Alexithymia is a difficulty recognizing emotions, and is sometimes seen along with depression, autism, or brain injury, among other conditions.
Alexithymia is a difficulty recognizing emotions, and is sometimes seen along with depression, autism, or brain injury, among other conditions.
I got diagnosed as autistic near the beginning of the year, and have been doing intent research on it since. Learning about this made a lot of things suddenly make sense. I struggle to describe my emotions, and often kinda just feel blank until I either feel ‘good’ or ‘bad’. So I started using a number scale, mostly for telling my gf what’s up. 5 is perfectly neutral, 10 is great, 1 is awful. Helps a ton so that I don’t have to try to figure out some abstract way of conveying how I’m feeling in the moment. A lot of the times if we’re in public I just use our code phrase, “the brain worms are at it again”, to tell her that I’m in a negative swing from the bipolar. It’s a gay old time.
Oh man, you just unlocked a memory of me explaining a weird spectrum I had subconsciously developed for emotions - there’s past, present, future - and a negative/positive axis. Past negative is regret, future negative is anxiety or dread. Future positive is anticipation, past positive is nostalgia, and so on. I got into this whole explanation until the person I was talking to interrupted me and explained that most people don’t need a matrix to explain their feelings.