Understanding the Roots of Alexithymia: Why I Think Trauma is at the Core
- Lila Low-Beinart
- Dec 9, 2025
- 7 min read
I remember the first time I felt an emotion. I was 24 years old and receiving trauma-focused body work sessions. I started feeling the energy of grief: a heavy feeling primarily in my lower torso, an ache across my chest, and a bittersweet sensation along the center-line of my torso.
This was a revelation to me at the time. This was what feeling emotions, that thing I'd often heard others talk about, was like! And not only that, but emotions correlate with a sensation in your body? I felt enlightened.
Feeling something, anything—until then I had been experiencing major depression for many years—felt so good, I began doing anything I could to help myself learn how to feel, to recover from Alexithymia, and to lead a more fulfilling life.
Now, after actively healing from alexithymia for over a decade, I have an incredibly rich inner world full of deep, meaningful emotions I'm able to identify (most of the time). Keep reading to learn more about what alexithymia is, what causes it, and how you too can heal from Alexithymia!
My Experience of Alexithymia
For me, alexithymia felt like an on-off switch between emotional numbness and overwhelm/emotional complexity. Part of the time I'd feel depressed and unfilled, like my life was empty and meaningless, and part of the time I felt completely flood by the intensity and complexity of my emotions as a highly sensitive autistic person with complex trauma.
But the thing is, I never knew that I was experiencing alexithymia, in part because the word has only recently gained traction, but also because it was the water I swam in. I didn't know any different. I didn't know a spacious, nuanced, and enlivening world of energies and emotions could be mine to experience and delight in (yes, even the sad emotions).
What is Alexithymia, Really?
Alexithymia is a broad term describing the difficulty we have feeling or identifying internal experiences. It's not a single experience; it’s a whole spectrum of experiences:
Emotional Numbness:Â A sense that no energies or emotions can be felt at all, like everything has been turned off.
Overwhelm: Feeling lots of emotions, but they’re all tangled up in a big ball of yarn and it’s impossible to sort them out. Maybe you know you feel "bad," but couldn't pick out the individual strands of disappointed, angry, grief-stricken.
Emotional Complexity: Those of us who are highly sensitive may feel a variety of complex, unique, and subtle feelings that may not correlate well with the feeling words that currently exist.
Unlabeled Feelings:Â Experiencing distinct emotional energies, but just not having the words to label or describe them.
And More!: You or a loved one may experience Alexithymia in a way I haven't described here. If so, I'd love to learn how you experience it (you can comment on this post or email me!)
Alexithymia is often correlated with autism alone, and while about half of autistic people do experience alexithymia, many other groups of people experience alexithymia as well. (More on that below.)
OK, But What are Emotions?
My favorite definition of emotions, because I think it's so simple yet so accurate, is that an emotion is a body sensation plus concept. (This definition comes from one of my, now dead and controversial, Buddhist teachers Chogyam Trungpa).
Taking my example of grief above, the two components of grief would be the heaviness, ache, and bittersweet body sensations plus the concept of the word "grief" applied to them.
Some qualities of the common emotions that I experience in my body (and this may be different for you!) is tension in my arms and upper body when I feel anger, a light and airy feeling (almost as if there is hot air balloon) in my chest when I feel happiness, and a light tension in my whole body plus wide eyes and an open feeling in the back of my throat when I feel surprise.
When I was numb, I wasn't feeling body sensations at all, and thus wasn't able to feel emotions at all either. When I was overwhelmed, I was feeling body sensations, however they were too complex, and I was too overwhelmed, to identify their qualities and apply an emotion word/concept to them.
Why is Alexithymia Important to Understand?
We have three main types of information we receive from our nervous system: cognitive, emotional, and sensorial. Sensory information can be broken into signals from the outside, called exteroception, for example sight or hearing, and those from the inside, often called interoception, for example hunger, heart rate, or temperature signals.
When someone's experiencing Alexithymia, they are effectively cut off from about half of the information they could be receiving - all of the emotional data, and half of the sensory data (the interoception). Without this data, we not only have less information to make decisions with (decision paralysis anyone?), but we also can't feel feelings like joy, happiness, and contentment (an experience often labeled "depression"). It's also really difficult to connect with others when we can't 'enjoy' being around them.
Additionally, research shows that having increased "emotional granularity", the ability to make distinctions between similar emotional states (which is effectively the opposite of alexithymia), is correlated with overall increased well-being, increased capacity to cope with stressful situations (resilience), and more social connectedness.
Primary vs. Secondary: My Take on the Difference
The clinical world defines primary alexithymia as a lifelong trait due to genetic differences, and secondary alexithymia as an acquired state due to trauma, stress, or medical conditions.
