Literally means “no words for emotion”, from the Greek a for "lack", lexis for "word" and thymia for "emotion". Alexithymia is a maladaptive psychological disorder characterized by the inability to identify and verbally describe emotions and feelings in oneself as well as in others.
People who suffer from alexithymia are limited in their ability to experience fantasies or dreams or to think in an imaginative way. Rather, they portray an externally focused way of thinking, relying on facts and specifics. People with alexithymia are often described by others, including their loved ones, as cold and aloof. They severely lack empathetic abilities and have great difficulty in effectively understanding and responding to other people’s feelings. Alexithymia in individuals is a variable characteristic that can be measured by researchers and psychologists through multiple choice questionnaires or surveys. Each answer has a predetermined score. The total score of the questionnaire is analyzed to indicate the presence or lack of alexithymia in a particular individual. Research that relies on these measurements has shown that those who score high in alexithymia are severely limited in their ability to form and maintain intimate relationships. Lower scores show only difficulty in relationships.
In the past, alexithymia was classified and limited to psychosomatic disorders, which are disorders that involve physical symptoms of the body that are created or exacerbated by the mind. For example, someone who is very angry but does not express his or her anger may develop a stomachache. Alexithymia as a psychosomatic disorder manifests in the form of bodily complaints and symptoms of an individual who can not effectively express emotion. However, research has revealed that alexithymia can be present in individuals who do not suffer from psychosomatic disorders or physical complaints.

What is it not?
There are many popular misconceptions about alexithymia. Notably, web searches on the term return links to radically different definitions and descriptions. Many erroneous definitions confuse alexithymia with other conditions or disorders involving a lack of emotion or of emotional expression.
For the record, alexithymia should not be confused with:

Sociopathy (a lack of concern for others)
Stoicism (deliberate resistance of emotional impulses)
Apathy (a lack of emotional reactivity or motivation)
Emotional repression (subconscious but motivated denial of emotion).

How do I tell if I'm alexithymic?
If you have a marked deficiency in emotional understanding, there will be various clues evident in everyday life. For example, you might:
find it difficult to talk about your own emotions;
be perceived by others as excessively logical, or unsentimental without being unfriendly;
be perplexed by other people's emotional reactions;
give pedantic and long-winded answers to practical questions;
rarely daydream or fantasize about personal prospects;
have a subdued reaction to art, literature or music;
make personal decisions according to principles rather than feelings;
suffer occasional inexplicable physiological disturbances such as palpitations, stomach ache, or hot flushes.
These features are offered only as guides for prompting further investigation and assessment. They cannot support a diagnosis.

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<A href="<A">What are the key features of the alexithymia syndrome?



Difficulty identifying different types of feelings
Difficulty distinguishing between emotional feelings and bodily feelings
Limited understanding of what caused the feelings
Difficulty verbalising feelings
Limited emotional content in the imagination
Functional style of thinking
Lack of enjoyment and pleasure-seeking
Stiff, wooden posture
Please note this is not a checklist. There is still some debate about which characteristics are central to the construct.

<A href="<A">Is it true that alexithymics have no emotions?


No. Alexithymics do have emotions. Much of the time they are either unaware of the physiological expression of emotions in the body (such as blushing or elevated pulse) or do not understand their emotional significance. When the cause and nature of the emotion is obvious, alexithymics have full-blown emotions like anyone else. Strong emotions tend to take them by surprise and they may not be able to limit their expression very well.
Alexithymics are prone to chronic anxiety. This is partly due to a failure to label their emotions properly. Even in non-alexithymics, emotions that are not properly identified or understood are experienced psychologically as undifferentiated anxiety; this situation occurs much more frequently in alexithymics. Furthermore the inability to make quick decisions on the basis of gut feeling tends to create considerable angst about personal choices.
Depression is also common in alexithymics. Alexithymics typically experience troublesome complications in life, which naturally prompt very negative (though arguably realistic) thoughts. These negative thoughts in turn depress the body's state of readiness for action by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and causing neurotransmitter depletion in parts of the brain, which leads to heavy feelings of sluggishness and slow reactions in body and mind. The result is a very somatic form of depression which the patients may have difficulty elaborating on or explaining. (An intelligent alexithymic, though, may be able to offer plausible suggestions).

Is it a disorder, a condition, a syndrome, an illness, a personality trait, a thinking style, or a neurotic defence?

