Alexithymia: how does a reduced ability to experience feelings affect life?

When people are overwhelmed with strong emotions, everyone experiences them differently. Impulsive natures often redirect their fiery potential, trying to drown out the emotional impulse with physical activity. Individuals prone to melancholy express their feelings through creativity. Reserved and secretive people prefer to control their feelings and maintain external equanimity. The weak in spirit seek solace in dubious sources of peace. This is what approximately 90% of the population of our planet does.

But there is another 10%, and imagine, they don’t experience anything. Perhaps someone will think that these unusual people are real lucky ones, because fate protected them from suffering and heartache. However, at the same time, such individuals are deprived of the pleasant experiences that love, new impressions, joyful surprises and other events that paint life with bright colors give. In psychology, the inability to experience a wide range of feelings is called “alexithymia.”

Terminology, disease concept

Alexithymia is a psychological personality trait in which it becomes difficult to identify one’s own and others’ emotional states, the ability for fantasy, imaginative thinking, symbolization and categorization is reduced, which complicates the process of communication with other people.

Fact: the name of alexithymia uses the syllable “ti”, from the word “thymus”, since it is believed that the possible causes of its development are in the pathology of this endocrine gland.

Alexithymia is a term that was introduced in 1969 by the American, psychoanalyst P. Sifneos, as a factor provoking psychosomatic disorders. Literally translated as “lack of words to express feelings” and is characterized by a stable set of symptoms:

1. Replacement of emotions with bodily stimuli and sensations.
2. Incorrect recognition and incorrect description of experienced emotional states - both your own and someone else's.
3. Poor development of reflection and self-awareness.
4. Low level of fantasy.

Types of alexithymia

Alexithymics are not alike. Some may be aware of their emotions, but do not know how to translate them to the speech level. Others would be happy to express them, but do not feel the possible range of emotional colors. Based on the nature of such difficulties, it is customary to distinguish different categories, depending on the nature of emotional dysfunctions:

1. Pedagogical: poor emotional vocabulary.
2. Psychological: the presence of conflicting emotions or their repression; discrepancy between feelings and emotions and the “I-concept” of the individual.
3. Linguistic: standard speech descriptions of internal mental states.

Forms of alexithymia

The inability to express emotions, according to statistical studies, occurs in approximately 5-25 percent of the world's population. Some people are clearly alexithymic, while others have only certain symptoms. There are many methods for identifying alexithymia in a person, causing controversy in society.

The most common scheme is the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. It involves the need to answer a number of questions. In this case, the patient gives his answer, choosing one of several options. The level of manifestation of alexethymia is determined by calculating the scores of the person being tested.

The inability to express one’s feelings and emotions, that is, alexithymia, has two forms of manifestation:

• primary.
• secondary;

Primary , also known as congenital, is caused by certain developmental defects, the consequences of negative influences during pregnancy or already during childbirth, illnesses suffered in infancy. How to learn to express your feelings with a primary form of the disorder? This type of alexithymia is extremely persistent, so treatment is difficult and difficult to cure.

Secondary. This emotional illness manifests itself in older people who may be somatically completely healthy. Signs of alexithymia develop against the background of a nervous breakdown, severe shocks, psychological trauma or neurological illnesses. Many psychodiseases, such as autism or schizophrenia, for example, are often accompanied by the presence of alexithymia in the patient.

The concept of alexithymia is described in detail in many psychological publications. They examine, among other things, the impact of upbringing on the development of symptoms of the disease. It can be:

• social stereotypes;
• imposed norms of behavior;
• prohibitions on showing emotions in public;
• irrational methods of influencing a child’s psyche.

All this leads to the fact that a mature child, already a fully grown and independent person, cannot describe his emotional state.

How are emotions born from physical sensations?

What is the main difficulty of “emotional muteness”? Why can't you experience emotions? Emotions are born at the biochemical organismal level. When a person is angry, he feels a rush of blood to his temples; when he is scared, he feels a rapid heartbeat and numbness in his limbs, etc. Based on the sensations, a person attributes them with a negative or positive meaning and associates them with the image of specific emotions: sadness, happiness, pity. In order for emotions to be brought “out into the outside world,” they must be transferred from the “emotional” right hemisphere to the speech center located in the left hemisphere. When this process of brain “communication” is disrupted, a person is faced with the fact that he does not understand the meaning of emotions, does not know how to verbally express them and convey them to another person.

