Difficulty in recognizing emotions

Hello, 

I hope someone could help me, I am trying to help a colleague or understand her more. I would like to ask if some of you who do have ASD or those who are in relationships with someone on the spectrum if you've seen this behaviour? That said person does do things or feel things however they are unable to recognize the emotional reason behind such actions? If that makes any sense. 

And if you have, do you have any tips for me to give this person to be able to cope or understand their emotions much better? 

Any feedback would be highly appreciated. 

Thanks 

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  • Psychologists call this difficulty "alexithymia", and it is known to be far more prevalent among autistic people, and for them, often more severe if they do experience it. If you search the internet for that word, you'll find many threads on different autism forums about it, and there are even a couple of dedicated forums.

    You're quite right that alexithymic people do have emotions, and they're not much different to anybody else's. The problem is with identifying which one you're feeling and being able to find the right language to describe it to people. You might think that you'd identify an emotion from how it makes your brain feel - but actually it doesn't work quite like that. Our body is often used as a messenger between the emotional bits of the brain and the bits that make us consciously aware of them.

    For example, you only know that you're stressed out because of the weird body sensations such as having a fluttery feeling in your guts and your heart rate rising - and for most people this is completely automatic. However, it seems that, for many autistic people, this "body messenger service" doesn't work quite right; maybe just because our body awareness isn't all that good. This can even lead to the very weird situation where somebody else can read the person's emotions from their physical reactions even though that person can't read the emotion for themself.

    I was identified as quite profoundly alexithymic when my autism was diagnosed, and the good news is that it can improved. I was taught by a counsellor how to pay more attention to how my body feels, and how to associate those body sensations with the emotions that are causing them. The second part is to talk through a situation with a sympathetic person to work out what kind of emotions a certain situation might be associated with - using a process of elimination, if necessary ("nope, can't be that one because I don't feel agitated" etc...) Even examples of similar emotional situations from TV and films (and, as I discovered, even kids' cartoons) can also help with piecing things together.

    That's exactly where sympathetic friends and colleagues like yourself can be a great help. Rather than pressing for a description which the person feels unable to give (it will get harder for them the more you push), act instead as a sounding-board so that they can work their way to the answer. It can be a slow process at first, and you must be careful not to bias their reading by prompting too much (it's more about listening without judgement than the talking), but my experience is that this can be a huge help. I doubt that I'll ever be as emotionally fluent as most people, but there has been a notable improvement in my relationships with the people around me since learning how to be an "emotion detective" like this.

  • where sympathetic friends and colleagues like yourself can be a great help. Rather than pressing for a description which the person feels unable to give (it will get harder for them the more you push), act instead as a sounding-board so that they can work their way to the answer. It can be a slow process at first, and you must be careful not to bias their reading by prompting too much (it's more about listening without judgement than the talking), but my experience is that this can be a huge help.

    I suppose it is difficult when they really don't want help and they choose to deal with things on their own by themselves and shut you out too but as you said, just respect their process. :) It's just very difficult when you care for someone and see that they are hurting as well. 

  • It's not necessarily that an alexithymic person doesn't want help or deep-down wishes to shut people out - in my experience, these are mainly side-effects of being alexithymic.

    Firstly, in order to have an intimate conversation about feelings with somebody, you need to know within yourself what it is that you're feeling and why. For people who have instinctive access to their emotional state, not having this implicit knowledge is probably very difficult to imagine - but it is far more profound than just "not being able to find the words". It's also common that the emotions about an event don't appear until long after the event itself - so it's hard for us make the connection between the two; and this can even affect how our memories of events get "recorded". I have had people say things to me like "it was really nice to see you enjoying yourself the other night" - and my first thought is "oh, was I?", even though I know I wasn't consciously trying to fake enthusiasm.

    The apparent defensiveness is actually quite easy to explain. Quite simply; "I don't know" is not an acceptable answer to the question "how do you feel?" in most situations - especially very emotionally charged ones. Since most people cannot imagine not having immediate access to their emotions, they always assume that "I don't know" can't possibly be the true answer. Unfortunately, there are no other rational explanations for this answer which are particularly positive! - we get accused of not caring, having something to hide, being passive-aggressive, and so on. When you are constantly accused of being a liar when you can't answer as people expect, becoming defensive as a matter of habit is not altogether surprising.

    The above problem doesn't just affect personal relationships. I have found that it can also be a big problem in therapeutic counselling - counsellors often incorrectly jump to the conclusion that an alexithymic patient is suppressing a trauma, or is being uncooperative because they won't invest in trying to overcome their mental health problems. The better ones, such as the wonderful person that I saw, realise the problem and work to improve the underlying alexithymia - but sadly there are too few professionals trained to work with autistic people with these kind of problems, so they try to fit us into a non-autistic mould, where "I don't know" is interpreted as "I don't want to tell you."

    That's why the attentive listening, and feeding back to the person what they're saying, can be so important - it helps us to believe that we're believed, and that when talking about our emotions we don't have to fit a "template" made for other people.

  • My little epiphanies

    I get thoughts appearing from nowhere from my subconscious, they arrive with an new idea to fix or an answer to a problem. 

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