Alexithymia is more complex than a singular property, quality or characteristic. Instead, it refers a bundle of concurrent characteristics. In the psychiatric sense, alexithymia is a clinical syndrome, not in the sense of a disease or illness, but "a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, behaviour, etc." (Oxford Concise Dictionary, 9th edn.).
Alexithymia is indicative of a dysfunction in the cognitive processing of emotion, and for convenience the term is often used to refer to this underlying psychological problem, though such usage deviates from the accepted technical meaning. It is controversial to describe the dysfunction as a disorder, because it has not yet been offically defined as such by the psychiatric profession and is not listed in the DSM-IV or the ICD-10. The term condition is quite vague, however, and is acceptable in most contexts.
Most of the recent research literature in psychology describes alexithymia as a personality trait. This means it is a persistent feature of a person's behaviour. In a more restricted technical sense, it refers to a qualitative dimension of individual variation as measured by a psychometric scale.
You may find alexithymia defined as a developmental, psychodynamic or neurological condition. Despite the strong evidence for developmental or psychodynamic causes and specific neurological abnormalities, each of these descriptions prejudges empirical research in a very partisan way. Similarly it is inappropriate to describe alexithymia as a thinking style, a neurotic defence or a neural anomaly, as these hypotheses have yet to be proven.

Is it psychological or neurological?


This question is often asked of psychiatric syndromes, usually with the aim of attributing responsibility or identifying suitable therapies. There is evidence that alexithymia can be either neurogenic (caused by biological abnormalities) or psychogenic (caused by upbringing or psychological trauma).
If alexithymia results suddenly from a head injury, the cause is probably neurological; if it correlates with a history of abuse or neglect it is probably psychological. But it is rare for the cause to be so readily identifiable. In fact, there is no recognized functional distinction between neurological and psychological strains of alexithymia, and hence no clinical test to ascertain the cause.
Moreover, the brain is continually changing both psychologically and neurologically. A developmental or biological failure may trigger a defensive psychology, which in turn causes the physical brain to develop abnormal 'wiring'. So while psychodynamic therapy may be the obvious choice in working to change secondary alexithymic defences to more healthy ones, it may not be able to correct the years of built-up neural anomalies and brain tissue development. So psychological and neurological causes may be intimately intertwined and inseparable in analysis.
Nonetheless the question is still worth posing. If the neural structures and pathways linking different aspects of emotion processing have sustained damage by injury or atrophy, the alexithymia may be completely irreversible and the focus should be on learning new compensatory coping strategies. However, if the structures and pathways are still intact but underused (perhaps the neural activity is being inhibited by other processes), then there is a greater prospect of reducing the alexithymia by psychotherapeutic intervention. (Accordingly Sifneos—who works with neurological alexithymics—favours compensatory strategies; whereas Krystal—who works with post-traumatic alexithymics—promotes a form of therapy based on personal training and education in feelings and their psychological signficance.)

How is it treated? Is there a cure?



The chief architects of alexithymia theory—Sifneos and Nemiah—argue that insight-oriented therapies are counterproductive. These methods provoke distress in alexithymic patients by focusing attention on their inability to understand their own emotions. In such cases it is preferable to concentrate on identifying compensatory coping strategies.
Some psychologists believe alexithymia can respond to psychotherapeutic interventions or talking therapies—albeit slowly. For example, Krystal advocates an edifying approach, whereby the clinician explains how the patient somaticizes his emotions and that such effects are temporary and to be experientially valued. The patient is then encouraged to identify and label the feelings appropriately. This is a very slow and potentially frustrating process. It should be left to the experts and should not be attempted by anyone with a naïve or common-sense theory of emotions. In common with most psychiatric therapies, it is not guaranteed to produce positive results.
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is particularly relevant to the prospects of therapeutic success. Insight-oriented therapies are unlikely to work if the pathways linking key emotional areas of the brain have been destroyed; it would be fruitless to attempt to train the patient to identify his or her feelings accurately if the brain structures responsible for emotional intuition are not in working order. Conversely, post-traumatic alexithymia is more likely to respond to training and education in feelings and emotions because the requisite neural structures are believed to be intact.
There are no direct medications for alexithymia. However, alexithymia is known to correlate with low mood, and some patients may benefit from antidepressants. This in turn may make it easier and more productive to focus on feelings and the interpretation of inner experiences.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to treatment is getting the problem recognized. Many psychiatrists are are skeptical and some are downright dismissive, partly due to the continuing confusions over definition. Alexithymia doesn't constitute a formal diagnosis and the underlying deficit in emotional awareness is not officially recognized as a psychiatric disorder. In practice, most therapists are reluctant to acknowledge alexithymia and fail to appreciate why some clients cannot get in touch with their inner feelings. Sadly, until the syndrome is more widely publicized, professional help may not be available.

There is no cure... just dont hurt them...

Nice to know more about it!

Thanks, Nurse!!!

you r welcome sweetie.