Fact: alexithymics perceive the emotional behavior of a person with a healthy emotional-sensual sphere as inadequate.

Diagnostics

This phenomenon has so no clear boundaries that it can easily replace other independent diseases or temporary conditions, such as depression, mental trauma, schizophrenia, or simply a low level of cognitive development. Therefore, it is very important to have a valid diagnostic tool. The most commonly used is the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (improved TAS-20), validated in 12 languages, consisting of 20 questions, three factors that reflect the key components of alexithymia:

1. Difficulty identifying feelings (TID).
2. Difficulty in describing your feelings (TOCH).
3. Externally oriented thinking (EOT), which also indirectly reflects the characteristics of imagination.

The Russian version uses the TAS-26 scale (the first, imperfect version of the questionnaire, consisting of 4 factors), which is not completely reliable, since it has not been fully validated.

The problem of alexithymia

Modern science is still searching for an answer as to whether alexithymia can be distinguished as an independent pathological phenomenon or as a symptom complex accompanying other conditions, which any healthy person can encounter in destructive circumstances. Alexithymia is a phenomenon so ambiguous that it is interpreted as:

• A form of defense mechanism.
• Delayed or reverse developmental changes (cognitive and emotional).
• Sociocultural phenomenon.
• Neurophysiological pathology.

Statistics

According to statistics, today the approximate number of people susceptible to this disorder ranges from 5 to 23% of the total population. The gender distribution is not in favor of men; they are more likely to suffer from this disease than women, since even in childhood, parents teach future defenders to be strong, firm, and not to show excessive emotionality.

Causes of alexithymia

Constitutional factors: genetic congenital malfunctions leading to dysfunction of areas of the brain responsible for the perception and reproduction of emotional stimuli and reactions; deficiency of the right hemisphere; trauma, brain tumors.

Social factors:

• Violation of emotional communication between mother and young child, suppression of emotions, prohibition on their expression.
• Low educational, cultural, status level of development.
• Some cultures prohibit the open expression of emotions and feelings, preferring emotional restraint and coldness.

Psychological concept of alexithymia: the appearance of post-traumatic reactions (emotional “numbness”, ignoring past events, poor communication and forecasting situations).

Fact: Alexithymics have been surgically found to have an abnormal density of neural connections, which impedes the process of transmitting impulses between the hemispheres.

Symptoms

The presence of certain characteristic manifestations of emotional and unemotional types makes it possible to identify alexithymia in a person. Many people mistakenly believe that alexithymic is characterized only by emotional signs. In practice, they also cover other areas:

• Difficulty in perceiving and expressing a person’s feelings and thoughts. No, no one is saying that alexithymics don’t experience emotions at all. On the contrary, they have the full range of emotions, like any other person. But, unlike them, alexithymics are not able to describe how they feel at one time or another. Against this background, problems arise with the perception of emotions displayed by others. To put it simply, it is extremely difficult to communicate emotionally with alexithymics, since they may not understand you at all. Due to this peculiarity of the disease, communication problems arise, which leads to a gradual renunciation of friends, acquaintances and even relatives. Alexithymics prefer loneliness and a solitary lifestyle.
• The problem is with fantasy. People with alexithymia have limited imagination, making them virtually unable to do any work that requires creativity. Some of them fall into stupor or panic when the need arises to imagine or come up with something.
• Rare presence of dreams. This directly follows from the previous point. Since alexithymics are unable to imagine and fantasize, they practically do not dream. If dreams appear, then they mainly represent ordinary, everyday activities that accompany his real life. A person cannot see something non-existent, previously unseen, or simulate an unusual situation in a dream.
• Clear expression of emotions, structural thinking, predominance of logical conclusions and expressions. Such people cannot dream or have their head in the clouds, as they say. There is no fantasy. Some may call this a positive thing, since this way a person is not distracted by dreams, but strictly moves towards a given goal. But in fact, it is difficult for any person without dreams and fantasies. Alexithymics specifically express and describe problems and clearly present arguments.
• Distrust of intuition. Most alexithymics do not trust intuition at all, or completely deny the fact of its existence.
• Bodily sensations instead of emotions. A person with alexithymia expresses all emotional experiences with the body. In other words, when they try to ask him about feelings, he basically describes what his body is feeling at the moment - discomfort, pain, warmth, pressure, etc.

