Topic: Only emotion I feel is anxiety/fear

Hello FluffiChik, your description of never having felt right and generally floating through life on varying levels of anxiety is very similar to my own experience.

I feel I've never thought the same way as other people - I'm now an engineer and so I have made the best of this trait.

However, the way I have interpreted the anxiety is it's caused by the uncertainty of not knowing how I should be feeling/reacting

Socially, I get anxious about offending or upsetting people because I know I'm not going to have a normal response to general stimuli.

I believe the anxiety doesn't cause the lack of feeling, the lack of feeling causes the anxiety because of how unknown it is.

Hope that helps :)

Hello FluffiChik,

A few years ago I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder. Looking back I realized I have had anxiety symptoms for as long as I can remember. But as Napalmmachete said I think the anxiety is a consequence of the Alexithymia not the other way around. I also have been diagnosed with ADHD inattentive type. And I am sure I have dysgraphia.

In my case I feel some strong emotions - anger, grief, extreme sadness, frustration, fear, joy. The same emotions but in a less strong form I am not conscious of feeling them but I have noticed their effects in changes in my behavior or in how others are reacting to me. When I am mad at someone I notice that when speaking my voice gets louder and more strident.

When I experienced grief it was only for my grandmother, grandfather, mother, and pets but not for aunts, uncles, cousins or people I've worked with or other people. Other emotions I think I have but I am not consciously aware of them - in part because over the years I have had people ask me why I am smiling or frowning when I was not aware of feeling anything or of smiling or frowning. I also used to break down crying when being dressed down or criticized. Empathy is something I have found I can only feel if I, personally, have experienced something then I can somewhat empathize with what someone else must be going through when they have the same experience.

After we had been married for a while and before I knew anything about any of my problems my wife told me that I don't say "I love you" much and asked if I loved her - my response was for her to pay attention to my actions and not my words. After I had said that I spent time paying attention to my actions in the present and also mentally looking back and the more I "care about" someone the more my actions change to include them, the more I will do for them without being asked, the more I will unconsciously keep an eye out for things they like or that concern them.

From research I have found and learning of other peoples experiences Alexithymia can result from genetic and epigenetic causes, traumatic brain injuries, events resulting in PTSD and probably other causes. Also, people report differing degrees of feeling emotions or being able to identify and communicate those emotions. I have read of some people having success with therapy in recognizing their emotions and others where therapy does not help.

I agree with you when you say "... There's an underlying sense of just never having been "right", never fitting in, tossed into this world without a manual that everyone else seemed to have. I couldn't figure out what other people were thinking, then they would do mean things, seemingly out of nowhere....made people all the more frightening to me." There are a whole host of situations I am sure where the meaning I get and the meaning someone else would get are two different things. A case in point from a few months ago at work one of the managers had asked me what did I think of her store and wasn't it inspection ready and I proceeded to tell her of everything I had noticed which was not inspection ready and would lose her points and she got angry at me and told me I was supposed to tell her her store looked beautiful. Apparently someone else would have understood that regardless of the words she used she only wanted reassurance that her store looked good and would pass and not that she was asking for feedback. Another example is with my wife, much more so in the beginning than now but still a problem are the times she is wanting emotional support whether in the form of a hug, or listening to her vent or a shoulder to cry on - she has gotten better at outright asking or at least giving me a clue and I have gotten better at remembering times in the past when the support was necessary and recognizing current situations which would call for the same response.

Hi FluffiChick, Napalmmachete and tooblue

I can certainly agree with much of what you are saying. I also had huge fears of other people, always preferred to be alone, was shy and almost non-participatory in group activities. Perhaps some of this was due to low self image and possibly the feeling that I couldn't do anything because I was useless. So what did I do?

A few years after leaving school I became a teacher. I had to interact with other people, all day, every day. Not only did I have to participate in group activities, I had to design group activities for others to participate in, and I had to assess their participation! I also became an outdoor instructor, again taking groups out into the forests and teaching them survival and other skills. Now I take coach tours for people, teaching them about our country and interacting with them in many different environments for up to three weeks at a time.

I am still shy; I still dislike talking to groups of people; I still prefer to be alone; I still have great difficulty interacting with others informally at parties and gatherings.

So it is possible to overcome your fears by doing that which you fear most. It modifies the fear into something that is manageable until eventually it becomes second nature and enjoyable. It does not necessarily change who you are and what your preferences are, but it certainly doesn't allow you to remain a slave to those fears either.

