How a Feelings Wheel Helps Me Overcome Alexithymia
Can emotional literacy be developed?
When I was heavy drinking in my 20s I used to joke that I was dead inside. I thought this was funny because I didn’t really believe it was true.
I was a Class A softy who would spend half an hour rescuing a bee without a second thought. 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 notice it (numbness if good like that.) Besides, 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, aged 37, I was diagnosed with autism. I sought the diagnosis because of issues with sleep and executive functioning that were negatively impacting my life, but reading one of autistic social psychologist Devon Price’s posts post-diagnosis 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, 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 endless variations on and how do you feel about that?
“You have a tendency to intellectualize,” my therapist said, and I wondered what she was talking about. What was it she was asking me to do?
“How do you feel right now?” she asked.
“Anxious, because I don't know how I feel.”
Therapy was always challenging for me, and my autism diagnosis shed light on why. Do you relate?
After my diagnosis, I joined a group for autistic women in recovery from alcohol addiction. Someone there referred to using a feelings wheel, and I was inspired. I had seen one in the past - when I worked supporting autistic adults - and I'd been riveted.
Who knew there were so many feelings?
Now I felt hopeful: could I learn to decipher my own experience with one of these lovely rainbow-coloured wheels? Or was it too late? Was I too old? My neurological pathways too entrenched?
Practicing with my new tool I discovered I was riddled with feelings, but unskilled at deciphering them. I could easily identify the root feelings — scared, sad, bad, excited — but not so good at recognizing more nuanced feelings: helpless, hurt, hopeful, curious.
I was astonished by the huge diversity and overlap present in human emotions and I wanted in.
So I practiced with my feelings wheel every day. A new world inside was opening up to me, and it was helping me connect to the world outside.
Having a better understanding of how I felt allowed me to make decisions more easily, something that historically has been a serious struggle for me.
I was beginning to understand the point of emotions.
Feelings are there to help you make better decisions
This will seem obvious to some of you but for me it was pretty groundbreaking to me. So I risk sounding like a fool in case it's helpful to you.
Emotions are there to guide you.
When we make decisions without checking in with our feelings we make less wholehearted decisions.
If you are out of the habit (or never got into the habit) of paying attention to your feelings then you’re missing a map. But don't worry, it isn't hopeless or it hasn't been for me.
It is sad though. To get a crucial map so late in life feels bittersweet. How different things could have been! But often nobody is to blame.
Many of us don’t get taught how to interpret our emotions in order to direct our decisions. We have autistic or disabled, mentally ill, addicted or traumatized parents who never learned how to interpret their feelings either. The baton of denying and suppressing emotions gets passed from generation to generation.
Luckily those who understood the importance of emotion for a fulfilled life designed a variety of different feelings wheels. Together we can find what we need, no matter our age.
Learning to use a feelings wheel
It is challenging to decipher emotions to begin with. Sometimes, the word resonates, more than you feel it in your body. This is okay! There may be a delay between the emotion-triggering event and your emotional response. This is also okay. (Hello self-acceptance, your new friend.)
Give yourself space and check in with how you're feeling. Take a minute to look carefully at your sweet lil feelings wheel. This might make you feel slightly like an alien, but remember you are a very sweet and diligent alien who you are growing to love.
So print yourself a feelings wheel and let your eyes land on whatever words make sense to you. Don’t think too hard about it. Just keep practicing. Fill in the gaps in these feelings sentence:
I feel __________ when _________________________________ because ________________________.
i.e. I feel purposeful when I write these posts because I am using my experience to help others.
Practice makes… BETTER
Using a feelings wheel feels overwhelming and maybe a tad embarrassing at first, but if you keep working at it you will improve your emotional literacy. The benefit of this is that you will feel more involved in your own life and experience, more rooted in the world. Keep practicing and eventually, you might find that your inner world becomes a radio station you really love.
So if you relate, 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.
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You can connect with the Autistic community on Twitter. If you have a question, use #ActuallyAutistic or #AskingAutistics (or both). You can also visit The Autism Self Advocacy Network and the Autistic Not Weird Facebook page and website.
Chelsey Flood is the author of Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a lecturer in creative writing at Falmouth University. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love at Beautiful Hangover, and is also working on a non-fiction book about getting sober, and a new YA novel.
This is super helpful, thank you. Shortly after I was diagnosed, on a googling binge, I discovered alexithymia (through embrace-autism.com) and was really amazed by it. It seems to describe so much of how I experience feelings but I never had the language for it before. I haven't yet thought about what to do about it, I've just been sitting with the knowledge and awareness of it. As a reader (and writer) I think all these words are familiar (the names of the feelings), but it's hard for me to describe them. I might compare it to singing on key. I appreciate and listen to music, and I've tried quite a lot in my life to create music, but I really don't have a sense of pitch. I can't correlate a specific tone with its named note. If you ask me to sing an "A flat" I would just make a sound with no ability to sense if it was an "A flat" or something else (it's most likely going to be something else!).
The place I've noticed it most is when something bad or tragic happens, such as a relative dying, or news of somebody being in an accident. I don't cry, I don't necessarily feel bad, or sad - I don't know what I feel, and I don't know what to say or how to react. And then I worry I appear cold (or lacking a conscience).
Thank you for sharing these thoughts and ideas!
Once again, I feel like I'm reading about myself when I read your articles. When I look at the feeling wheel, I know what most of those feelings mean but I just don't think I feel most of them or I can't identify that feeling in myself. It's frustrating. I see and hear people identify how they feel and I'm often left questioning myself on why it doesn't jump out at me. After I hear someone explain their feelings I can often understand it, and it makes sense, but unfortunately, they don't become obvious to me at the moment. I can identify the more central strongest one. Anger, Anxious, Sad, Ecstasy but I'm fairly numb to the more subtle feelings.