Can you imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have any feelings?
We are not talking about the inability to feel pain, which is a condition known as congenital
analgesia.
But if you think not ever feeling pain would be a good thing then think again.
Most people with congenital analgesia often die young from injuries or illnesses that
went undetected.
So, we might look at that and wonder what it might be like to feel no emotional pain.
Would the flipside of an absence of emotions be a life that is almost impossible to live?
Let’s now examine this more.
The condition we are talking about today is not properly understood, but some sources
say it can occur in as many as 10 percent of the population.
This might mean it will happen to some of you.
It’s called “alexithymia”, and we should say that while people may experience some
kind of feeling they just can’t identify it.
If you can’t say what you are feeling then it’s pretty much like having no feelings.
We will let a person who has this condition describe it to you.
He was interviewed by the Independent newspaper in the UK in 2018, and this is what he said.
“Most of my responses are learned responses.
In an environment where everyone is being jolly and happy, it feels like I’m lying.
Acting.
Which I am.
So it is a lie.”
This man said he cannot feel happiness, cannot feel love, cannot feel shame, excitement or
disgust.
His life feels like a sham, because in order to communicate he must pretend what to feel
based on the situation.
“I feel something but I’m unable to distinguish in any real way what that feeling is,” he
said.
And that’s exactly what alexithymia means, a term derived from Greek meaning having no
words for emotion.
Before we get more into how this can devastate lives and cause all manner of problems, let’s
have a look at what the medical community say about this strange condition.
First of all, please don’t think this condition is an inability just to describe feelings,
something men are often said to suffer from but more often than not in an amusing context.
This is, as we said, often an inability to identify feelings, which is very different.
You might say, I can’t explain how I feel, but someone else might say, I have absolutely
no idea what I am supposed to be feeling or what this thing is I am feeling.
Dr. Allan Schwartz wrote a piece about the condition for the website Mental Help.
In this article he said there were four notable characteristics of alexithymia.
· Difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations.
· Difficulty describing feelings to other people.
· Limited imagination and, therefore, little or no fantasies and limited dreams.
· An unawareness of what is happening in their own mind and a very concrete way of
thinking.
He gave the example of one of his patients, writing, “Ultimately, her husband left her
and sued for divorce.
She was completely shocked.
Yet, she could never grasp the notion that her husband could be sexually frustrated.
She seemingly had no understanding of him at all.”
He tells us that some people believe that there is often a connection to autism, but
the jury is still out as to why this happens to many other people.
It’s also said to be found in people with Asperger's syndrome and PTSD sufferers.
Many veterans of the Vietnam war have been diagnosed as being alexithymic.
Others have said that it could be a neurological issue in which one side of the brain fails
to send information to the other side of the brain.
All you budding neuroscientists out there might know that the brain is a network of
neurons that pass information to each other.
You might have a gut feeling and activity in one part of the brain, but another part
figures out what that feeling is.
We might look at some animals, while they seem to experience great joy or sadness, do
they know what they are feeling?
As Live Science tells us, dogs might be able to interpret our feelings from social cues,
but that doesn’t mean they know what we are feeling.
The condition we are talking about today could be said to be similar to having the disposition
of a dog (not as bad of course), in that some of the people require social cues to know
what is going on in other people’s minds.
At the same time, they might not know exactly what they are feeling.
We might also add here that it goes without saying that if someone has had a very traumatic
brain injury then there is every chance this could affect their ability to understand emotions
or take that ability away from them completely.
But we are not talking about injuries today.
Some psychologists say that they think it’s not a purely neuroanatomical problem in which
parts of the brain are not functioning correctly, but it is a result of some kind of psychological
trauma.
A well-known French psychiatrist tells us that the condition can be a case of arrested
development.
After all, we are all sufferers of this at one point in our young lives and then we learn
to understand our and other people’s emotions.
He believes that alexithymia might occur in a person when they have “experienced overwhelming
emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity.”
So, what did they do?
They shut down shop, battened down the hatch, blocked out emotional representations from
their minds.
Studies have of course been done and we now have something called the Toronto Alexithymia
Scale.
What that means is that if you are at the bottom of this scale you might just have some
problems getting to know feelings, describe them, but if you are at the top you might
be like the man we talked about earlier that seems to have no idea what he is feeling.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote a paper on this phenomenon, stating in the
introduction that it can be related to “several psychological and pathological processes.”
It gives a long list of reasons why this might happen to people, based on a lot of research
that was cited.
