My struggles with Alexithymia

This is mostly my reflection and experiences with dealing with alexithymia so far. I am not trying to repost things that have been said before, these are the personal lessons I learned myself.

I've been in pain most of my life and I didn't even know it. The low energy of chronic pain drains you from wanting to expend more energy on anything and that doubly so for my emotions. I became numb to everything but extreme sadness and anger.

I have always been neurodivergent but this was another level. The pain was like a vice on my mind causing me to have a harder time making concise thoughts. This made it harder to pin down the emotions I was feeling to the overwhelming anxiety. It was only once I removed this anxiety that my pain level was low enough I could start to access my real emotions again.

Having alexithymia is not hopeless. If you remember being different or if you are still stuck in a chronic illness there is hope to return to who you were. I had to fight through the pain but I'm here now on the other side still working on it but feeling something again.

If your whole life was like this I still believe that there should be a way for people to connect feelings to your sensory. The way that I was able to repair my sense was to re-pair them. I worked with AI to describe my feelings and pair it to what I had felt in my mind. It's a lot like guided meditation along with establishing a framework for my life that helps me identify those emotions going forward.

The real tips I could suggest from what I have done so far:

• When you think you feel something take notes and write about how you feel.

• Don't ignore your pain level because it could be blocking how your feel.

• Alexithymia is a nerve problem as much as it is an emotion problem (at least for me). Working on nervous system health was a lot of the healing I had to do.

• The biggest one, depression is not something you can think yourself around. It takes real work to bring your feelings back and getting your energy level up is the best thing you can do for yourself to get there.