Alexithymia: a psychological problem

It is based on cognitive, personality and affective defects. Alexithymia is a complex of disorders in psychology that complicate the adequate process of interaction with society. An individual suffering from a disorder has a number of destructive characteristics:

• A person does not perceive, does not adequately express his own feelings and does not understand others, but is prone to uncontrollable outbursts of affect; internal experiences are perceived in the colors of indignation, irritability, fatigue, emptiness.
• Alexithymia as a psychological problem leads to the fact that a person’s cognitive sphere is characterized by poverty of imagination, a predominance of visual-effective thinking, along with the inability to categorize and symbolize objects and images of the surrounding world.
• Pronounced infantilism of the individual, primitive life values ​​and needs, low self-reflection.

Such a psychological picture makes interaction with people conflicting, and the holistic perception of life - meager, gray, pragmatic, without any creative approach to it.

What is alexithymia?

Literally – what is alexithymia in psychology, it is the inability to talk about your feelings, emotions, experiences. A person cannot formulate them and, moreover, even understand what he is feeling at the moment: fear, joy, surprise, hatred or love. As a result, he cannot recognize the emotions of other people and adequately respond to everything that happens around him.

Thus, alexithymia is a disorder of empathy in psychology. A person finds himself in forced isolation, without actually leaving society. Alexithymia is, in simple words, the patient’s inability to create communicative connections, communicate, and empathize with other people. This process can be triggered by natural factors or be the result of upbringing, as well as the behavior of the patient himself.

The term alexithymia was coined by Harvard psychiatrist Peter Sifneos. He noticed this emotional deafness and became interested in the problem.

Psychiatrist Peter Sifneos
At the moment, this phenomenon is not officially recognized as a mental illness and does not have its own classification in the world registry. This issue is addressed by psychoanalysts and psychologists in the cognitive-behavioral field. According to the concept, there are two types of ailment: primary and secondary alexithymia. Their signs and manifestations will be described in more detail below.

Alexithymia, as a psychological problem, can be congenital; it accompanies some types of autism, disorders of brain development, or is a consequence of perinatal (intrauterine) injuries. It happens that the condition can manifest itself in mature people, as a consequence of psychotrauma. More often this happens to men whose occupation is associated with risk or due to a specific upbringing.

Emotional contact, the perception of one’s own and others’ emotions, is established in the first year of a child’s life. The baby learns to express feelings and recognize them in adults. He tries to demonstrate his reactions and receive an adequate response. This is how the child learns his emotional nature. If he is deprived of this opportunity, then, like the Mowgli child who is unable to master speech, the alexithymic child does not understand the language of emotions.

Often the phenomenon of alexithymia appears as a result of a certain lifestyle. For some reason, a person hides any of his experiences, and the ability to recognize emotions atrophies over time as unnecessary. The military, security forces and other reserved people of similar professions can suffer from this. They are forced to wear a constant expression and maintain an equanimity. If you limit a child’s ability to express his feelings, this can lead to the development of this disease.

Alexithymia, psychosomatics: research

Numerous data debunk the belief that all psychosomatics are necessarily alexithymic. Only 25% of patients were distinguished by changes in the affective sphere, while the remaining patients could demonstrate their emotional communication absolutely normally. Alexithymia, the definition of which we are considering, is simply a frequent accompaniment of psychosomatic diseases. It is not identical to them and does not have cause-and-effect relationships with them (G. Engel).

Studies of alexithymia (neuropsychological experiments) have shown that in the cortical centers responsible for self-awareness, conscious understanding of emotions is difficult due to a lack of gray matter in them (Görlich-Dobre); and in the centers of the cortex responsible for attention, a deficiency was found, which is why the brain does not seem to register the presented graphic emotions at all (André Aleman).

During the experiment, alexithymics can correctly identify the main groups of emotions (joy, happiness, sadness, fear, etc.), but in real life this process is more complicated and instead of specific emotions they name vague uncomfortable bodily sensations (McDonald).

When studying the level of self-reflection and the ability to fantasize, the sociocultural reason for the appearance of emotional deviations was confirmed: people with alexithymia had a low level of education and social status in general (R. Borens).

Alexithymia

Medical psychologist, State Budgetary Institution Scientific and Practical Center of MSR named after L.I. Shvetsova

Rokitskaya Inna Borisovna

1. What is alexithymia?

Alexithymia is a phenomenon of impaired recognition of one's own emotional state. Sometimes this pathology is called emotional deafness, and a person with alexithymia is called callous and insensitive. Alexithymia is not a medical disease.