Just some of the reasons why this paper says people might develop alexithymia are traumatic
memories, chronic pain, eating disorders, psychosomatic illness, depression, substance
abuse, hypertension, inflammatory bowel disease and get this, even Internet addiction can
bring on a case of not being able to identify your emotions.
The problem is, the condition hasn’t been studied enough and it’s not only hard to
understand where it comes from but it’s also sometimes difficult to put a person on
the correct place on the scale.
The paper goes onto say that cases have been popping up all over the world, but it seems
those cases, at least given as an example, are all after the year 2000.
Was this the year we started not knowing what we’re feeling, or has science just got a
grasp of it?
In an article called “The Most Important Personality Trait You’ve Never Heard Of”,
Psychology Today tells us that sometimes we are judged as having one of five personality
traits.
These belong to the “Five Factor Model” and are conscientiousness, openness to experience,
agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism.
It’s probably better not to have the last one, which basically means emotional instability.
Each of these categories also comes with sub-categories, and here the article brings in alexithymia.
We are told it was discovered by a Boston psychiatrist called John Nemiah some four
decades ago, and interestingly people with the condition were often labelled as being
boring.
Why was that?
Well, it’s because they couldn’t talk about their emotions because for all intents
and purposes they had none.
It’s not exactly exciting for an analyst when he asks, “How do you feel about your
father.”
“Dunno.”
“What do you feel when you look at this ink blot?”
“Dunno.”
“Have you ever felt resentment towards your sister?”
“Dunno.”
We are told it’s certainly not new, but more research has been undertaken since the
mid-90s.
We are told that people with a hardcore case of alexithymia are impervious to psychotherapy
because as we say, they can’t talk about what they are feeling.
It’s said these people usually have some kind of other psychological disorder such
as we have already mentioned.
Psychology Today tells us that many non-clinical (not suffering from any disorder) participants
have been measured on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and we don’t need to tell you that
some have it worse than others.
Perhaps some of you right now are thinking, yep, I often don’t understand what I’m
feeling or what others are feeling.
We are told that when it gets worse these people will often fear relationships and if
they do get in them will often experience problems due to their lack of understanding
of their or their partner’s feelings.
It’s said sufferers will only be able to explain experiences using language that is
“abstract, vague, general and diffuse” while people who hardly get onto the scale
will use language that is “vivid, specific, full of imagery, and evocative.”
We doubt many working novelists have alexithymia.
“Is there hope?”
That’s not our question, but a question asked on the forum, “Alexithymia: Emotional
Blindness.”
It was actually the most recent question asked in the Personal Experience part of the forum.
So, is there hope?
Let’s see what the answer was.
First of all, the person asking the question was a woman who had been married for 16 years
to a man who had developed Alexithymia.
She was told her husband, in his 50s, had this because of Asperger's Syndrome.
“I feel emotionally totally wilted and drained,” she said, about having a husband that can’t
feel anymore.
The advice given to her was to train him to feel, to get him to read books, to focus on
emotions.
It could take months or years, said the poster.
Another poster wrote, talking about her husband, “I used to think I was going mad before
we learned he had alexithymia.”
On another thread someone wrote, “I'm strongly Alexithymic.
That's just a fact.
I have blue eyes, that's also a fact.
… Would I like to change either?
Why?
What would be the point, when both things actually contribute towards me being who I
am?”
What’s interesting about this forum is that a lot of people think they have Alexithymia
but aren’t sure.
One person writes, “For the longest time, I thought I was borderline sociopathic, or
some form of autistic, but neither of those really fits.”
In an article in the Australian press, a doctor described how some “Alex” sufferers have
a word for people who do know what they are feeling, they simply call them “feelers.”
He talked about one person with the condition, saying, “If someone was upset about a family
member dying, she might think they had a defective tear duct.
It’s the reactions from other people that throw up challenges.
You can be judged harshly or quizzed.”
One person in that article said, “As a kid I always watched cartoons to try to understand
emotions.
If someone is angry this is how they act, if they’re happy, this is how they act.”
The BBC interviewed one guy.
He was married, had a good job, but just lacked feelings, even when around his family.
“I don’t miss people, as far as I can tell.
If I’m gone, and don’t see someone for a long period, it’s a case of out of sight,
out of mind,” he said of his family and friends.
He also said, “It takes a lot of understanding on my wife’s part…
She understands that my conceptions of things like love are a bit different.”
Another person in that article said he thought his alexithymia was related to childhood trauma,
when his drunk father had threatened to get a gun and kill his mother and him.
He said after that he was unable to understand his emotions.
Maybe that was the emotional block we talked about earlier.
What do you think it would be like living with this?
Do any of you think you have it?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video People Who Remember Everything.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.