Alexithymia and Finding Refuge in Romance

I mostly operate in this very even, neutral space of mind. But under the surface, I know that there is a lot going on. That perhaps things are building up until they reach a tipping point and come spilling over. I’m in that place today, the tipping over place. Where emotions come crashing over me like a broken dam. But it’s not just one predominant emotion, it’s a confluence of many disconnected from a specific context or moment. There’s no making sense of it or finding meaning in this flood emotion, it just demands to be felt all at once.

There was a time when I would become completely overwhelmed and terrified by this flood of emotion. I was terrified because I had no idea what triggered it or when it would end. I was terrified because I felt sure that it was proof that there was something wrong with me. That I was broken and would never be whole. I tried to numb these confusing emotions using alcohol and for a while, it seemed to work until it didn’t. Until the numbness felt like a trap and I felt disconnected from myself.

I tried other things too.

 I went to therapy, read personal growth books, learned mindfulness, studied the neurobiology of trauma, determined to find a solution, to solve the problem that was me. Nothing worked. I couldn’t think my way out of my neurology no matter how hard I tried. In fact, the more I tried to fix myself, the more debilitating the experience became.

Sometimes it feels like my emotions don’t hold a ton of nuance or range. I’m either neutral which feels really good, it feels right, or I’m overloaded and that feels like a tightness in my throat, pressure around my diaphragm, and the urge to wail which I conceal with lots of heavy sighing and groans. I can describe the sensations, the somatic experience of it, but I can’t tell you if it’s grief, sadness, or something else.

The thing I know best and can almost always name is frustration.

It’s frustrating to go from neutral to overloaded with no warning. Frustration is what I feel when there is a breakdown in the systems that I create to function; when I can’t do my routines and the ability to transition between tasks or batches of work gets undermined because something unexpected has happened. It’s frustrating when someone takes away my ability to control my environment and what’s happening to me. But everything else. The weighted sensations in my body. I can’t put an emotional label on it, nor can I pinpoint what caused it. Was it losing my parking ticket as I was leaving the garage, the Grubhub driver who accused me of giving the wrong address when they got lost? The feeling of being in the theatre watching a contemporary circus surrounded by people who clapped, gasped, and laughed as the performers flipped, balanced, and tossed each other around the stage? Was it talking with a friend for the first time in a year or something else? Something that I’m not yet conscious of but my brain is working in the background processing all the bits of information it seems to collect unbidden.

I have no idea.

Trying to figure it out is exhausting. Feeling the sensations, and the emotional processing is exhausting. Emotions are only supposed to last 90-seconds if you don’t attach a narrative to them but this feels like a slow-building fire that has been spreading inside of me for days.

Alexithymia is a term used to describe a range of challenges with feeling, identifying, and expressing emotions. While the condition isn’t recognized in the DSM-5, recent studies have estimated that 1 in 10 people experience it. 

The greatest misconception about the condition is that it reflects a lack of empathy. But just because you cannot name your emotions doesn’t mean that you don’t feel them. I first learned about this condition when I was going through the autism diagnosis process.

I remember my doctor somberly explaining what my alexithymia score meant. It was undeniable evidence of how early childhood trauma had changed the functioning of my brain. It also gave clarity to my experience and relieved me of the shame I had hid for most of my life. Because while I might not be able to identify my emotions, I was fully aware of what the expected emotional response was in most social situations and felt deep shame that I could not access those feelings. So like most people with alexithymia, I performed the expected socially acceptable responses to hide the complete sense of void that I most often felt.

I often think about how ironic it is that someone who can’t recognize their own emotions has always been obsessed with the most emotional genre of literature to ever exist. How can I write characters who go through an emotional arc to achieve their happy ending when most days I go from neutral to overloaded?

I recently read, Rina Kent’s Empire of Hate. There’s a secondary character in the book who has alexithymia which he developed after suffering a traumatic brain injury. His family is horrified that he has become this “emotional less robot”. They try to hide his condition. His mother is distraught, and it reminds me of why I don’t often talk about this feature of my neurotype.

At least half of autistic people have alexithymia. People think we don’t feel anything. That we’re disinterested in emotional connection or lack empathy. But that’s not what alexithymia is.

I may not be able to notice my own emotions, but my mirror neurons operate on hyperdrive. If we’re in the same room, and another person is having a strong emotional reaction, I can feel it far more acutely than I can feel my own emotions. Over the phone not so much. But if I can see them, I can feel them. Imagine lacking a full vocabulary for emotions and then feeling what someone else feels? Of course, it will be confusing, seem irrational, imprecise, and impractical. It might elicit feelings of frustration. In those moments, feeling helpless to do anything else, I have a tendency to problem solve: to see the problem and address those leverage points where we can move out of the chaos of emotion to some meaningful harmonic resolution. But that is how I express love. That’s how I show care; through acts of service to make things right.

I guess that’s what I try to do when I’m writing a story about two people finding their way to each other and to a resolution of the internal conflicts holding them back. I love the structure of a romance novel; the four-act structure is so clearly defined. You know exactly where you’re meant to be at every point in the story. I love that there are tropes that reappear again and again. The familiarity, the patterns, and narrative repetition are so comforting in a world where I struggle to understand what’s happening inside me. In a world where when I seek to connect with others it’s likely, that they will misunderstand my expression of care. In such a world, romance novels are a refuge from the flood, a place where emotions become an instrument of change.