Hope this helps.

Alan

Just dropping an idea in here before I zip off to bed:

Something I've noticed in myself is that I 'interpret' my emotions based off physical sensations. This becomes awkward due to the close relationship between nausea and anxiety (or fear, or excitement, or anticipation).

Now, numerous things cause mild nausea. A childhood of anxiety and stress has caused me to mentally interpret a feeling of nausea as anxiety, as it was the main symptom I was able to identify for said anxiety. Unfortunately, anxiety shares the same physical manifestations as excitement. And being mildly ill.

I only recently realised that this 'link' goes two ways: when I'm anxious I feel mildly sick. When I'm mildly sick, I identify the symptom and assume I must be anxious about something. Some time last year I went almost a week feeling 'anxious'. Try as I might, I could not find anything that made sense as a cause for this anxiety. I mentally analysed what I'd been doing that week, how my life had been going. The only logical answer I could find was that my brain chemistry had gone mad (as it sometimes does) and was heading for an almighty crash. I began to get GENUINELY anxious, becoming more and more worried I was heading for a mental breakdown of some sort. Finally, after getting so worried I had to talk about it, I talked to my mum.

"Mum... I'm really sorry, but... I think I might be heading for a crash."
"Oh, hun! Have a hug. What makes you think that?"
"I've been feeling sick and anxious all week, and I can't identify a rational cause for it. Nothing's happened to make me feel like this..."
"OH! I've been feeling a bit sick for a week. I thought it was just me!"

It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders - of course! It was genuine illness, not a stress reaction! Why had I not seen this? So many times where I'd felt I was anxious or scared in my life could have been genuinely due to stomach upset.


TL:DR; There might also be an issue of associating physical symptoms with emotions, sort of a reverse psychosomatic reaction. "When I feel anxious, I feel sick. Therefore I must be anxious when I feel sick."

Anxiety can cause stomach upsets, nausea and sickness. But stomach upset, nausea and sickness does not mean you're anxious.

...is anger for me by default. From irritation to frustration and annoyance to rage.

As for OP: yes, the anxiety could drown other emotions out of existence. For me the anger is like that by default. But it's possible to find access to other emotions.

So. You may have a bit of disconnect/lack of ability to access emotions much but it's not like it's totally impossible. Don't give up.

I felt compelled to contribute because you brought up asperger's.

When I started therapy I thought there was a chance I had asperger's, because my partner (not married, but 12 yrs together) said "it's like you don't have a space in your head for me". She would get upset with me for not being emotionally connected to her, or failing to take her into consideration etc, and only after she explained it to me I would understand what she meant. I felt like an idiot because of it.

I went for psychological testing because of the aspergers idea. I am so glad I did -- not asperger's but avoidant personality disorder. Maybe alexi too, but that's just me strongly identifying with the traits and taking this online test. So I highly recommend testing. The main benefit is that it can help point you to the right type of therapy. I started with cognitive-behavioral, which felt like a waste of time, and after testing changed to an insight-oriented therapist recommended by the testing doctor.

Also: as for anxiety/fear, I felt that a lot of the time too, less now after months of therapy. I have been chipping away at it for like 3 years, starting with going to a nutritionist and addressing deficiencies related to celiac (which I didn't know I had most of my life) and chronic mononucleosis. So I believe there's a physical component to anxiety as well (at least for me).

Not sure if you have trauma (psychological or otherwise) in your past, but if you do you might want to check this out: I also discovered EMDR, a technique used on PTSD sufferers to help work out traumatic experiences stored in their amygdala. I have gone 5-6 times and I feel like it has helped a lot too.

For me, EMDR was very emotional and after a couple months of it, I feel somehow more "solid", and seem to be less traumatized when my partner gets upset. I used to take it personally and feel like crawling under a rock. That feeling used to last a day or so. I get that less now.

Finally: [sorry for rambling on, these things are all so interconnected it's hard to know where to stop!] my mother recently described her anxiety which is related to OCD, but she told me she started taking Prozac and it has reduced her anxiety. She described something which rang true with me: sometimes I get stuck in these infinite loops of anxious thought, to the point of being paralyzed and unable to move forward with anything. I don't take Prozac because I'm afraid of it. I am taking SAM-e instead and so far seems helpful.

Can Alex be inherited?
Do most people with Alex experience the anger and not the other emotions?