The term “Alexithymia” was introduced into psychiatry by P. Sifneos . Today, the definition of alexithymia has moved from psychiatry to psychoanalysis and cognitive behavioral psychology.

Alexithymia is a person’s inability to adequately express their own emotional experiences and correctly interpret other people’s expressions of feelings.

Alexithymia is a specific personality characteristic manifested by difficulties in understanding and verbally describing:

• own emotional disturbances and the emotions of those around you
• differentiation of bodily sensations
• distinguishing experiences
• decreased ability to symbolize and fantasize
• focusing mainly on external aspects
• inability to pay appropriate attention to internal experiences
• inclination towards a utilitarian, concrete-logical thought process
• emotional response deficit

P. Sifneos compiled a clinical picture of alexithymia, the main symptoms of which were:

• a person's difficulty in detecting and differentiating his feelings;

• difficulties in separating physiological sensations and emotional experiences;
• poorly developed imagination and lack of creativity;
• poorly developed intuitive thinking;
• high level of development of logical thinking, analytical mind;
• focus on events in the external world rather than the internal;
• predisposition to the occurrence of psychosomatic illnesses;
• stereotypical thinking.
• a person’s tendency to reason and try to find a rational explanation for everything;
• high resistance to stress, based on the habit of ignoring strong emotional shocks;
• tendency to loneliness;
• lack of empathy;
• poorly developed self-regulation and self-control skills;
• predisposition to the development of addictive behavior;
• systematically repeated failures in love

1. Causes.

The reasons for the formation of alexithymia are unclear today. Alexithymia, as a type of emotional disorder, can be primary and secondary. It is believed that the primary form of the deviation in question is difficult to psychocorrect. The first form of deviation is due to:

• genetic predisposition;
• infection of the fetus with infectious diseases during intrauterine development;
• intrauterine pathologies of brain and nervous system development;
• birth injuries.

The secondary form develops:

• as a consequence of depression or prolonged stress
• experienced psychotrauma,
• schizophrenia
• neurosis
• represents a denial of the existence of emotions.

In addition, secondary alexithymia and addictive behavior may be the result of errors in raising a child. The disorder is based on psychological defense mechanisms: denial, suppression, repression, dissociation. Experiences in this case turn into psychosomatic symptoms and mental disorders.

It is difficult to cope with this type of alexithymia on your own, but a psychotherapist can choose effective treatment.

Corrective work aimed at secondary alexithymia can be effective.

Alexithymia can be a permanent personality trait, or it can be a temporary reaction to depression or anxiety. If this is a human trait, then its development begins in adolescence. If you do not teach a child to talk about how he feels, how he expresses it, then he will not learn to empathize. And parents often not only do not ask the child about his feelings, but, on the contrary, teach them to hide them in every possible way, demonstrating appropriate behavior by their own examples.

This phenomenon indicates that a person is closed to new experiences and is focused on negative experiences. People with alexithymia are more prone to depression and the development of psychosomatic diseases than others, and the course of their illnesses is, on average, more severe than other patients.

Alexithymia can also be a characteristic sign of a severe, ongoing stressful situation, to which a person has already become accustomed and evaluates it as normal.

1. Signs

Firstly, there is difficulty in perceiving and expressing one’s own emotions. Such individuals feel the entire emotional spectrum inherent in people, but are not able to describe what they feel in words. As a result, they have difficulties in understanding the emotional reactions of others, which often provokes enormous difficulties in communicative interaction. Therefore, gradually, individuals with this deviation develop a desire for loneliness.

Having highlighted the signs that the concept of alexithymia includes, the negative impact of this phenomenon on a person’s life becomes obvious. If there is no processing of emotions (and in this disorder there is none), then it is appropriate to talk about chronic stress.

The impact of the disease on a person and his quality of life manifests itself in many aspects.

