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. But...it is useful to have words for that something that seems weird. 

Or rather I found something uncomfortable, and unbelievable about our dialogue. The therapist didn't pick up on my metaphors 

I use metaphors to describe sensations, emotions, experiences. I've learnt to rely on Gendlin's focusing to understand the felt sense of any issues. It works well for some people, not for others. But focusing creates a way to talk about the things that cannot make sense if they stay confined to the prosaic and 'structural'. Thinking back, I often felt that the therapist dismissed my feelings, and I felt that he was consciously and even 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, such as 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 I found the miscommunication - his alexithymia// aphantasia - interesting - because his mind worked very differently to mine. I couldn't predict what he would say next - that was the positive aspect! On the negative side, I experienced the absence of metaphor profoundly challenging, and distressing. 

I wonder sometimes if falling in love with him was my complete submission, a final plea, demonstrating just how much I needed him to hear my story with all the feelings and 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 being stuck, trapped, 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 when it comes to ways of thinking; not because they are trying to be deceptive, but because literally the communication between their limbic system and their neocortex operates differently - in this case differently 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 of the felt-sense 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 I was in grief after years of extreme stress, Metaphorically, my hippocampi were passed out at the foot of the amygdala tree, and my insula had put everything on lockdown. I felt this as 'the bullet to the skull' metaphor, I was bewildered, the wounds swollen and numb [ why? +]. When I began therapy - if we factor in this phenomenon of aleithymia - the therapist  and I were in the same psychological country. But feeling dazed and confused isn't my normal. I was there in this land of I can't name feelings, as a refugee, washed up, on the shore of a foreign land, disconnected, emotion burnt out.

But that changed, once I started to heal (Wim Hof!), Breath work and the cold brought everything back 'online' so to speak. 

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

I remember him noticing if my expression changed, so first class observation skills!

But I don't remember ever feeling that he felt my meaning? 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. Granted, in therapy we ask extremely open questions, but...he didn't ask about physical sensations?

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.  

And if this statement is true:

'reality is invented, not discovered' Watzlawick 1984.

No way could we create a new reality without a common language. Therapy is, in my view all about reconfiguring a reality from shattered and pain full, to one that is both powerful and beautiful. Sometimes he positioned my account if my actions were symbolic rather than pragmatic, when I told him about pouring my father's alcohol away for instance. It was love for my crazy dad, and it was all I could do. Nothing about it is symbolic. I was not describing a deep need to save all alcoholics! Nor was it a metaphor, I will take action rather than fret or worry. 

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 don't find Descartes's concept of any split between thinking and being, as useful. I am, regardless of my thoughts. I don't 'think' a lot of the time, but I always feel. I lived for three years in an increasing nightmare of hypervigilance (in an externally dangerous reality!), raw encounter and contact with the feelings brought healing. Understanding myself did nothing to help.

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. I was talking about the android. 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! 

I then spoke about my son's sectioning, how he'd been taken off the hospital ward where he was still in recovery from his suicide attempt and bundled, pale and terrified, into a van.

Me - 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! I've just said that my son was taken out of hospital - unhealed fractures, after a suicide attempt and bundled into a van by men dressed in black and the therapist says "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 then '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!

No recognition of any of this in his reply. 

And he went on to laugh about it...

Which is only possible if you can't feel the horror...

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 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...