Alexithymia.

The study also revealed an intriguing pattern: people with aphantasia showed a disconnect between their physiological fear responses and their subjective experience of fear. Their bodies reacted with fear, but they didn't feel as afraid.Dr. Monzel suggests this might be related to alexithymia - difficulty identifying and describing emotions - which appears to be more common in people with aphantasia. This "decoupling" between physical and emotional responses has been observed in alexithymic individuals before.

The more I think about the dialogues between the therapist and I, the more puzzled I become. I don't 'do' diagnosis, and I tend to see labels as very likely to concretise and limit identity. The problem in therapy was that my thinking includes metaphors to describe sensations, emotions, experiences, and I've learnt to rely on Gendlin's focusing to understand the felt sense of any issues, both for myself and with clients. It works well for some people, not for others. But focusing creates a way to talk about the things that cannot make sense if we stay confined to the prosaic and 'structural'. 

Thinking back, it often felt that the therapist dismissed my feelings, and I felt that he was consciously and maliciously doing this - but now I wonder if it might have been something else? You see, the therapist didn't speak of feelings from what I'd call the inside. He spoke of feelings as objects - he may have been different in private? I can't know. But his blindness - for that's how it felt to me - meant that when I used metaphors, like saying that I felt as if I was stuck in thick, cold mud for instance, he didn't (and I'm checking the transcripts) pick up on any sensations the metaphor conjures up.

The absence.

Alexithymia// aphantasia?

I don't understand the relationship between the terms yet, and I had not come across them when I was his client. And me being me found the miscommunication - his alexithymia// aphantasia - interesting - because his mind worked very differently to mine and I could never predict what he would say next - that was the positive aspect! I also found the absence profoundly challenging, and distressing. I wonder sometimes if falling in love was my complete submission, a final plea demonstrating just how much I needed him to hear my story with all the emotions allowed. For sure I kept on believing that he could understand me. In my defence he was / is a psychotherapist! And of course I would never consider there to be a problem I couldn't solve eventually. In transactional analysis terms I have a 'try harder' driver. 

My answer to failure is simple. TRY HARDER! 

And the point of trying harder with the therapist was?

I wanted, no, I needed to know what the hell had happened - I needed to know what he had felt...

Oh dear, it can't happen can it, not if he is alexithemic!

So, what I now know is that there are neurological differences that lead people to appear to be aversive or evasive, not because they are trying to be deceptive, but because literally the communication between their limbic system and their neocortex operates differently t- in this case compared to mine. In particular, the functioning of the insula, the hippocampi, and the communication pathways between both hemispheres of the brain...is different. 

I'm going to say throttled! 

OK, bit extreme - but I feel a mix of anger and confusion, because I don't want to believe that a person can be a therapist without having an enhanced ability to work with every quanta of emotion-sensation. Awareness seems fundamental! True or no, I was harmed by his inability to articulate and speak a language of sensation. It shut me down, and I re-routed via Eros (one possibility, other theories exist) I can absolutely let myself off! 

When I started therapy my hippocampi were passed out at the foot of the amygdala tree, and my insula had everything on lockdown. I felt this as 'the bullet to the skull' I was bewildered, the wounds swollen and numb. When I began therapy - if we factor in this phenomenon of aleithymia - he and I were in the same psychological country. I was there as a refugee, washed up, on the shore of a foreign land. I couldn't pass as a native once I started to heal (Wim Hof!) because facing my fears brought everything back 'online' so to speak. 

I don't remember him ever picking up on my emotions in any session. 

My memory is that whenever I began to access sensation and put my feelings into words, it was as if I was now speaking a different language.  

Alexithymia is:

<<a cognitive style where a person focuses on external objects, people, and events, rather than their own inner feelings or thoughts, often avoiding introspection and emotional awareness, is a core feature of alexithymia, characterized by difficulty identifying/describing feelings and reliance on external cues to understand emotions. Source - AI>>

When I think about a dialogue between us, a particular dialogue, it is significant that he can only diagnose emotional distress as a developmental issue, rather than as a natural response to the unmet needs in the present. 

As a Buddhist, I don't see 'self' as a lasting, permanent something.  'I' am a construct and everything changes, so the concept of self he uses doesn't make too much sense to me. I assume he means by self, 'identity'? It appears that he hears a person's description of distress as a symptom though, not as communication seeking empathy? 

