My Thymos of Alexithymia

"Alexithymia," which refers to the challenge of understanding one's emotions, is often prevalent among neurodivergent individuals. However, the way alexithymia presents itself can be deceiving. What may seem like a deficit to some is deliberate and purposeful for certain individuals, serving as a natural aspect of our cognitive processing needs. This can ultimately lead to a heightened sense of interoception, which is a positive attribute. Let's break it down on some levels into a more philosophical but historical linguistic sense.

The "Thymia" in alexithymia (a term coined by psychiatrist Peter Sifneos in 1972) is usually translated as "emotion." So we have A - (difficulty), Lexi (speaking), and Thymia (the emotions). But Thymos, in Greek, means something closer to "heart wind." In classical texts, your thymos was a cross between your will and your soul; it felt like you were breathing in the middle of your chest. It was often referred to as leaving soldiers' bodies after battle. It was personified as separate from oneself or the mind—so you might say you were consulting your thymos deeply to see what you intended to do. It could refer to inner states that are not expressed in behaviour. In Homer’s Odyssey, for example, Odysseus pities Penelope in his thymos without outward sobbing. But it was also characterised as embodying a strong urge or desire.

In the Iliad, Priam says his strong urge to ransom his son comes partly from his thymos. It is perhaps something like a gut feeling, but it’s more than that. It’s a mixture of something thought, and something felt. Something, in short, is very hard to articulate, but actually something bigger than what we commonly designate as “feeling.” Speaking honestly about the intricacy of feeling—a combination of thinking, sensing, and willingness—is not something that many people excel at.

I don't always know how I am feeling or why. Still, you probably don't always either, so let's consider emotion identification from a neurodiverse lens as a neurodivergent individual. But when I do know how I feel, I know every detail in detail, and this is because it takes me longer to process, sense, check, and feel my way around my head and heart with the deep interoception I need to satisfy my cognition so that I truly understand how I feel and why.

Again, many in my life, past and present, don't have the patience to let me do this. At times, when it suits another agenda, this can also be misconstrued as a lack of an emotional response or understanding when the truth for me is that I am just feeling my way into my feelings because regularly, it is something bigger than what we commonly designate as “feeling".

I used to consider using emotional wheels before to assist me in this process. Still, with hindsight, I feel that it was more of a rush to get me into emotional identification to suit agendas and enabled more masking before I was confirmed as autistic. So, I don't use them personally anymore, albeit they can and do have a place for many individuals if they serve their needs. I prefer to sit in my emotions until the feeling shows itself; I instinctively have a strong urge or desire to do this. It's a kind of me trusting the process of my cognitive processing in a literal sense.

At 48, most of my life until my early 40s, I struggled to know what I was feeling or why because, let's be honest, many human beings are just winging it before they can truly understand themselves; the emotional brain takes years to mature and develop, but there were interesting observations made of the self personally and clinically regarding how I process things and one interestingly enough is grief. So it may come as a surprise, but no surprise now, that initially it was considered I had complicated grief and autism was not mentioned. Still, then it became apparent how I process grief is so intense that it can erupt at any time and sometimes not be connected to anything, and I will start crying or shut down. Anger is another emotion I have always had challenges identifying and expressing. I can come across as having a passive nature in which everything is accepted without thinking, studying, and analysing the causes and effects, which couldn't be further from the truth here. Still, it can also be unfairly misconstrued as passive-aggressive as I don't have a designated default anger expression per societal norms.

But grief and its accompanying emotion I am obsessed with, and mortality and the intricate process of grieving, and I can't do enough of it; I talk about it a lot, not in a morbid way but in processing its reality and acceptance way. Some people cannot understand or handle this, which is fine. They want to move on, and I also have to be able to manage my daily life, but it just looks different from their moving on. I have specific rituals to process and regulate all of this now, and I cherish them. But I didn't before, and this likely explains why I was called into my son's school when he was four years of age to explain why he suddenly had begun his mortality obsession and asked if somebody had died recently. I wasn't fully aware of its emotional impact on his childhood sponge brain. Still, we eventually connected the dots and realised it was because we had moved out of my parents, and he was actually grieving for his grandparents even though he still saw them daily.

Maybe we are all immersed in alexithymic processes in our own ways, so let's not misinterpret or judge each other. Yes, mine can be dark at times. In fact, I am quite dark, but because of that darkness, I am also quite bright and light up my own and many others' lives who love me as I love them and as I am. The ones who now let me be this individual, as I can not not be her. I tried that for so many years, and I lived the even darker tale of what happened in burnout and chronic illness. I am not doing that again.

Maybe my darkness and my emotional processing or alexithymia, whatever I want to call it, is because I am battling with inner states of mind not easily expressed in behaviour to find the thematic connections between my will, head, heart, and soul, so I can come up for air and breathe, and only then when it is processed can it leave my body like the soldiers in the battlefield. I can't separate it from my body or mind as easily or hastily as others. It is entrenched in my human nature, as morbid and bizarre as it seems to others, to be obsessed with death and grief. It has done me more good than harm, and I'd rather overthink it than underthink it with the grace it needs and deserves to serve me in my conscious, cognitive, autistic ways of knowing, being and doing.

Credit goes to Kate Fox for this writing prompt and her insights on Alexithymia, which inspired it.

Grá Mór