My personal clinical experience suggests the vast majority of people experience secondary alexithymia and rooted in trauma. For example, most if not all of the clients who I've worked with in psychotherapy for a year or more, whom at first experienced alexithymia, built an increased capacity to feel their emotions over time. This suggests that alexithymia is often a reversible state, not a permanent genetic trait.
The Sensitivity-Trauma-Alexithymia Connection
In my therapy office, I see over and over again that the more highly sensitive a person is, the more likely they have developed complex PTSD, followed by 'shutting off' their emotions as a way to deal with the intensity, and the literature backs this up. And autistic people are often highly sensitive people, despite the stereotypes that we lack empathy.
There are many reasons why highly sensitive people experience more PTSD than those who are not. Highly sensitive people feel emotions much more intensely than those who are not, leading to social ostracization and shame for those who are not supposed to display vulnerability in U.S. culture—such as cis men—or for those who's big emotions lead to non-normative emotional expressions body movements (e.g. stimming) or emotional expressions (e.g. meltdowns)—such as autistic people.
This is trauma in and of itself (see my post The Trauma of not Belonging to learn more about this type of trauma). But in addition, someone who's feeling big feelings and not getting the co-regulation support they need will become flooded by their emotions, which will overwhelm their nervous system, which is itself the definition of trauma (see the first paragraph of this blog post for a definition of trauma).
When we are completely overwhelmed by emotions due to all types of stress, and we aren't getting the co-regulation support we need, our nervous system protects us by simply turning those emotions off. That’s alexithymia.
Who Does This Affect?
Alexithymia can impact anyone, and I want to highlight a few populations below:
People who have Experienced Trauma:Â As we explored just above, anyone who experiences trauma, neurodivergent or not, has a much higher risk of developing alexithymia. I have seen numbers anywhere between 20% and 85% of people suffering from PTSD also meet the criteria for alexithymia.
Autistic and Neurodivergent People:Â Peer-reviewed studies show 30 to 70% of Autistic people meet the criteria for PTSD in their lifetime (7-16X higher than for non-autistic people at just 4.5%) or higher. Our highly sensitive nervous systems and capacity for deep emotion mean we are especially susceptible to this emotional blunting as a result of bullying, social ostracization, and living in a world not built for us (rather than alexithymia being an inherent trait of autism itself). About 50% of autistic people experience alexithymia compared to about 5% of non-autistic people.
Cis Men:Â Research shows that Men experience alexithymia at about twice the rate of women across many cultures. This has been described as "male normative alexithymia," the notion that men have been taught to suppress their emotions because it's not 'manly' to be 'too sensitive'. This can lead to the prevalence of anger, isolation, and difficulty connecting with friends or partners that is more prevalent in cis men than in cis women (there is no research yet on trans men, trans women, and genderqueer people).
Many other groups of people experience alexithymia, including those with:
Chronic Physical Conditions: Chronic pain, Parkinson's disease, and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs).
Mental Health Difficulties: Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and personality disorders.
Addiction: Alcohol and substance use disorders.
High Stress Populations: Studies have found a much higher risk of alexithymia in medical students and in men in prisons.
How Can You Tell If You Have Alexithymia?
There are two self-report questionnaires, the Online Alexithymia Questionnaire (OAQ) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) you can take. But honestly, if you have difficulty identifying emotions for any of the reasons above, that might be a clear enough sign that you experience alexithymia.
What's Next?
I want to be clear, if you experience alexithymia and don't want to or are not ready yet to shift this aspect of your experience or identity, that's totally fine! Alexithymia is a fantastic protection against overwhelming feelings stuck in the body because of trauma, and it often does more harm than good to reduce alexithymia before someone has sturdy coping skills in place.
If you are on this journey, I hope the insights I've shared are useful and validating. If my journey from being unable to feel emotions to having a deeply rich and fulfilling inner world is any guide, you too can reconnect with your inner world and find more meaning, joy, and connection in your life.
About Lila Low-BeinartÂ
Lila (she/her) is the founder of Divergent Paths Counseling, where she offers neurodiversity-affirming therapy and training. She specializes in working with autistic, ADHDer, and gifted/2e girls/women and gender expansive folxs, using contemplative, parts-work, and somatic approaches to support clients experiencing trauma, executive dysfunction, depression, and relationship difficulties.
Her trainings for mental health providers go beyond professional development, challenging the 'trance of normal' to foster deeper compassion and more effective support for neurodivergent clients. She also provides consultations for therapists, tailored workshops for mental health organizations and speaking engagements across a range of diverse organizations.