He -' I'm getting at any potential client who might be sitting in front of you who might not have a sense of self and might not know who they are. There are many clients I've come across who describe sensations and feelings and events and experiences, but they have no sense of self to carry them in, and therefore having a framework for self understanding is critical for somebody like that.  Because that's their chief trauma if you like, that I'm going through the world not knowing who I am, and not having a place to put anything. Particularly if somebody has disorganised attachment - because people with disorganised attachment, their chief emotion is fear - and if the background feeling is fear than they are constantly hypervigilant and there is no space for any sense of self'

I now interpret his view as meaning that a traumatized person is unable to find a different relationship to their sensations and feelings until they can say 'I feel this way about it'. In other words, the therapist would focus on the relationship between meanings with the client, rather than on the client's perception of sensations and emotion - contact with the whole of it. He would not do as I try to do - go into the sensation with the client, allow the underlying need to be recognised, give it space, let it speak. I aim to show through my words and body language that I have heard and felt the impact without getting lost in it, without any fear or aversion. Only compassion.

Here is another example of the therapist responding to my feelings, as if they are disordered objects. I was talking to him about a nauseous miasma, a sickening, putrefying atmosphere of libido and Thanatos that ran like a black line of doom constricting my heart, my soul, during the time of my son's psychosis and husbands infidelity -  I had felt as if I was on the Nostromo, I was saying that my husband was like a character in the film, Alien, who was capable of murder through its mindless programming. A chilling, horrifying thought..and it summed up exactly the fear and horror I was connected to.

Me -  "...he reminded me of the character of the android, the synth (Ash). The android has been programmed with the imperative to sacrifice the crew to get an alien onto the ship, the Nostromo, somehow. We were the crew - my sons and myself...the agenda (my husbands hidden agenda) created the feeling that comes from gaslighting. What is happening is harm it is harmful, and it will destroy. Somebody who does it that way (path of lies and deception) there is no need for it to be underhand"

He - 'When you put it that way, it sounds like you are drawing parallels between the activity of the company and their unseeing agenda, and your husband and his unseen agenda - like there are two agendas going on that are not really connected, but both are operating simultaneously, and both undermine you and your son, in a way'.

Me - "No, it was my husband, he was acting like the synth - Ash - there was an agenda, and the synth actually tries to kill Ripley, the character in the film who questions him, so, you know...because she might find out. So he has to - no he has to but...he has to kill her basically. He doesn't want someone getting in the way of the agenda, but meanwhile this thing is incubating in John Hurt's character, and it is going to destroy the whole ship - unless Ripley blows the damn thing out of the air-lock! The company, the name on the van, Prometheus was just synchronicity, something that takes you down to the underworld I suppose? No, Prometheus suffered for giving man, fire, so no, nothing to do with that layer of myth. But for my son, Prometheus is not good - two big burley men dressed in black, putting him in a van.."

He - 'It's strikingly bizarre, isn't it. Why would a company that does that call themselves Prometheus? Can you talk about all of that now as something that happened, rather than feeling its live presence. Does it still have any live presence for you?'

FFS! Why would a company that does that call themselves Prometheus? Rather than asking the client - me! -  how she managed to get through those experiences! And 'Does it still have any live presence for you?' My words, my body language, my tone of voice demonstrated that I was back there, back on the bloody Nostromo! Remembering my son, white, broken, shaking, sectioned.

No recognition of any of this in his reply. 

And he went on to laugh about it...

OK, yes - the therapist's response is to ask about the relationships of things, he misses out entirely my sensations, my feelings. Plus as a safeguarding issue...what I actually said! I think he should have asked me if I thought that my husband was still a threat!

So, no wonder he couldn't understand my victim statement.

No wonder I had to write it!

I don't feel any better for identifying this. I have never felt any better ever for understanding the relationship between things. I feel instead that I've learnt something very important. That what I know now makes sense of why the therapist couldn't understand his role in harming me. On the other hand I find it unforgivable that he didn't - doesn't - understand that there is a processing difference that will limits his ability to explore and make contact with the inner meaning of a client's feelings, especially the unmet needs that their emotional pain points to. And when I think about that, a part of me says 'hey, not my problem!' Except he will keep on keeping on identifying structure and form, unable to be 'in the picture' or imagine the impact of what has been expressed. 

I should have made the complaint...