Topic: unconditional love - at bottom of post is a question

Firstly, you should understand that alexithymia doesn't mean that we do not have any emotion.
Actually, I cannot talk for all alexithymic people but for me alexithymia is inability to understand my own emotions. As a result I am not able to react at any way. Since I do not understand what is going on, I cannot tell others. So, reactions and talking are the problems. Sometimes I feel something but I am just not able to put a name on this emotion. Sometimes I know what I feel but I do not understand the reason behind it. And sometimes I feel so deep that there is no word for that much emotion.
Lets come back to your question. Nothing is so hard in life for me unless people expect some reaction from me to show or some words from me to say about my thoughts. I wish my friends or family understand me without listening me. I wish someone see inside me...
Having friend(s) is problem because they expect emotional response. Also, without any reason I become cold the person who I have passed so much time. So I break up people but I don't want this.
I like situations in which I am able to talk but for some reason that I do not understand I talk very less. I am quiet and cold person for others. Actually, thoughts of others are not important but when I am quiet, I feel the tension in the environment and I don't want to be the cause of this.

Thank you yBeB, you have made a really valid point. I think it is wrong for me to assume that he has no emotion because he cannot read my emotions or express his own or react in emotional situations. I had come to the conclusion that he was stonewalling me in an extreme way and in a cruel way, ( his way makes me feel invalidated) but I realise now this is not the case and it is much more complex than that.
What you say about feeling so deep, really resonates with me but I cannot quite put my finger on it, it reminds me of my son (20 years old) who I feel may also have this personality trait because I know instinctively as his mother that he feels deep but he does not know how to express or react although he does have anger as an emotional response to my emotions and expectations of him.

My son can come across as being cold to others when in fact he is very warm but he is misunderstood.

I hope I can learn to understand this because we will all benefit, I think being individual is so important, especially in a world where we are all made to feel weird if we are different.

Your last words "you feel the tension and you don't want to be the cause of this" has really touched me and shows that your emotional response is actually very in-tune to your environment, my son from a baby has always been incredibly sensitive to his environment.

My partner who is now 48 now has probably had such a hard time all his life having this personality trait, that he had to condition himself more and more to switch off from emotion to protect himself and now does not know how to react or feel, hmmn I don't know if that makes sense, I am still processing

I am 21 and my mum is 48. To help you, I think what do I expect from my mum and I couldn't find some beneficial things. Then, I think my current friends and this didn't really work too. However, I found an imaginary friend who can help me but I will not write here because I am curious about the expectation of other alexithymic people. Lets open a new topic.

I was disgusted at all the FB postings on people's "Wonderful" mothers....Mine never "got" me. It's not that I didn't have feelings, I just "felt" differently on situations than other people do. For example, I DESPISE Christmas. I hate the whoe gift giving and "gotta spend X" thing. Sheldon Cooper on BIG BANG THEORY said it perfectly.

"If someone gives you a gift, you are required to give one back that has the same cost and reflects the level of friendship." Or something like that.....

When I tried to express, as a child, that I hated Christmas, I got told, "No you don't, no you don't....."

When my "feelings" were other than what Mom THOUGHT I "should" have, I got invalidated. So it was.... "never express your real feelings, just FAKE IT!"

I "faked" relationships, too.

I find it very hard to say these "glowing" things about a woman who didn't understand me and made no effort to, instead tried to get me to "be" what she wanted me to "be."

HI, it's interesting that you mention Sheldon from TBBT he is a great example, people speculate if he is autistic, aspergers etc and now we can say alexithymia!

A bit off subject kinda, but it is only just being acknowledged now that children with autism who were always thought of as not having empathy are now being recognised to have so much empathy that they switch off their emotions and that is partly why they live in their own little world - because they get so much emotional input from the environment that it is too much for them to cope with, I can understand this on the other side off the coin being an empath,

I wonder if as an alexithymia you have had to learn to switch your emotions off because they are too enormous to cope with, and noone seems to understand them anyway, this is your protection and your sanity. I do not know I am still processing.

Having a partner that has this personality trait has at times made me feel like I am going mad, because his non-reactions to my traumas,or just my experience of life hurts me so much that I feel totally invalidated as a person, and that I am going crazy.

I am sorry that you have had such a hard time with your mum, I too hated my mum and she hated me, I felt her hate as she expressed it both verbally and silently and I was incredibly sensitive to her thoughts and expectations that I never lived up too, nor wanted to live up to.

