The term alexythymia was first used by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Peter Sifneos in an attempt to describe a problem shared by a large proportion of patients suffering from various stress-related medical disorders. Looking at the Latin roots for the word we discover that “alexy” means “no words, and “thymia” means “for feelings.”
It’s a dangerous state. If we have “no words for our feelings,” we are not in touch with our internal state until the subtle whispers have turned to painful screams within or around us. The more alexythymic we are, the farther out of balance we get before we even have a conscious clue that something is not quite right. For this reason, alexythmia is regarded as a dangerous precursor to nearly every stress-linked illness.
Additionally, when we are out of touch with ourselves, we are far more likely to get stressed about being stressed, or to get anxious about being anxious, and to have small imbalances escalate out of control into major crises. Losing our balance, we are more likely to set off a whole cascade of problems in the lives of others, and these impacts may echo for generations to come.
For many people the first encounter with the notion of alexythymia is a fierce wake-up call. They immediately recognize people in their own lives who fit the description, and they often silently wonder to themselves, “How well does this describe me?”
Alexythymia is most often transmitted to children from parents who are out of touch with their own feelings. It develops over childhood as we go to our parent saying, for example, that we are feeling hungry, and s/he negates our experience saying, “You can’t be hungry! You just ate a sandwich!” or telling our parent we’re “feeling cold”, and s/he responded by telling us, “No you’re not. You can’t be. It’s eighty degrees in here and you have your sweater on!”
When our authority figures make a habit of ignoring or negating our own deeply-felt experience, or when they lack the patience, skills, or caring to help us figure out what is really going on, they put us in danger of developing alexythmia.
When this happens early in our lives, we begin to ignore our feelings, confuse our needs, distrust our interpretations of our own deep personal experience, and thwart our development of self-balancing awareness skills necessary for knowing what we feel and describing what is true for us. Though we may come of age physically and assume our position as a “mature” adult in society, unless we heal this deficiency with ourselves, we are prone to be out of touch with what is going on within us and with other people, unknowingly pass this condition on to our own children, and perpetuate living our lives in a precariously unbalanced, and unmindful way.
Though in many settings people scoff with disdain at approaches that they describe as “touchy-feely,” there is considerable hard-nosed evidence to suggest that people who are out of touch with their feelings are especially vulnerable and at risk in the face of stressful change. And no matter how out of touch we may be, the warm, feeling creature of our bodies continues to be deeply affected by the experiences of our life, continues to pump out the biochemistry that heals or harms us, and keeps broadcasting loud and clear the intensity of its feelings and needs, even if we choose to ignore them.
Photo by Gecampbell
