What if you were someone who could not identify or express your feelings? Now, suppose you were experiencing distressing physical symptoms. You call your medical provider and make an appointment, and during the assessment, you cannot explain how your symptoms feel or what may be contributing causes. This lack of ability to describe what you feel internally can be a risk factor for untreated illness, and you may be diagnosed with medically unexplained symptoms.

People with alexithymia experience this regularly. In addition, alexithymia makes it challenging to understand that physical symptoms can sometimes be the somatic equivalent of underlying emotional distress. As a result, those who experience this can erroneously attribute physical signs as an indication of an illness and may request a medical evaluation for which there is no underlying physical cause. For example, a 2021 study of 200 patients seen in an outpatient internal medicine office with complaints consistent with medically unexplained symptoms showed that almost half qualified for a diagnosis of alexithymia.

The term alexithymia is from Greek and means no emotions for words. People with alexithymia struggle to identify feelings, express emotions, and differentiate between emotions and bodily symptoms. This means they cannot accurately identify the physical signals their body is sending them and may misinterpret its cues. If you have alexithymia, you may be viewed as socially awkward or lacking in appropriate emotions for a given situation. If you try and see a therapist about this, you may have difficulty answering some basic questions such as “How are you feeling today?” because you don’t know. The estimate of people with this trait is about 13 percent of the population and is twice as likely in men. It can occur congenitally, from birth, or can be secondary as the result of a brain injury.

People with alexithymia who experience bodily cues such as a racing heart, difficulty breathing, or body pain often cannot identify where they come from. Some individuals with alexithymia misinterpret the physical components of feelings because they cannot recognize an emotional state and its physical accompaniments.

Most researchers believe that primary alexithymia is the product of genetics and environment. In one study published in 2018, investigators reported that participants with alexithymia had differences in an area of their left brain hemisphere compared with their unaffected counterparts. The affected participants had smaller........

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