Alexithymia -- Difficulty Feeling Emotions

Inferring, I do not think many people infer, they rather tend to assume. Things need to be extremely different for most people to realise something has changed. 

She says we need to use all senses and context as well as personal history including culture to be able to infer the emotional state of others. Thinking of how I deal with it, allistics can make a simple linear extrapolation with other allistics of their own culture. However try to put a british person with a chinese person and both emotional and cognitive empathy get a lot trickier! Allistics mainly project their own way onto the other which is also why they fail on autistic people as I regularily experience with my son. 

I think allistic people are better at inferring information to get the picture whereas autistic people need detail to form the picture 

I was just listening to an audiobook about memory and perception, it mentioned people who had been born blind and had an operation to make their eyes work as adults. One could only infer what a face even was because a voice came from it, of course he could not read emotions from facial expressions nor recognise people until they spoke. It didn't say if he eventually learnt to do either. Also could recognise capital letters as had been taught those by touch, but not lower case ones. And shapes. So yes, the brain had to learn how to interpret that sensory input.

So she says that allistic are guessing what others are feeling as well, they are just better because majority of them isn't alexithymic, am I right?

I have started to read her book (kindle sample available for free) and it starts with a nice scientific demonstration that it is impossible to infer emotions from other people based on their facial expressions. ;)  

I so agree with that:

If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave and deal with them. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is emotion.

It's clearly visible in young autistic kids

Thanks for posting!

As you inspired me further investigation  I just found this rather new interesting perspective that you might also like: nautil.us/.../

Maybe it is one of the difference between making sense from direct experience and from discourse in general. Real feelings always develop with direct experience don't they while discourse stimulate feelings by emulation and are never connected with reality I think.  

Would you remember which article that was please? What I observe in my son is a combination of not recognizing early inner body signs, feeling later (or allowing it to come later as I read you), then feeling very strong and longer each emotion (hours). He also developed each emotion one by one in infancy starting with the basic ones later than typical and in a precise order: disgust, anger, fear, surpise, while sadness and happiness came later and not that well defined when he started to develop secondary emotions: shame at 5, guilt at 7, confidence at 9, decepcion at 11 years old. With each new emotion he would experience a drop in self-confidence as if the world had change and he needed to reconsider everything or was scared it would reappear without being able to control them. Does anyone remember how they felt in infancy? Adding that the way he experiences shame for example is also different as what people usually name shame. Sorry for the long post, I tried to study links between sensory inputs, emotions and feelings but I still haven't found a good one and I see it is a central point to build self-control and self-esteem. 

 I was always 'told off' by therapists for being 'too good' at factually describing the events that have occurred but then not describing the way I felt, I would try but it would have been what I was thinking and apparently that wasn't the same thing, so it was very confusing. I didn't understand how I was supposed to look back on a past event and describe a feeling that I could barely identify then apart from 'bad or good' now years down the line, and yet I never heard the term Alexithymia until I was diagnosed in August this year, when it was said I probably had this, and why I might have been said to have BPD/Emotionally Intensity Disorder traits before, as if you can't tell you are starting having some feelings they get strong faster without being able to make any changes to the trigger causing them!

I don't think humans work when emotions are taken away, just leaving logic. I read about some poor chap who lost the ability to have emotions and he was unable to make a simple decision like which restaurant to eat dinner!

It was a therapist who pointed out to me that I struggle to notice my emotions too. I also have the feeling that the world might dissipate, although I'm not sure if it means the same for me as it might for you...

I have heard of the love languages, although I hadn't thought of applying it here.

I didn’t realise until 2021 that I had Alexithymia,  but it hasn’t been diagnosed, and I don’t think it needs to be. I’ve always had to look at what’s happening within ‘me’ to find out what might be wrong.  I also don’t feel some emotions as strongly as others, or maybe I do in other situations, but it doesn’t register. Even knowing if I’m unwell or not, I have to deduce from what I can and can’t do and be logical about it.

I was actually made aware of this around 26 by a therapist who noticed I had difficulty understanding my feelings. At the time I think he simply assumed it was due to a lack of parenting but I was only able to see him a few times due to finances.

Since, I started to simply attempt to express what was actually happening. How am I?  The world is still in tact and no accidents have occurred. Ready for the rain. I've had 2 excellent coffees and will hopefully finish this project.

Or I might use an analogy because I have all this vivid imagery in my head and have learned to extract from it: I feel like I'm falling into the sky with out a tree to hold onto. I feel like at any given minute everything around will turn to pixels and dissipate. 

Life is not confined to one feeling though. I've done a bit of work on this as it occurred to me something was wrong with the phrase Emotion vs Logic and discovered this was a bastardisation of Nature vs Reason and was simply supposed to be a bit of fun for sci-fi. What is even more interesting is to think about the symbiotic nature of the Passions, Our Intellect and the Psyche. Freud was famous for hijacking Greek Myths and exhumed the story of Eros and Psyche as a groundwork to this.

How are you feeling is a new bit of nuance in Western culture. And while it's used to affirm the individual experience, words aren't always how we express. There's a book for matters of relationships called the 5 Love Languages which help partners understand when they're being loved in other ways than words. Affirming that not everyone expresses a thing with words, which begs to question further expectations around understanding our emotions. It's not the only book, but as an example.

Back to applying words to feelings. I rarely can. I'd prefer an Emotions Wheel with matters of impact: feeling unprotected or feeling like I've won.

Yes, I can identify an emotion as positive or negative.  
it there are lots of people around I get overwhelmed by their presence. 
There isn’t an emotion called ‘peopled’ is there? 
By deduction I imagine that fear is the emotion behind it.

This also explains why I am sometimes triggered into a mode of self-defence against even innocent passers by.  
I occasionally have a primitive association of people with danger. 

for me it feels like a jumble I can't decipher on a spot, I can do it later, but it takes time..

So I only try to keep them contained so others don't see it.

Sometimes there is to much of course, or some feelings are harder to mask,

e.g. I get anxious and aggitated when people are pushing there view on me and I know it's not true

or awe I find it overpowering, I lose all control when I feel.it, I can only stand as if I was awestruck, maybe that's where the word originated.

In my case it feels pretty innate. Even if I try to feel the emotions, they're hard to find.

I wonder how much alexithymia is related to how our brains operate and how much, for people diagnosed as adults, is environmental.  Not trusting our own instincts due to masking and other people questioning our feelings ("oh it's not that bad...."don't be so silly")