Can Alexithymia Feel Love? The answer is yes, we can feel love. It might be harder to find the words to describe how you feel, but sometimes it can be easier to show love through actions. If someone with alexithymia feels and recognizes they are in love; it means the feeling is very strong and real.
Clinical experience suggests it is the structural features of dreams more than the ability to recall them that best characterizes alexithymia. Some alexithymic individuals may appear to contradict the above-mentioned characteristics because they can experience chronic dysphoria or manifest outbursts of crying or rage.
Alexithymia is a personality trait and not a mental health disorder. However, it co-occurs with many mental health conditions and forms of neurodivegence such as ADHD. Alexithymia is a broad term that means difficulty identifying and describing emotions. The term was coined by the psychiatrist Peter Sifneos in 1972.
People with alexithymia have difficulties recognizing and communicating their own emotions, and they also struggle to recognize and respond to emotions in others.
Although alexithymia is not a core feature of autism, recent studies have found varying degrees of this trait in 50 to 85% of individuals with ASD.
The prototypic person with alexithymia, however, is anxious, overcontrolled, submissive, boring, ethically consistent, and socially conforming, whereas the prototypic individual with psychopathy is anxiety-free, undercontrolled, dominant, charming, deceitful, and nonconforming.
Therefore, patients with depression exhibit higher rates of alexithymia than patients with other mental disorders (17, 18). The prevalence of alexithymia has been reported to be ~10% in the general population (19), and 7.3–29.9% in adolescents (20, 21).
It's common to occasionally have difficulty expressing what you're thinking or feeling. But regularly having trouble articulating thoughts or emotions may be a sign of a thought disorder. For example, being sleep-deprived can make it tough to think clearly and coherently express your thoughts.
Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by grandiosity, self-admiration needs, and empathy deficits (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). An emerging body of work suggests that narcissism is particularly associated with an alexithymia subtype (i.e., difficulties identifying feelings).
Alexithymia and Depression
A person with alexithymia is twice as likely also to experience depression. But at the same time, research shows that symptoms of alexithymia decline with a reduction of symptoms of depression. It is not clear whether alexithymia is a cause or consequence of depression.
Results show that compared to low-alexithymic individuals, individuals with high levels of alexithymia reported increased anger after interacting with out-group members. This corresponded to increased trait aggressiveness when interacting with out-group members. No differences emerged regarding behavioral aggression.
In one of his first studies in this field, he linked alexithymia, as measured with a 20-item checklist developed at the University of Toronto, with a lack of empathy. If you can't feel your own emotions in the typical way, it makes sense that you can't identify with those of others, either.
A functional impairment in the process of cognitive handling of emotions also has important consequences in interpersonal skills. The alexithymics are unable to empathize with others and this inability leads them to social isolation or, in alternative, to develop highly dependent and interchangeable relationships.
In particular, alexithymia was associated with being cold or distant in interpersonal relationships and feeling socially inhibited in social interactions. Alexithymia was also found to contribute to lower social support (Humphreys, Wood, & Parker, 2009) and lower affection for others (Hesse & Floyd, 2011a).
Several subsequent studies suggested that alexithymia might develop in response to overwhelming stress to avoid experiencing agonizing and unbearable emotions[97,98]. During the previous two decades, this “state or trait” issue has been assessed in several studies discussed in the next section.
Alexithymia may restrict the control of emotional states and may lead to negative affect, including depression and anxiety [10].
Alexithymia, while effectively isolating a person emotionally, does not always prevent them from getting along well enough to end up married. A spouse with alexithymia, though, will have a lot of trouble relating to their partner and expressing how they feel. This is extremely troublesome in a marriage.
Alexithymia may be related to the repeated experience of trauma and the nervous system's susceptibility to stress [13, 14]. Also, it may refer to a preexisting condition that increases the probability of developing PTSD. Multiple traumatization is another factor considered to increase the risk of alexithymia.
Alexithymia can amplify stress and its impact on emotional, social, behavioral and physical health. Clients with alexithymia have difficulty understanding, processing, recognizing and describing emotions.
Conclusions: These data reaffirm previous findings that dissociation fundamentally differs from alexithymia. Dissociation involves a change of one's sense, of self, whereas alexithymia reflects a cognitive state of externally oriented thinking with an inability to identify and report discrete emotions.