be like that).
Yet the normal every day feelings I am normal with. I am still trying to work things out.
Uhmmm. Help? Haha! (If I can't work things out no one else is going to! HAHA! Can just imagine someone sending intelligent mice into my brain! Uhmmm. No!)

But after writing all that, I may not have anything. I might be normal. I do not know! How do we know? It might be that everyone goes through these experiences at times in their life?

Sorry. Wrote too much again going off on tangents etc... Ignore me! Haha!

Alexithymix. Not sure what it is. Wait. Do Alex's get it? I am not an Alex. No. I don't get it... Uhmmm. Sorry. Carry on people. Ignore me. Morning madness.

Lol, I love your spoiler
Alexithymia - inability to identify and name emotions.

I know what you mean and I think it's on topic. I was also a horribly noisy baby, as a toddler, I cried and yelled until I turned blue and fainted. As a schoolchild, I routinely cried "for no reason" in most inappropriate situations. I felt very ashamed of it, so I started to - as you said - bottle it up and act like I didn't want to cry, dissociating from myself to cope.

The missing piece, in my case, turned out to be the "no reason" being in reality severe sensory overload - a horrible pain-like sensation I couldn't understand or explain to anyone. When I finally learned that, the rest started to slowly move forward.

I hope you move forward, too.

I'm not sure how I feel about alexithymia, but then I am autistic...

It is really high though the percentage of people that have it, it is around 50% - 85%