Hi. I’m new and my teen tested and scored 138 (guessing how she might feel on the sexual questions).
We have clashed often as I’m extremely empathic and she is, now understood as, not.
My question is what are the ‘must knows’ for a mum of a girl with Alexithymia? To help her best understand herself and mentalise others?
She is also autistic and adhd.
Thanks in advance.
I am a kid (male) who's mum has always tried to make me the happiest. I have never knew that I couldn't talk about my own feelings but I always thought it was because I was anti-social or awkward. At the time that I was in university I had trouble speaking about how I felt with everyone. My mum is the one who helped me the most in this situation. I had already talked about my feeling twice (with two of my friends, which helped me then talk with my mom), but when I needed the most my mum wanted to know why I was feeling down and I always felt like I wasn't ready to talk about it so I just kept ignoring her questions and always talked about something else. I started writing on a book what I was feeling at the time. To give you some context, I was feeling super stressed because of uni and I only realised my stress when my mind blew up. So I felt the need to write down what I was feeling so it wouldn't happen again. When my mum wanted to know how was going uni I showed her my book and then she realised what I was going through.
You can ask your daughter to write down her feelings and when she's ready she could perhaps talk to her.
One of the reasons that made me show my book to my mum (which believe it or not takes courage) was the fact that she always helped my and knowing that she couldn't help me because of my incapability of expressing my feelings made me put all blame on me and the shame and her suffer (for not knowing what I was feeling made me just show her book).
After this I realised that even not knowing how to perfectly show my emotions to my mum I realised that's not what I needed to make my mum understand what I was feeling so I kept on insisting in myself to understand and express what I was feeling.
Knowing that you made this post and you are trying to help your daughter as much as you can brought me so many tears to my eyes. I really hope you can help your daughter.
I know that you wrote this a year ago but since I only created this account today I really hope that you can still get notis and see this post.
I love your attempt on trying to understand your daughter as best as you can.
Also if time is not enough and you feel like you can't help your daughter don't hold back on seeking for professional help. It's no shame to put your daughter under professional help.
Hey! Thats true! And I feel that sometimes we impose on ourselves to become numb or express die to exper3inces while growing that can be from parents or schools or peers or relatives... and this condition may not be permanent, it just takes awareness and a desire to become more aware, more vocal about feelings, more sensitive to EQ of self and of others! In my case I wasn't able to express myself so well, as much as I could by writing this gave the birth of a writer in me and helped me to become more creative! And now I feel I can be both! So yes writing does help in this situation and having Apps that provide prompts to develop on, like YourQuote in my case, make you imagine the play for words and helped me a lot! Hope this helps!
Hi, I am a teenager and I have severe alexithymia what I finds that help is to draw out how I am feeling and show my parents so they know or another trusted adult, then I rip it up and put it in the bin. This makes me feel way more comfortable for me drawing it out rather than having to say it. Hope this will help!
I forgot to add on aswell that I have autism and a girl, so this will most likely help. I know it is hard as a parent of a autistic child but remember that there is always a way forward and that the same things might not work with everyone but that's okay.
