alexithymia

It registers as a win in a moment where they feel profoundly out of control.

Furthermore, perpetrators exhibit much higher rates of what psychologists call alexithymia.

Alexithymia.

That is the clinical inability to identify or describe your own emotions, right?

It is.

So people who have high interoception and can manifest what it is do well, 'cause they can discharge it.

If you are autistic, for example, there is a condition that I am more excited by than I've ever been in terms of sort of, uh, professional interest I don't think gets nearly enough attention, I think is beginning to get to, and it's called alexithymia.

Alexithymia literally means in Greek, no words for feeling.

And I d- realized in a lot of my patients I was seeing who said, you know, "Your tent's not stiff," I realized that they were unable to tell me as to why they were tense, and we'd sort of ask for some emotional reasons, but most importantly, they couldn't name it.

So your parents teach you how to emotionally respond to the world.

Going through each person's reasons is how I reach a judgment.

I'm autistic, and I have something called alexithymia, which means I can tell I'm feeling something, but often not what.

Alexithymia is a trait that's common among autistic people like me, and my gut can barely tell me whether I'm happy or sad.

So if I were deciding on those late orders, going with my gut wouldn't be an option.

I trust my reasoning, and with Claude, the AI I use, I can now test my reasoning about as fast as most people go with their gut.

The automatic response in every context, including the private ones, until you've lost access to anything underneath it, even when access would be the thing that saves you.

Alexithymia is the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing your own internal states, and men score higher on it than women on average.

That's not hardwired into you.

It's shaped by a socialization process that systematically discourages boys from developing the internal vocabulary for emotional experience in the first place.

But Jesus wept.

There's a disorder called alexithymia.

Alexithymia.

Alexithymia.

And it's where you cannot name your emotions.

And we see it with men all the time.

There's a term called alexithymia, which apparently is common in autism.

Who knew? Just learned this recently, by the way.

Alexithymia is the difficulty identifying and describing your emotions.

So while I could feel everyone else's experience so intensely, what was I actually feeling inside? It could take me days to name it, if at all.

So bosses would assign the behavior they saw with what they believed it was, whether that be frustration or anger or irritation or defensiveness.

And I clearly am in this, uh, in this state phase.

Alexithymia is a three-pronged issue, more or less, right? Uh, trouble recognizing what I'm feeling, trouble modulating it up and down, and trouble telling it to others.

Now, in the world of, like, post-traumatic stress and things like that, we might call this emotional numbing, right? Where we're just calloused and kind of out of it.

And here's where the problem exists.

Yeah, and I mean, one more thing on that that I think is important for us as autistics is, you know, two things that make this more difficult, like acknowledging our emotion.

Alexithymia, which many of us experience this difficulty putting words to emotions.

And then interoception, which is...

Knowing how our body feels inside.