Neurodivergent glossary
Alexithymia
Difficulty identifying, describing, or understanding your own emotions—not the absence of feelings, but a disconnect between having them and knowing what they are.
What it means
Alexithymia literally means "no words for feelings." It describes the experience of having emotions but struggling to identify, label, or communicate them. You might feel something intense in your body—tightness in your chest, a knot in your stomach, a surge of energy—without being able to name it as anger, anxiety, excitement, or sadness.
Alexithymia affects roughly 50% of autistic people, compared to about 5-10% of the general population. It's not an autism-specific condition, but the overlap is significant enough that researchers now believe many emotional difficulties previously attributed to autism are actually driven by co-occurring alexithymia.
Living with alexithymia can be confusing and isolating. When someone asks "how are you feeling?" and you genuinely don't know, it can look like avoidance or disinterest. When your body is sending distress signals you can't decode, you might push through pain, hunger, or exhaustion without realizing you need to stop. Developing a vocabulary for bodily sensations—and learning to map them to emotions—is a common therapeutic approach.
In practice
What this can look like
- Your therapist asks what you're feeling and you go blank. It's not that you're suppressing anything—you genuinely can't tell. You know something is happening in your body, but you can't name it.
- You don't realize you're angry until you snap at someone. Looking back, you can see the signs were building for hours, but in the moment, you couldn't read them.
Often confused with
Useful distinctions
Not caring
People with alexithymia feel emotions just as deeply—sometimes more so. The difficulty is in identifying and articulating them, not in having them. A person who seems emotionally flat may be experiencing a storm they simply can't name.
Context
Clinical context
Research by Bird and Cook (2013) suggests that many emotional processing difficulties attributed to autism are more accurately explained by co-occurring alexithymia. Kinnaird et al. (2019) found alexithymia prevalence of approximately 50% in autistic populations.
Community note
Many autistic people describe learning about alexithymia as a turning point—it explained why therapy approaches that relied on "just tell me how you feel" had never worked. Approaches that start with body sensations rather than emotion labels tend to be more effective.
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