Alexithymia, emotional awareness, and alienation
Thursday July 13, 2023.
What is alexithymia?
Alexithymia, a state of mind characterized by difficulties in identifying and articulating emotions, often coexists with neurodiversity. It’s estimated that with around half of the neurodiverse experience alexithymia (and I strongly suspect they are overwhelmingly men).
This lack of conventional emotional awareness poses a significant challenge in neurodiverse marriages, as it profoundly impacts his neurotypical spouse.
On the other hand, sustained emotional nuance and sophistication is the hallmark of the high-level neurotypical.
What Do I Mean by Emotional Awareness?
In contrast to individuals with alexithymia, neurotypicals possess an innate ability to instinctively recognize and understand nuanced emotion. Emotions, for the neurotypical, are an effortlessly communing with concurrent physical sensations, feelings, and contexts, enabling an intuitive, but reliable, grasp of their current emotional state.
This emotional awareness allows the neurotypical to not only notice physiological responses like a racing heart, quickened breath, and a jittery body, but to also to extract emotional information from the noticing.
Neurotypical humans effortlessly navigate the vocabulary of emotion, accurately discerning various levels of distress and distinguishing between dismay, apprehension, frustration, unease, insecurity, nervousness, terror, horror, and so much more.
How emotional awareness recruits language
Such awareness of emotional complexity facilitates the use of language and the verbalization of our internal experiences. Furthermore, in the absence of alexithymia, we can easily differentiate between emotions that share similar physiological sensations.
For example, we can discern the difference between feeling jittery with a racing heart and fast, shallow breathing due to excitement rather than as a result of the onset of fear or stress.
The nuances of emotional language have different levels of significance and meaning for a neurotypical wife, as opposed to her Neurodiverse husband. When an ND husband manifests alexithymia, his ability to comprehend and empathize with his wife's emotional experience.
Her neurodiverse husband can become frustrated in his inability to imagine, posit, hypothesize, or embrace his wife's emotional perspective.
This is because his brain struggles with recognizing and identifying emotions within himself. It becomes frustrating to compare one’s feelings with your spouse…especially when her emotions seem indistinguishable and chaotic.
When a neurodiverse marriage is struggling, the neurotypical wife often relies on her rich repertoire of emotional language to convey her sense of deprivation. She strives to be clear and explicit with her ND husband.
She knows in her heart that connection and understanding are fostered through empathy. She earnestly communicates how she is feeling ignored, isolated, discarded, devalued, unseen, and misunderstood. She expresses herself through tears, sobs, pleas, and even emotional outbursts. She employs rich metaphors in an attempt to help him grasp her emotions. However, no matter how vividly she is able to describe her emotional experience, her efforts are often met with criticism, or withdrawal.
The pervasive use of metaphor is problematic…
“I feel like I’m walking on eggshells.”
"I'm drowning. It’s really like I’m always drowning. I can't breathe, or swim. I'm drowning and desperately waving my hands, while he doesn’t even notice. He won’t even look at me”
"I’m dying of thirst in this marriage, and he's angry at me for even wanting to wet my parched lips with his kiss”
‘When my ND husband gets annoyed, he acts as if he can dispense of me at any moment. It makes me fearful…but he doesn’t get it at all.”
"It’s like I’m a kidnap victim. He’s taped my mouth shut every day for the past 22 years. He doesn't permit me to have any fu*king feelings!”
"He abandoned me on a deserted island years ago. but he doesn't understand why I feel lonely. He gets pissed when I bring it up. He thinks that mumbling at me over dinner and then watching TV together every night is a marriage."
"It’s like I’m hemorrhaging on the sofa, and he is just sitting there, watching me bleed out."
"I'm essentially a prisoner with a life sentence. He won't agree to separate or divorce, but he also stubbornly refuses to do the things I ask of him to make things better.”
"I’m his fu*king slave, Daniel I'm his mommy, his maid. I’m also his personal assistant. I'm not his wife. Because he doesn’t treat me with affection.”
The problem of metaphor and misapprehension of meaning
NT spouses, with their attendant neurotypical emotional processing, would hear these descriptions of emotional anguish and immediately understand the despair described by the bedrock of metaphor. They would, most likely, respond with empathy, and curiosity. They might even agree to collaborate to find solutions to improve their communication.
But for an neurodiverse husband with alexithymia, these descriptions can often provoke disengagement, dismissal, offense, or anger. It is not uncommon for a ND husband to respond with a blank stare or a simple "ok" in a text message. He may interpret her emotional language as criticism or blame, labeling her feelings and expressions as "extreme."
He may perceive her words and emotions as an attack, saying things like "you always blame me when you feel bad" or "why are you always changing things for no reason?"
Due to difficulties in reading facial expressions and voice tones associated with alexithymia, he may be completely misapprehending the situation, believing that her emotional sharing is driven primarily by anger.
He misses not only the nuanced emotions she is describing, but also her emotional experience while communicating with him. He only sees anger when she might actually be overwhelmed by grief, frustration, and hopelessness. This has been labelled the “Cassandra Syndrome,” and I’ve written about it at length in a well-known previous blog post.
