AvPD or Alexithymia?

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Does anyone know anything about AvPD or Alexithymia? I have a feeling someone I know has it and I want to help.

I just read up online about Alexithymia after reading your post, and I think it applies to me, somewhat. Although I do have fantasies and dreams, my dreams often contain strong logical factors. I have sleep apnea and snore loudly at times, and will often dream I am driving a car, or occasionally a plane or boat, because my brain converts the snoring sound to a motor in my dreams. I have often dreamed I was in a bathroom or public rest room, and woken up needing to run to the bathroom. I once dreamt that I was falling out of bed and grasping the blankets to slow down the fall, so I wouldn't hit the floor hard. I woke up half way to the floor--grasping the blankets, so I wouldn't hit the floor hard. Due to health problems I have trouble getting out to the stores often, and it sometimes worries me. Sometimes my subconscious mind tries to help out by having me dream I am at the grocery store or a mall. Unfortunately, I have never found any purchases waiting for me when I have awakened from any of those dreams.

I do have trouble comprehending the feelings of myself and others, although not quite as much now that I am older (early 50s), as I have gotten some experience in making educated guesses, and I still often have trouble expressing my own feelings. One point made in the article I read was that people with this condition are often stimulus bound and externally oriented in their thinking. External stimuli do have an effect on what I do, as they do to any one, but my thinking tends to be internally oriented. Still, for the most part I fit this, so I believe it is overlapping with or a part of my Asperger's Syndrome.

Do look further into this for your friend or relative's sake. The best help you can offer is to be a friend, though, and without expecting this person to conform to the norm.

So Questor, Love is not even something you can understand? I mean romantic love. On that note, if you don't have that ability would you want someone to love you still?

I am also almost sure I am alexithymic; I had spent years struggling to describe how my inner working are different from how I perceive others' are, and the best I could come up with was that I have no words for emotions. When I first saw the definition a couple of years ago I saw myself in it completely.

I draw parallels to synaesthesia where people can see sounds as colours or perhaps experience smells when thinking of numbers, but for me it is as hard to link an emotion to a word as it would be to say how much Wednesday weighs; the words and the emotions just have nothing to do with each other. Plus they all flow into each other like different colours of paint in a bucket - inseparable.

My husband left me because I couldn't (or in his mind wouldn't) talk about my feelings. But I have feelings, I just can't get them out, verbally or even necessarily in body language.

Okay then I didn't realise it had a name. . It definitely applies to me as well. I hate that question "how do you feel?"