Posted by gardenergirl on April 12, 2006, at 15:36:21
In reply to Re: alexithymia?, posted by zazenduck on April 12, 2006, at 9:02:42
I've used the term before to refer to when someone doesn't seem to have the "language" to discuss their emotions. By that I mean that they aren't able to differentiate different emotions from each other and label them.
It's sort of like how there are 30(?) or more words for snow in the native Alaskan languages (at least I think I've read that), but there are many fewer in parts of the world which don't get snow.
So someone who only knows "I feel bad" or "I feel good" is not able to identify and label if they feel sad, depressed, melancholy, devastated, sorrowful, grief, down, blue, out of sorts, low, etc. They just don't have the accompanying experience of matching a feeling with the word. If you've had many experiences with seeing and trying to describe different kinds of snow, you develop a language for the different kinds. And then using this language with someone who understands it helps to consolidate the terms in your vocabulary. Same with emotions. It's important to have people in your life who "mirror" your emotions accurately in order to learn about them.
Unless it's organic, I think it is amenable to psychotherapy. There are some DBT exercises in the Emotion Regulation section of the "Skills Training Manual" which help a person think through the process of identifying an emotion in a structured manner, looking at all the data and putting it together to determine the best fit for the emotion word. As clients get more skilled at that and become more familiar with the many words for different emotions, they gain useful information about their emotions and related thoughts and behavior.
gg
poster:gardenergirl
thread:631881
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060412/msgs/632244.html