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Testing for Alexithymia

Polaris302

Hi,

I'm very good at recognising the feelings of others, but I've always had difficulty identifying my own feelings.  I know when I'm feeling a strong emotion like anger, sadness or happiness, but most of the time I can't really tell what I'm feeling, or when I feel something and spend time trying to figure out what it is I'm experiencing.  I've seen blog posts mentioning Alexithymia, and I was wondering if there is a  test I could take online to confirm if I have it.

  • It was mentioned to me by a psychologist as I was having difficulty explaining hoti felt.

    On the Toronto scale I got 71, some of the questions are a bit subjective, I'm not confused about some feelings, I just don't have those feelings that I can describe.

  • in reply to Lotus

    I got 68 too.

    Question clarity is poor and I had to take time to think of an actual scenario and rewrite the question in my head so it made sense in that context before answering. Don't know if that skews the results. 

    When my assessor mentioned the term I read about it and it clicked why therapy has always been such a pointless, frustrating and sometimes painful thing.

    I tell therapist about some dramatic past experience. Therapist asks "how did you feel about that", and I literally can't tell them (beyond "it was a bit irritating"). Therapist gets annoyed that I'm not "cooperating properly" or says I have to "trust" them and "open up", basically accusing me of lying.

    I get irritated that they keep asking stupid questions about "feelings" over and over, when I've already told them "it was a bit irritating" and there isn't any more I can add.

  • in reply to Lotus

    I found the questions very difficult to answer. 

  • in reply to Tears_before_bedtime

    I've just taken the Toronto Alexithymia Scale test on the embrace autism website. I found it really difficult to answer a lot of the questions as I hadn't even thought about what they were asking. For example:

    1. "I am often confused about what emotion I am feeling" - I could say no as I don't feel confused, but that would suggest I am aware all the time of my feelings which I'm not. Most of the time I just feel neutral, if you asked what emotion I was feeling I'd say "none", I'm just ok. So I answered "neither agree or disagree"

    2. "It is difficult for me to find the right words for my feelings" - nobody ever asks me and I don't think about it, so I tried to remember when I've been upset and I would just say I felt upset or felt bad. So answered answered "agree"

    8. "I prefer to just let things happen rather than to understand why they turned out that way" - I don't understand this statement. I sometimes think about what actions led to a bad outcome, but my assessment doesn't consider emotions. "Neither agree or disagree"

     My result was a total of 68 which means alexithymia present, so perhaps that's why I don't understand some of the questions! My subtotal scores are:

    Difficulty describing feelings: 18

    Difficulty identifying feelings: 21

    Externally oriented thinking: 29

    (Externally oriented thinking is when someone focusses their energy on external events and tends to avoid focussing on internal experiences)

  • Yeah I don't know if I have it either. It wasn't mentioned in my assessment so I hadn't heard of it until a couple of years ago. I tried the online test which I scored highly on but I found the questions confusing. I don't know if I know my emotions, I don't know if I feel them because I have nothing to compare it to. I'd love to be neurotypical for a day just to be able to understand the difference in how I process the world. Autism is normal to me.

  • in reply to Tears_before_bedtime

     Thanks for the link !

    I've only been reading about Autism for past 5-6 weeks and several times have come across Alexithymia which seemed to fit me.  It wasn't specifically covered in my recent assessment, but I just got 72 on that test

  • My autism assessor said I had alexithymia, but I don't know how I feel about that... Ba-dum-tss

    Bad joke aside, the assessor really did say that I had it and I did this test that backed it up embrace-autism.com/.../

  • in reply to Bagpuss7

    the link psymed.info doesn't work anymore, it gives out error 404. I found a better one here: idrfocus.com/.../