• Constant muscle tension, leading to distortion of posture and changes in the functioning of internal organs.
• Changes in hormonal levels. The endocrine system continues to respond to events in the surrounding reality by releasing certain hormones into the blood, regardless of whether a person is aware of his emotional state or not. The concentration of the hormone in the blood during a stressful situation increases, but there is no reaction from the brain - the nervous system is depleted, the body does not rest.
• Mental abnormalities. The disease often leads to anorexia or bulimia, insomnia, depression and increased personal anxiety, schizophrenia and psychopathy, and addictive behavior.
• Pathology interferes with effective communication and the formation of healthy interpersonal relationships. Social contacts of a person with this disorder become scarce and short-lived. Communication partners get the impression of such people as cold, indifferent, distant

Specific characteristics of people with alexithymia:

• inability to fantasize;
• rather poor dreams;
• schematic, rigid thinking;
• excess social relations;
• projecting one's feelings onto the feelings of others;

The world of an alexithymic person is sad and joyless, since one of the consequences of this deviation is the poverty of life.

1. Manifestations and symptoms.

Alexithymia, as a type of emotional disorder, is a functional specific feature of the nervous system. The intellectual sphere of the individual with alexithymia is not impaired, rather the opposite.

Research on alexithymia shows that approximately 20% of citizens have manifestations of alexithymia. People with alexithymia are practically unable to experience empathy; it is difficult for them to empathize with others. But they are not soulless egoists or insensitive people. Individuals with this disorder simply do not understand how this is done. Therefore, it is easier for them to avoid communication or get away with any familiar phrase.

Usually alexithymia manifests itself in this way:

• You have “no words” to express your feelings
• You find it difficult to identify an emotionally charged situation that is significant for your inner mental life
• Unable to explain, tell what is happening to you at the level of feelings
• You rarely have dreams and they are dim and fragmentary.

Alexithymia is closely related to the development of psychosomatic diseases. Individuals with this disorder often confuse emotional worries with bodily sensations. As a result, when asked about their feelings, they are more likely to describe bodily sensations, for example, “it hurts, it pulls, it pinches.”

• People suffering from alexithymia will not notice the reason for the development of a bad mood, negative feelings, until something hurts them: head, stomach, heart, etc. Comfort and positive feelings for such people are also associated with bodily joys, most often with food.
• People suffering from alexithymia may find it difficult to form close relationships. After all, they not only cannot explain to their loved one how they feel, but they are also unable to recognize the feelings of other people. Empathy - tuning into the feelings of another person - is not given to them. Therefore, misunderstanding and alienation often reign in their communication with loved ones.
• Alexithymic individuals have fantasies and dreams that are poor in content; it is difficult for them to convey their bodily sensations in words—contact with their own mental sphere seems to be difficult; There is tension in posture and movements, poor facial expressions, robotic activity, and a tendency towards the development of hypochondria .

According to a number of observations, alexithymia occurs with a particularly high frequency in people who are overweight, and in these cases it is usually combined with depression.

• For alexithymic individuals, food intake acts as a kind of internal regulator of feelings of tension. Alexithymia is considered as a factor that not only predisposes to obesity, but also complicates the possibility of losing excess weight.
• A tendency towards a decrease in positive emotions and joyful events and at the same time the severity of feelings such as anger, sadness and hostility characterize alexithymic patients with arterial hypertension resistant to treatment.
• In patients diagnosed with coronary heart disease, alexithymia occurs in 31-49% of cases.
• Overweight, diabetes mellitus
• Smoking and alcohol abuse are more common in alexithymic patients with coronary heart disease, and therefore alexithymia is considered as one of the risk factors for the development of this disease.
• If alexithymia occurs in patients with brochial asthma, then such patients require longer hospitalizations.

In the emotional sphere , it manifests itself as an inability to accurately recognize and describe one’s own emotional state and the emotional state of other people (focusing more on external events than on internal experiences).

In the personal sphere, alexithymia manifests itself in a reluctance or inability to reflect, which, in turn, leads to a simplification of life orientation, impoverishment of relationships with the outside world, and sometimes to some infantilism.

In the sphere of thinking, a person prefers to use visual-effective thinking rather than abstract-logical thinking, does not use the possibilities of his imagination, as evidenced by the lack of inclination to dreams and fantasies.

Alexithymics are unable to cope with themselves due to a lack of emotion management skills, which causes the displacement of emotional sensations from consciousness. But repression does not mean complete absence. All this together leads to the inability to relieve accumulated tension and anxiety. Alexithymics, feeling experiences and not realizing the reasons for their occurrence, consider such experiences as a symptom of some disease.

