Emotional Literacy Is a Skill That Can Be Developed, and Here's Why It's Worth a Shot

How a feelings wheel is helping me overcome alexithymia

Jun 22, 2021

When I was still drinking in my 20s I used to joke I was dead inside. I thought this was funny, but I didn’t really believe it was true. I was a Class 1 softy who would spend twenty minutes trying to rescue an insect without a second thought. I used to feel sorry for a Scots Pine tree on the way to Penzance because it felt like the motorway had ripped it from its family. Walking the streets made me so sad that I wanted to devote my life to nurturing lonely people.

I joked I was dead inside because I never cried. Even when my beloved grandfather died, I found myself unable to feel the grief of it. How could he be dead? He was my sweet and silly granddad!

My numbness didn’t worry me - I didn’t even think of it as numbness; it was all I could remember knowing. Besides, who wanted to be a girl who cried all the time? Not crying was a kind of super skill, right? I had a warped sense of humor and nothing much fazed me. I was a cool girl. In my imagination, at least.

At four and a half years sober, I was diagnosed with autism. I sought the diagnosis primarily because of the issues I have with sleep and executive functioning. But reading one of autistic social psychologist Devon Price’s posts I learned about alexithymia, too.

“Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by the subclinical inability to identify and describe emotions experienced by one’s self,” according to Wikipedia. It can vary from person to person, apparently, with some not identifying as feeling emotions at all, while others find it difficult to differentiate between the mess of emotions they experience.

Reading about this for the first time, I was intrigued. I recalled my experiences in therapy in which I struggled to answer the endless question of how do you feel about that?

“You have a tendency to intellectualize,” my therapist said, and I wondered what she was talking about.

After my diagnosis (many years later ALAS), I joined a group for autistic women in recovery and quickly realized I was on the right path. The group referred to using a feelings wheel, and I felt excited. I had seen one in the past and been riveted by it — who knew there were so many feelings? — but it hadn’t occurred to me to try and decipher my own experience with one. Wasn’t I too old for that? Too damaged, even? (I didn’t feel damaged until the therapist pointed out my inability to talk about my feelings, by the way. Also, if you are a therapist working with autistic or alexythemic clients, please introduce a feelings wheel ASAP.)

Practicing with my new tool, I discovered it wasn’t that I had no feelings at all, more that there was a lack of nuance to my awareness of them. In the past, I had mainly identified the root feelings. My inner emotional world had been rather… basic.

Scared. Sad. Excited. Using a more elaborate feelings wheel, I discovered the tremendous diversity and overlap present in human emotions. WOW! A new world was opening up to me.

I began regularly doing feeling wheel check-ins with a friend who struggled with a similar confusion over her emotional life. Using a feelings wheel often felt embarrassing, but it allowed us to get a deeper, vastly more sophisticated insight into our inner worlds.

At first, we could identify only the negative feelings that simmered underneath: grief, loss, shame, fear. Over time, we developed top layers too. Hopeful, affectionate, trusting, proud. I was learning how to tune into the mass of white noise inside me and recognize that different instruments were playing.

Over time, I didn’t even have to look at the feelings wheel. (Mic drop.)

I felt stressed and valued and fragile and courageous and skeptical and thankful and creative…

Feelings are complicated and changeable

I still find deciphering how I feel difficult when there is a lot going on inside of me. Sometimes, the word resonates, more than I feel anything in my body. I seem to be a very language-based kinda human being, and that’s okay! There is often a delay between the emotion-triggering event and my emotional response. That is also okay! I give myself space and check-in with how I’m feeling, and I look at my sweet lil feelings wheel. This makes me feel slightly like an alien, but a very sweet and diligent alien who I am growing to love.

In other words, all this effort is paying off.

So if you relate to feeling like a sweet and diligent alien, then hello! And welcome to Earth. It’s scary here, but if you work on self-acceptance and asking for help, it can be a hospitable environment.

Since I mastered the feelings wheel, I no longer fear emotions or run away from them. I don’t hold onto them either. I understand that emotions are the internal weather system that provides guidance about where to go next in my life.

Rather than being dead inside, I am incredibly emotionally alive. I feel things intensely and can be extremely reactive. I’m now learning how to manage that. Better late than never, right?

Practice makes… an emotional rollercoaster

Some of us don’t get taught how to handle our emotional natures. Many of us have autistic or disabled, mentally ill or traumatized parents. Often, they weren’t taught how to deal with their feelings, either. The baton of denying and suppressing emotions gets passed from generation to generation. Children learn to be ashamed of their neediness and uniqueness. They learn to hide how soft and ‘weird’ they are.

If this resonates, you might benefit from working on your emotional literacy. Print yourself a feelings wheel and let your eyes land on whatever words appeals to you. Don’t think too hard about it. Just keep practicing.

Fill in the gaps in these feelings sentence every day for a week:

I feel __________ when _________________________________ because ________________________.

i.e. I feel purposeful when I write this newsletter because I am using my experience to help others.

Keep working on your emotional literacy and eventually, you might find that your inner world becomes less like silence or cacophony and more like a symphony.

Do you believe it is possible to develop emotional literacy if you experience alexithymia? Have you had any luck trying? As always, please share your experience in the comments. <3

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