Hi, my name is Stephanie, and today I want to talk to you about alexithymia and autism. So,
what is alexithymia? Which, by the way, I've been saying wrong again. [laughs] One of those
words that I don't know why, but I was saying wrong. I keep on calling it alexi-thee-mia,
so I'm going to do my best to say alexi-thy-mia throughout this video. According to Nemiah et al.
1976: alexithymia is a subclinical phenomenon involving a lack of emotional awareness, or
more specifically, difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and in distinguishing feelings
from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal. And another source gives the more literal meaning,
along with some of their features seen in alexithymia: alexithymia literally means
no words for feelings. The concept refers to a hypothesized communicative function of somatic
symptoms. Its key features are a relative constriction of emotional functioning,
poverty of fantasy life, and inability to find appropriate words to describe one's emotions. So,
in super basic terms, alexithymia is basically the inability to match emotions with words - whether
that is identifying what the emotion is or just describing what said emotion is. Trying to figure
out what's going on inside your body emotion-wise and not being able to communicate that in words.
Someone with alexithymia may also confuse emotions with physical body sensations. Now,
these feelings could be quite your average simple feelings, but for someone with alexithymia, this
might just kind of feel like an unsettling mass of yuck that is hard to distinguish and determine,
and when you don't understand what you're feeling, it can be distressing in itself. Now, I personally
experience this to some degree, and I actually thought this was pretty normal. I think a lot of
times I try to kind of categorize things under, like, depressed and upset because I'm learning
what those are, but otherwise, I can have a lot of trouble with, maybe, more nuance to what I'm
feeling. I think most the time I understand, like, when I'm happy, like, overjoyed, but it's almost
like a lot of times I don't tend to know what I'm feeling unless if it's, like, in the extremes or
sometimes I almost feel like I'm investigating. Like, I think maybe what I'm feeling is this
because of x, y, and z, and I'm, like, trying to figure it out and it actually helps me a lot to
talk to other people for them to help put words to what I'm feeling because I can't. But apparently,
someone asking you how you're feeling and you saying, "I don't know," isn't super typical. That
in particular was an interesting thing to deal with early on in my relationship with my husband,
especially because, again, we didn't know that I was autistic. We didn't know all these things, and
he would be trying to communicate with me about difficult things. We're talking about feelings
and all that stuff that you have to deal with in relationship, and I'd be starting to shut down,
and he'd say, well, what are you feeling? And I would say, I don't know. And then that would
make him upset or frustrated because, obviously, he's sharing how he feels and then he's, like,
well, you have to know how you're feeling. What do you mean you don't know? Like, you have to know
what you're feeling. I don't. Like, I don't! And that would kind of become a point of contention
because it sounds like I'm lying to someone who understands how they're feeling most of the
time. I think this can also often contribute to shutdowns and meltdowns because it's another kind
of, almost like a sensation going on inside that, it's almost like it's mounting, but you can't
see it. I don't know how to explain. You can't grasp it, and so it's just another thing that's
like this and because you can't identify it, because you can't put it into words
to maybe try to deal with it - I imagine you would deal with it or at least knowing kind of helps;
I don't know. It just kind of adds to ... like, the noise. And I'm not talking about
the physical sensation of hearing, but like, you know when stuff is like that, like, surely
you understand what I'm saying. This is super hard to say in words, but I hope you understand
what I'm trying to say. Either way, it's almost like this mounting storm of something,
you just don't understand what, and I really do think that alexithymia,
or at least the difficulty of putting words to emotions or identifying emotions, can definitely
contribute to meltdowns and shutdowns, especially when other people are wanting to try to engage and
you do not know, you do not know how to put those things in words for them. For the record, I don't
think I experience alexithymia in any severe form. I know there are probably people who definitely
feel that a lot more, but I do kind of think it's amusing because I use the word frustrating a lot,
because I remember distinctly in, I believe it was it was fourth or fifth grade, I think it was
fourth grade, and we had a special class that we went to for talented and gifted kids or ... no.
Talented and creative kids, because it was TACK lab, and we had to go and participate
in something. I don't remember if it was actually a part of our class, our normal classes and we
had missed it and we needed to make it up or something. I don't know. Basically, we had to
try to put, like, a, a face and a word to go along with an emotion and everyone had already gotten,
like, happy, sad, angry, you know, those are very simple emotions, right? Those are,
in my world, the emotions, and they helped me come up with frustrated.