I know with my own son I have had a hard time understanding him as he has me, but he is now 20 and we have both worked really hard on our relationship and we now respect each others differences, and as it turns out we are quite similar even though opposites! (Different sides of the same coin) I wouldn't have him any other way. Since he was a baby he was such hard work because of his seemingly detachment to emotions. For instance he never gets ill and does not feel pain in the same way as others, so if he says he has a headache or his back hurts then I know he must be in agony because otherwise he doesn't have the same emotional response that others have to pain. His doesn't feel pain, is this a symptom of Alexithymia???

Having our feelings invalidated is a horrible experience and one that makes us withdraw. I am having trouble seeing my partner as someone with feelings that are misunderstood because he really does seem to have none, I do not say that with bitterness or malice it seems to be a fact, he is the first to admit now that he just does not feel other peoples hurts, in this sense it means that he is incapable of taking any responsibility to his behaviours that do sometimes cause others hurt.

Does this mean he doesn't care about me, he says he loves me, he cares about me, but he is a vulcan with no emotional response, no emotional receptors at all! Sometimes I even question that he must be stupid if he cannot understand me when I am so emotionally articulate but then I think he is a financial director so he isn't stupid just unemotional.

I wonder if as an alexithymia you have had to learn to switch your emotions off because they are too enormous to cope with, and noone seems to understand them anyway, this is your protection and your sanity. I do not know I am still processing.

Good theory, and probably applies to a lot of people. For me, it's because of "invalidation." My feelings were never "wrong" per se..... just different. I didn't "feel" what my mom WANTED me to "feel." Things she thought were a BIG DEAL were nothing to me, and things that were no big deal to me were HUGE to her...... She felt that I should feel what she felt, as if her feelings were the definition of "what is normal." Like I mentioned before, hating Christmas is "wrong" to her. To me, it's just "different." Also, as a child I told her I wanted to grow up and live FAR AWAY. She then said, "no you won't, no you won't, you will change your mind and decide to live REAL CLOSE" (and there was the "unspoken" message that I heard LOUD AND CLEAR..... "just like all good daughters do....") Fortunately, she never challenged my thing of I didn't want to marry and didn't want kids...... but anything else where I felt the OPPOSITE of what she felt was "wrong." Such as, "family" is a BIG DEAL to her, and thusly I was SUPPOSED to feel the same way. I don't. FAMILY is just...... "the people I grew up with in the same household" and nothing more..... In fact, my siblings and I don't even call each other on the telephone unless we have to...... but my mom continues to live in this "Dream world" of "our family is close knit." HA!

having our feelings invalidated is a horrible experience and one that makes us withdraw.

No kidding! At the age of 12 I "had to" have an OB/GYN exam (it was necessary.... long story...). Mom just tried to make it sound like "oh they will check your heart and lungs....." She purposely did not tell me what was REALLY going to happen. I was traumatized! But instead she chastised me for being RUDE to "her" (male) doctor...... I think if the doctor had been female it wouldn't have been so traumatizing for me, but the doctor was male....... That was when I began pushing my parents away emotionally. I knew, although I couldn't articulate the feelings at the time.... that my feelings never mattered..... unless they were aligned with what Mom thought I "should" feel......

I have confronted her about these things in recent years.... Mom is like.... "I'm 80 why are you doing this..." BECAUSE I NEED ANSWERS!!!!

In fact, on the ob/gyn thing, mom claimed she "didn't know" I was going to get THAT kind of exam.... But when I forced her in a corner via a "Law and Order SVU interrogation" then she admitted she did "withhold" information from me, which, to her, isn't "lying." A lie by omission is still a lie.....

As a result of that incident, I tend to "overshare." I don't want to be accused of a "lie by omission."

my partner and i recently came across alexithymia and he thinks there is a strong chance he has it. im not sure what i think quite yet. right now im very confused. so many things dont seem to be adding up, like i have seen him cry many times, all over me. before our relationship he cried maybe 5 times since he was a small child. i know he loves me and loves me very much, but he has a really hard time showing it in the way that i need. and our daughter the love i see him show to her is astounding. she is his whole world. at the thought of losing me he has hurt himself. my thoughts are more along the lines of him choosing not to feel except when he has to, and because he has done this for so very long i feel that he may have forgotten how to feel and deal with these feelings. and that our relationship and the fact that as he put it "he could never get rid of his feelings for me no matter how hard he tried" is bringing out all these emotions and he doesn't know what they all are or how to deal with them.