In addition, there is a theory that describes the dominant role of upbringing in the formation of the deviation in question. So, for example, when stereotypes of “male behavior” are imposed on a child in society, that is, they limit emotionality, prohibit them from showing their emotions, constantly repeating the well-known story “men don’t cry”, growing up, he will absolutely have difficulties in expressing emotions. This disease is more common in men.

1. Diagnostics and correction.

The first step is diagnosing alexithymia. Treatment of alexithymia should begin with determining its type. As a diagnostic tool, psychologists use a short TAS test with closed-ended questions, developed by the Toronto School of Alexithymia. Quantitative processing of test results makes it possible to fairly accurately judge the presence or absence of a given mental disorder in a client. This method for diagnosing alexithymia has a simplified version for children.

When experts think about how to treat alexithymia, they consider, first of all, the age of the patient.

• Methods of working with alexithymia in children are art therapy and sand therapy .
• Hypnosis and Gestalt therapy can be used when working with adults .
• The effectiveness of treatment depends on the ratio of hormones in the body, so hormonal drugs are additionally prescribed.
• Also, much attention is paid to the development of imagination, as it helps to expand the range of emotional experiences.

There is no reliable data on the effectiveness of drug treatment today. Most doctors prescribe benzodiazepine tranquilizers to patients with panic attacks that develop simultaneously with alexithymia. At the same time, the most positive results come from an integrated approach , aimed not only exclusively at psychosomatic symptoms, but also at relieving psycho-emotional stress, depression and anxiety. Psychosomatic ailments that developed as a result of this deviation are also subject to correction. Since there is a connection between alexithymia and the occurrence of psychosomatic illness. Alexithymia also affects the course of concomitant illnesses. It is very important to properly balance metabolism, hormone production and the immune system.

1. Methods for preventing alexithymia

Prevention of alexithymia should begin in childhood. It is based on proper upbringing: parents should not prohibit their child from showing feelings. Ways and methods of working with alexithymia do not always make it possible to correct the deep structures of the psyche

The limitation in the ability to understand oneself, associated with poor use of reflection abilities, becomes a significant obstacle to understanding what is happening, to the possibility of a holistic view of one’s life. After all, reflection makes it possible to look at oneself from the outside, to realize the meaning of one’s own life and activities, allows one to see them in a temporary relationship, to make a semantic connection between the present and the past and future, which allows a person to create and maintain inner harmony, to change one’s inner world in a necessary way and not to be completely at the mercy of the situation.

• Reflection is one of the mechanisms of semantic self-regulation, therefore it is a source of freedom and stability of the individual, his self-development. This is a conscious form of semantic regulation, which differs from the unconscious mental automatisms we have acquired in the process of life and development.
• Self-regulation allows a person to change in accordance with changing circumstances of the external world and the conditions of his life, supports the mental activity necessary for human activity, and ensures the conscious organization and correction of his actions.

Alexithymia is the result of poor development of the emotional component in the personality structure. Often this illness becomes the root cause of serious mental disorders. People with this mental phenomenon have difficulties in building effective interpersonal relationships. They feel that their life could be better, but they don't know what to do to make it happen. Psychologists and psychotherapists can help regain the lost ability to enjoy life. Don't be shy to ask for help.

Alexithymia as a risk factor for the development of psychosomatic disorders

The idea of ​​a connection between the inability to describe and express one’s feelings and the appearance of psychosomatic disorders, according to P. Sifneos, has a fairly logical explanation. Although an alexithymic person does not identify emotions, he still experiences them, accumulates them, but cannot express them. Then the body takes on this task and with physiological symptoms (“choosing” any organ) reports mental discomfort.

There are two views on the process of development of psychosomatic diseases (according to Neimiakh):

1. “Denial” (inhibition of the affective sphere).
2. “Deficiency”: the absence of certain mental functions that reduce the ability to reflect, fantasize and symbolize needs. Such changes usually cannot be treated or reversed.

With alexithymia, only physical sensations in the body are constantly recorded, and emotions could play the role of distraction from focusing attention on individual organs, which, in turn, can give rise to inspired psychosomatic pains and ailments.

Psychological portrait of an alexithymic person

Alexithymia is a mental condition in which the potential for recognizing, feeling and adequately expressing emotions is very reduced. 10% of “cold” people is just an approximate figure that researcher Rebekah Brewer released after her sociological experiment.