And ever since, frustrated is the fancy word in my vocabulary for my own personal emotions. Anyway,
moving on. The main characteristics of alexithymia include: one, difficulty identifying feelings
and distinguishing between feelings and bodily sensations of emotional arousal; two, difficulty
describing feelings to other people; three, reduced capacity to fantasize and to imagine;
four, stimulus-bound, externally oriented cognitive style; and more recently,
5, low perspective taking as well as difficulty understanding and describing
the emotions of others. Now, when I read that, I found that kind of interesting because the
mention of low perspective taking definitely reminded me of the concept of theory of mind,
and there's a little bit of a debate about that, whether we actually lack theory of mind or whether
other people are the ones who are lacking theory of mind, or maybe, perhaps, I think, personally,
we are failing to understand each other real well because we have different neurotypes,
so, obviously, there's going to be a failure there, but either way,
perspective-taking, that concept is shown here under alexithymia. Now, again, on this channel,
I talk about autism related things and I'm talking about alexithymia with autism, and I'm kind of
connecting some of these things to the autistic experience, but that's really not a leap, because
alexithymia is noted to be quite prominent in the autistic population, specifically. Alexithymia
is present in approximately 10 percent of the general population, with significantly higher
incidence levels within autistic populations (about 50 percent). Recent work suggests that
comorbidity with alexithymia may be a fundamental factor in some of the social impairments,
including empathy and emotion perception exhibited by autistic individuals. Many experts feel that it
is quite likely that alexithymia and autism kind of work together and feed on each other to cause
some of the issues that we typically see with autistic individuals. This source agrees. The
lack of emotional awareness has a negative impact on subjective emotion regulation and compromises
the understanding of others' emotions, giving rise to problems in social interaction. In particular,
because of their difficulty identifying and classifying feelings, people suffering from
alexithymia cannot interpret or recognize emotional stimuli, such as facial expression
or tone of voice, both verbal and non-verbal. As a consequence, they have difficulty establishing
social relationships characterized by intimacy and proximity, understanding the intentions and
attitudes of others and making morally relevant decisions that take into account others' points
of view. These aspects of alexithymia, together with the communication and social skills deficits,
are among the most relevant overlapping elements between alexithymia and ASD. And we see here that
this can negatively affect our relationships with other people, and it also can cause that
characteristic naivety that we see a lot of times in autistic individuals, because it's really hard
for us to take someone else's perspective while maintaining our own and also understand someone
else's intentions. Autistic people are pretty well known for being very loving and very trusting
people because it's hard for us to comprehend the concept of you having bad intentions. This one in
particular actually drives me insane sometimes, because I do have a really hard time understanding
people's bad intentions in reality. So, I can understand, like, in a story,
right? Them explaining all the things and then you can see, like, oh, they have bad intentions, and
then they went and did this thing and of course they did because they had those intentions and
blah, blah, right? Like, it's all spelled out for you, and I can understand it even like on a TV
show or in a movie. Like, I can see that because they show it for you, but then if someone tells
me about something that someone did in real life with the people around me, it is very hard for
me to comprehend that that's real. It is very difficult for me to understand how people can
really be like that, how people can really think sometimes that, the, the ways that they do. It's
really hard for me to really concretely understand that people really do think differently than me,
have different intentions that are very bad, and it's just hard for me to actually fathom
that the real people in my real life actually have those. Because I can see it in stories and
hypothetical situations, but it's very hard for me to understand and comprehend that that's real
in my world, in my, like, the people around me and stuff like that. So, it's, I don't know. It's
frustrating to me because it's like there's no way someone can explain it to me enough
for it to get through my head that that's, like, really who they are and really
what's going on in their mind. I tend to believe that people are telling me the truth when they
talk to me, even though I can see when people are lying and manipulating other people. I have a hard
time understanding that people aren't telling me the truth unless if they don't have, like, a
real close relationship with me and are, you know, setting off red flags or something. People close
in my life, it's hard for me to get, like, you would really look at me in the eyes and and lie to
me and have bad intentions. And look, I'm a human being. I've had bad intentions before. I've done
bad things before. But I feel like some people have those a lot and that doesn't make sense
to me. It's also very, like, something that's really hard for me to even accept with myself.
So, like, the the idea that ... basically, what I'm trying to say is, like, it's very difficult
in my ... to bring it into, like, a sense of concrete understanding, that people are
really like that. Now, not only that, I again believe that this does contribute to meltdowns
and shutdowns, something I briefly mentioned beforehand and tried poorly to describe to you,
however, this source might help a little bit more: Alexithymic individuals seem to be vulnerable to
mounting tension from undifferentiated states of unpleasant emotional arousal. This vulnerability
is presumably caused by a disturbance in the processing of emotional awareness that is
believed to interfere with the subject's ability to experience and express emotions. Now, something
I would like to note on that, just because someone has trouble putting emotions into words
or maybe being able to distinguish them from something else, I don't think that necessarily
means that they don't experience emotions, and the reason I want to note that is because some people
really think that autistic people do not really experience emotions or don't really have much
empathy or whatever. Just because we can't put it into words or just because we can't describe it or
figure out what it is from something else we're feeling, doesn't necessarily mean we
don't experience it. Another thing to note is that someone can have alexithymia without being
autistic, and someone can be autistic without having alexithymia. The fun thing about this
is, despite the heavy trait overlap, we just don't know enough about either of these things
to fully understand the relationship that they have with each other and the exact influences
that they might be having on each other. In spite of the high volume of research devoted to
the relationship between alexithymia and ASD, no one unequivocal answer has been provided
to the question surrounding their precise relationship. In fact, it is still not clear
whether this should be interpreted in causal terms (and in which direction), whether one of them is
a secondary phenomenon due to the occurrence of dysfunctions caused by the onset of the other,
i.e whether there is a comorbidity or an epiphenomenal relationship or whether it
is a mere yet unspecified co-occurrence. This situation of etiological uncertainty is partly due
to our incomplete understanding of the cognitive, physiological, and neurophysiological mechanisms
underlying the onset of both conditions. So, there you go. Alexithymia, in very basic terms, is a
difficulty in being able to identify emotions and describe them, maybe putting words to them. It has
a lot of overlap of main characteristics with ASD, however, we don't know enough about either to tell
what kind of relationship they have together. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that you
enjoyed this video and found it useful. As always, the references or resources, further reading, etc.
links are in my description box, so be sure to check those out if you would like to.
If you did enjoy this video, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and let me know your thoughts in
the comments below. If you enjoy autism-related content from me, you can go ahead and hit that
subscribe button. I upload to this channel every Thursday at 4 p.m. central standard time. Thank
you to everyone who supports me here on youtube as youtube members, my patrons over on patreon,
and a special thank you to my spaz tier patron, Marie Johannson. Thank you so much
for watching! I hope you're having a wonderful week and I'll see you in my next video. Bye!