How often does it happen that you cannot understand your feelings and don’t know how to describe them? “I feel that something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is”, “I feel strange”, “I am just uncomfortable…”
Unfortunately, lately, people often address psychologists and doctors because they are worried that they do not understand their feelings and cannot describe them.
This condition has a pretty name, alexithymia. It is the inability to evaluate, differentiate, and describe one’s own and others’ emotions and feelings.
Why does it happen? The reasons can be different, such as psychological traumas, stress, neurological conditions. Often it stems from the upbringing, for example, if expressing one’s emotions is a taboo in the family (especially in front of other people), if parents don’t pay attention to the child’s feelings or depreciate them, it makes it very hard for such a child to figure out their feelings even when they grow up.
People whose emotions are blocked tend to:
- Find it difficult to describe their feelings (even though they can actually feel them)
- Confuse their emotions and physical sensations, for example, I feel warm (instead of joyful), I feel pressured (instead of anxious), I feel squeezed (instead of scared)
- Find it hard to socialize since they struggle to understand others’ emotions, which leads to a secluded lifestyle
- Be very intelligent and have advanced logical thinking, while they might struggle to fantasize
- Have no colorful dreams and deny the existence of intuition.
One might think, this doesn’t seem to be too bad, it’s just peculiar. However, this condition has serious consequences.
Self-therapy can be an essential tool for personal growth and self-improvement.
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You are not sure where to begin?
First of all, if you don’t understand your emotion and don’t know how to react to it, you cannot “let it out” in the right way. If your conscious does not recognize a strong feeling and cannot process it, your body will react to it with psychosomatic diseases.
Second of all, it will be difficult for you to comprehend the results of your actions and make conclusions based on them. When you don’t understand that you are experiencing a positive emotion, you do not obtain the pleasure and motivation to move on. If you don’t understand a negative emotion, you do not feel threatened and don’t make a life lesson out of it.
Third of all, if you don’t understand others’ emotions, you are awkward and difficult to communicate with. Other people find it hard to talk to people who do not express any emotions and do not talk about them. This leads to conflicts, misunderstanding, and loneliness.
But there’s also good news. Feelings and emotions can be unblocked.
Here are a few simple ways of doing it.
1. Watching others’ emotions. Try novels where authors describe the feelings and emotions of characters in detail. Films with complex plots devoted to people’s lives might also help.
2. Freewriting. If you describe the events that invoked at least some emotions in you every day, you will learn to understand yourself better, see the connection between the events and your and others’ reactions.
3. Arts associated with expressing feelings. Dancing, pantomime lessons, any form of art therapy (drawing, sand art, clay art).
4. Photo therapy (a form of art therapy). It works on images and emotions, sensations, and memories that they trigger.
5. Working with a specialist. In difficult cases, it makes sense to address a psychologist and try one of the types of psychotherapy (group therapy, gestalt therapy, psychodynamic therapy, etc.).
