Alexithymia

Alexithymia:
Noun
The inability to recognise or describe one's own emotions.

I've known all my life that I struggle to understand and explain my own feelings but I only found out within the last year that it's an actual thing with a name. That discovery just helped everything click into place while I was waiting for my autism assessment. It's quite a common thing that's seen in a lot of autistics and can probably account for it's fair share of our social and communication difficulties.

It means that it can sometimes take me a while to process what I'm feeling about a situation and I might only realise how I feel later on, often when it's too late. And quite often my wife can tell if there's something wrong but when she asks about it I can only really give one of two responses; either "Nothing" or "I don't know" because there's nothing identifiably wrong and I genuinely don't know what the problem is. If I do figure out what's going on in my head it won't be until later on, in which case I bring it up with her again later. I think this is partly why I don't like conflict, and therefore why me and my wife have never really had an argument in the 8 years we've been together. I can't usually process things in the moment that are too heated and emotional so it doesn't put me in a good position, which means I avoid arguments at all costs.

One of the things that I've noticed in myself recently is that whenever I need to use emotive language I separate myself from what I'm saying, which I think might be a result of the difficulty in describing/expressing in alexithymia. So for example, instead of saying "I'd like that" I find my self saying "That'd be good." Or instead of "I hope so" it's just "Hopefully" so I'm basically removing myself from any emotional statement. I think this might play a role in my difficulty in making and maintaining friendships because people seem to bond over sharing emotions with each other, which I'm not good at. With that said though, I do think I'm getting a bit better when communicating online because showing empathy helps occasionally with what I do for work, so I've been working a little bit on it and trying to be more conscious of how I'm saying things.