Felt Thoughts and Thought Feelings

First thoughts towards Alexithymia

Well this hasn’t gone to plan. I was going to say some things about “Alexithymia” - the difficulty in knowing what you’re feeling which can be common in neurodivergent people. But the more I read and think- the more I want to break down and disagree with every part of that sentence. I could keep it personal and say that for the first thirty years, or so, of my life - I struggled to know what I was feeling. In fact- I mostly didn’t have any direct bodily awareness of my feelings. Grief might occasionally erupt like a surprising geyser (Like in a GCSE Business Studies lesson once. Me and my friend Katy started crying and couldn’t stop. I don’t think learning about Bearish and Bullish stock markets was that traumatic. We had to be sent out for tissues. Her cousin had been killed in an accident the week before. I had no clue what was happening for me. There was just crying. Which basically never happened. It wasn’t attached to any thoughts or other sensations I could feel. It didn’t even seem to be contagious- though I don’t think it would have happened if Katy hadn’t been doing it too. Now, I might link it to my Grandad having died a month or so earlier. But I hadn’t consciously had sad feelings or thoughts about that).

Anger might erupt like a volcano. Though not until I had left home. Everybody else in the family were the designated feelers. They had very big feelings a lot. Erupted and geysered and gushed. Well, except my Mum. She was more like me. Nothing, nothing, nothing- then a sudden surprising something out of nowhere which appeared to bear no relation to any other thoughts or feelings she had previously expressed. Came quick and left quick like a video tape rewinding. Over the years I began to tune in more to my body. Uncover feelings like a detective finding clues “Oh- my stomach had a funny feeling in it, and I snapped at somebody…was that anxiety?”. Usually learning to link bodily sensations to emotions to the words that described them is learned in relationship with others. But it’s obviously harder if you can’t tune into the bodily cues in the first place. (Tuning into what’s happening inside you is known as "interoception" and it can be weaker in some of us). Like somebody flipping the switches on in a space ship, where you see each light come on and hear each motor whirring, more and more of my feelings came online. I think swimming, a settled life, counselling and performing poetry helped. It was a slow but steady process through my thirties and forties. I still find myself in counselling sessions sometimes saying “Oh! I’m having a feeling!” as if I’m about to sneeze. Then I have to stop and try name the feeling. Work out what might have prompted it. I’m glad my feelings-awakening didn’t come in the context of knowing I was autistic, because the voices of authority back then were researchers like Simon Baron Cohen. He would have said that this was part of mind blindness. Not being able to read the feelings of others. Lacking empathy or the ability to be relational. He says that’s what defines autism.

Hearing rocks, the lake and things at different speeds

But actually- it’s not ONLY a difficulty tuning in to somatic sensations that drives alexithymia. And nor do I believe it’s “mind blindness”. Many of us actually tune in to other information in the environment and we don’t filter it out as much as others, nor do we necessarily prioritise human output over other “noises” around us. Researcher and philosopher Erin Manning has written about nonverbal autists, such as Mel (formerly Amanda) Baggs and Diane Krumins. How they tune into the textures and sounds of everything around them:

“There was very little difference in meaning,” says autist Daina Krumins, “between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the turtle sitting on the log. It seems,” she continues, “that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, human.”

What is it we really mean, when we say human? According to autism activist Amanda Baggs, we certainly don’t mean “autistic.” We mean neurotypical, we mean expressing oneself predominantly in spoken language, and most of all, we mean immediately focused on humans to the detriment of other elements in the environment. “Most people attend to human voices above all else.”

If you have eight minutes- do watch this extraordinary film illustrating this by Mel Baggs In My Language. They say: “My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings”. Manning says that this is making thought felt instead of speaking it.

No wonder it so often feels to me that trying to articulate a feeling actually feels like a lie- or completely inadequate to whatever I’m trying to say. If you have some of this “environmental awareness”, then maybe a truer expression of “a feeling” includes something more like “sadness, a rock sinking, your drooping wrist, this buzz, beat, a heart slow”. Which sounds like babble or poetry but probably doesn’t make it onto the “Scale of Categorising Your Emotions in This Box From One To A Hundred” of clinical language. PLUS it can take time to tune into and process all of this. Far longer than the couple of seconds most people leave after “How are you feeling?’ for an answer.

Thymos

The “Thymia” in alexithymia (A term coined by the psychiatrist Peter Sifneos in 1972) is usually translated as “emotion”. So we have A - (difficulty) Lexi (speaking) Thymia (the emotions). But actually, Thymos from the Greek means something closer to “heart wind”. In classical texts your thymos was a kind of cross between your will and your soul and felt as breath in the middle of your chest. It was often referred to as leaving soldier’s bodies after battle. It was personified, as separate from your self or mind- so you might say you were consulting your thymos at a deep level 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- very hard to articulate but actually something bigger than what we commonly designate “feeling”. And I’m not actually sure that many people are very good at speaking the truth and complexity of this blend of thinking/sensing/willing that constitutes feeling. I’m not sure a sad emoji covers something like “Saddened with a tinge of future hopelessness around this matter, undergirded by a deeper sense of satisfied yearning”.

Basically perhaps we are all in our own ways alexithymic- though those people who, like Mel Baggs, have managed to find ways to express the expansive, multilayered, relational, entangled nature of their being, might have come closer to breathing the winds of their heart.