Published on 12, July, 2020
Example 1: At my last psych appointment the pdoc said I looked happy. I didn't think I was.
Example 2: Was recently seen at main hospital emergency department because of chest pains. Tests were ok, but BP was higher than normal . Had to go for follow up the next day . Doctor said it had been raised because I was anxious. Apparently my pulse rate was fast. I hadn't noticed I was anxious.
I don't think it happens all the time ie I sometimes know when I'm anxious etc .
I struggle with differentiating between negative emotions in others - - eg I might recognise someone looks "off", but can't work out if it is angry/sad/ill/frustrated/annoyed etc.
Within myself I struggle to recognise a lot of emotions, or rather to realise I am having them when I am having them. My biggest "OMG" moment of realisation came in a conversation with my boss (this was about 18 months ago in the very early days of me thinking I had AS) when he just casually said something like "oh yeah I can tell the anxiety you have about..." and in my head I was going absolutely bananas at him "what, I'm not ****ing anxious, what the ...you saying that for mate" .. Didn't say anything to him. About a week later, it suddenly dawned on me that he was absolutely right, and there were several work situations I clearly had been anxious about. He had obviously noticed this, being NT, but I did not have a clue! It was a real "wow" moment in my head, and led to me then discovering about alexythymia.
I've posted this image before on another thread, but I have found it helps since I realised I had alexythymia.
I feel "neutral" most of the time. The only times I really "feel" anything is when I listen to music and I get hit with a lot of feelings all at once and also lots of memories. I have to be quite careful what I listen to. I have no idea how you separate out what "feeling" is related to what emotion, as they all sort of feel the same? I guess I'm still working through this. Up until recently I've just guessed at what I should be feeling when someone asks. What I mean is, if someone says "aren't you happy?" I have to think through the situation and decide if the person asking wants me to say yes or no. Sort of an analytical process of working out what the right answer is rather than genuinely feeling an emotion. (I assumed this is what other people do but I guess it's not)
That feelings wheel has led to some interesting thoughts and conversations in the last year or two. I was busy telling a therapist once that I could identify maybe 8 primary visceral emotions (I was listing more "primary" ones than a typical feelings wheel) and 22 secondary ones, and find it hard to discriminate between the tertiatry ones, and the therapist said something like "yeah most people struggle to identify more than a handful". So this left me thinking where the wheel comes from? It's like the wheel is fibbing to us about how many feelings you should be able to identify :-)
Anyway, I made my own :-)