This deviation is not a psychiatric diagnosis. It exists separately or appears as a concomitant symptom of depression, schizophrenia, PTSD, Asperger's syndrome, and other disorders. Not everyone with alexithymia is aware of its existence. If a “cold” person comes to psychotherapy, then most often the complaints are not related to emotional detachment. This quality is perceived by him as a character trait, nothing more. It is difficult for an alexithymic to build personal relationships and make friends. He is unlikely to be considered the life of the party, since he is incapable of empathy and identification with his interlocutor. This does not mean that he has no chance at all for family happiness. There will simply be no passion in the relationship between the spouses, and the children will feel the emotional lack of the parent. A “cold” person does not tolerate strong emotions from others. Especially when it comes to work, where it is important to demonstrate such qualities as sober thinking, composure, balance and logic.

Outwardly, the behavior of a “cold” person differs from others. Here are its main features:

• difficulty defining and articulating “how do I feel in situation X?” and “how does the other person feel in situation X?”;
• communication problems, loneliness;
• inability to empathize;
• absence of violent reactions, rash actions;
• complete or partial absence of dreams;
• inability to fantasize, weak desire for creativity;
• excess weight as a result of overeating;
• replacing feelings with bodily sensations.

The most interesting thing is the last point. Not endowed with the ability to identify their feelings and experience them, alexithymics define them as a physical ailment. For example, the ephemeral concept of “butterflies in the stomach” is interpreted by a “cold” person as hunger. Falling in love, accompanied by increased heartbeat, sweating, and discomfort, suggests thoughts of a disease that urgently needs to be treated. It is for this reason that “cold” people refuse love and break off relationships at the moment when its typical signs appear. For this reason, they are often called cynical and callous.

On the plus side. The emotional detachment and mental stability of “cold” people helps them more easily cope with losses, solve complex problems, make informed decisions, and realize themselves in professions that require endurance, perseverance, attentiveness, composure and prudence. Unburdened by unnecessary worries, they have every chance of success in their careers.

Treatment, reduction of alexithymic manifestations

Correctional work in a group setting involves a step-by-step structure, but remains ineffective:

1. Relaxation (autogenic training, psycho-gymnastics, music therapy).
2. Development of non-verbal methods of communication.
3. Verbalization of internal speech (“internal speech subtractor”, according to N. Sendifer).

A hindrance is the inability of alexithymic people to voice their feelings and emotions, and to perceive the correctional situation as a meaningful and interesting process. Such an attempt is similar to teaching several foreign languages ​​at once to a person who does not understand a word of any of them.

A modified version of psychodynamic therapy, where the emphasis is on the safety of demonstrating one’s emotions and feelings, was able to produce clear progressive results. In practice, this model of therapy resembles the interaction of a mother with a child, which explains, interprets, supports and gradually leads to increased personal maturity.

The goals of such treatment are to guide and help patients:

1. Convey and explain the essence and reasons for such unemotional interaction.
2. Learn to identify similarities between your emotions and the emotions of other people.
3. Distinguish between physiological sensations and emotional reactions.
4. Teach emotional sensitivity and eliminate unproductive ways of managing your affective sphere.

An important condition for treatment is the absence of anxiety, which is guaranteed by the accepting and supportive position of the psychotherapist.

Signs of alexithymia

The clinical picture of the phenomenon of alexithymia, the symptoms and signs of which were examined by the same Professor Sifneos, is as follows:

• Problems recognizing one's own feelings, emotions, experiences;
• Problems with the separation of physical sensations and the emotional sphere;
• Undeveloped imagination, lack of any creative inclinations;
• Weak intuition;
• Above average logic and analytical skills;
• A person pays attention to external events, ignoring what is happening inside himself;
• Predisposition to psychosomatic phenomena;
• Stereotypical thinking;
• The desire to look for a rational explanation for everything that happens;
• Resistance to stress, due to the habit of not noticing possible emotional shocks;
• Introversion (tendency to loneliness, self-isolation);
• Emotional callousness, lack of empathy.

Treatment prognosis

Psychotherapeutic treatment for alexithymia can last for years. The disappointing fact is that not all alexithymics are responsive to treatment, and there is a possibility that some patients will not respond to these treatments. An important condition remains the client’s strong desire and motivation to gain emotional sensitivity. Outside the therapeutic room, a person must work hard on himself independently: develop his creative abilities, join the communicative, sensory, vibrant world of people, interact with them, responding to their emotions.