Concrete thinkers and the clash with abstract language
Abstract language poses a challenge for concrete thinkers, and neurodiverse men in committed relationships in particular, struggle in this area. On the other hand, neurodiverse women often excel in language skills. I’ll be writing more about Neurodiverse women in an upcoming blog post.
Emotional metaphors usually fail to achieve the desired result because they rely on:
Emotional language,
Extrapolation of emotional experience.
Fanciful context that is not literally true from a ND perspective.
For neurodiverse husbands with alexithymia, sharing a complex emotional language with their neurotypical spouse remains guesswork, even with significant effort. I can help with that.
Alexithymia…each case is different…your mileage may vary
Alexithymia can manifest at varying degrees of impairment, from low to moderate to high.I’s on a continuum.
If you ask an ND man with alexithymia to describe what it feels like to be angry, his response is likely to be clear and include verbalizable adjectives. He may also use words like criticized and blamed, as those have been recurring, familiar episodes for him throughout his life. He may use simplistic, all-purpose emotional descriptors like "good" or "fine" to label emotions or rely on extremely vague words such as happy, mad, or sad.
However, if you ask him to consider emotions like despondency, desolation, inconsolability, or heartsickness, he may understand these words intellectually, but be unable to conjoin the notion with any of his actual felt experience.
While he may have a solid grasp of descriptive words by definition ( and sometimes these very definitions are idiosyncratic), he does not intuitively connect nuanced emotional labels to his own experiences.
Meanwhile, his neurotypical wife employs highly expressive vocabulary to articulate her feelings, all in an attempt to be understood, often without either partner realizing the full extent of his incomprehension and bewilderment.
Over time, his apparent lack of response to her emotional appeals engenders anger and contempt in the neurotypical wife. She craves tenderness, nurturing, and validation, and she seeks a solution to bridge their emotional disconnect. Instead, she is met with disinterest, anger, offense, hurt, or dismissal.
The neurotypical wife becomes increasingly frantic about the state of her marriage but struggles to convey the urgency of her need for understanding and the reality of her deprivation.
Why a trained therapist can help…
Perhaps in the early stages, the neurodiverse husband may express chagrin and promise to “do better next time.”
However, despite his best intentions, self-directed change proves challenging, and he eventually resents her “oppressive” instructions.
The status quo of emotional gridlock quickly returns.
Only when he senses that she is on the verge of leaving does he momentarily acknowledge her misery. Yet, his attempts to attune are short-lived. She grieves over the fact that he seems to requires her complete emotional breakdown before he notices her distress..
Endless circular conversations eventually lead to the identification of her emotions as the problem.
The neurotypical wife realizes that her metaphors hold no power. Her words have no impact because he has heard them repeatedly, and he increasingly views them as extreme, over the top, and irrational. A therapist trained to work with ND couples can help couples migrate away from metaphor, and craft a new shared language that will significantly enhance mutual understanding.
From his perspective. This is all annoying, frustrating, and ridiculous. Nobody is actually bleeding on the floor, imprisoned, or forcibly restrained. These descriptions are nonsense to him. He eventually comes to see her “ridiculously extravagant” emotions as the root cause of their marital conflicts.
If she weren't so dramatic, unstable, or "unhinged" then there wouldn't be a problem.
Because a ND husband tends to be oblivious to emotional injuries, he believes that the problem lies with her and her supposedly excessive feelings. As she sobs and expresses anger, he perceives her emotions as spiraling out of control. Since he does not experience emotions at this depth, he assumes that there must be something profoundly unbalanced about this emotional presentation. He comes to see his wife, and her apparent emotional dysregulation, as the problem.
What happens when feelings are the harbingers of marital conflict?
When emotion becomes the perceived source of all conflict in a neurodiverse marriage, it dissuades the alexithymic neurodiverse husband from further expanding his emotional language vocabulary.
Emotion becomes even less valuable, and ever more dangerous—almost seen as weapons—when he regards it as a personal attack.
This viewpoint also discourages him from enhancing his emotional literacy. The primary arguments between the neurodiverse couple often revolve around her being labeled histrionic, demanding, controlling, or even crazy, while he is seen as cold, cruel, and indifferent. Tragically, over time, each will come to believe that the other has malicious intent.
The impasse caused by emotional misunderstanding in their intimate relationship often spills over into other areas of their relationship. With his concrete, black-and-white thinking, he concludes that her perceptions are distorted in any matter that elicits strong emotions for her.
For instance, if she expresses frustration or a sense of betrayal because he fails to fulfill family or household obligations, he interprets it as hyper-emotional criticism, another means of attacking or controlling him. He may even perceive her emotional disclosures as emotional abuse. It is also true that I have seen ND women become abusive in their despair. As the needs of the neurotypical wife are increasingly marginalized, she loses ground as her marriage grinds on in emotional silence..
When emotion is marginalized in a neurodiverse marriage, communication and cooperation come to a standstill. The neurotypical wife feels as though she is endlessly chasing after her husband's understanding, but it leads to nowhere.
The good news is that problems caused by alexithymia colliding with metaphor-rich communication can be addressed with motivation, curiosity, and willingness to try new approaches and interventions.
In other words, I can help you both do better. What I have to offer, as a colleague once told me, works pretty good most of the time…
Be well, and Godspeed.
