I don’t know how I feel about it …






I have already referred to Phil v2.0’s emotional difficulties. To date, my focus (such as it is!) has been on depression and self-loathing.  I would now like to delve a little deeper into a couple of other emotional issues that affect me. 

 

In practice, their manifestation (to myself and to outsiders) and in some respects their cause, involves both cognition and behaviour. Nevertheless, so far as the following are concerned, the key underlying factor is emotion. I therefore tend to think of these as emotional issues. Who knows what somebody who knows a bit about it would say but if I may adopt a highly educated acronym – WTF!

 

The 2 challenges that I propose to look at here, can be summarised as:

 

·      Emotional confusion; and

·      Difficulties with emotional memory

 

Taking these in turn, I will start by mentioning alexithymia. 

 

This is actually, a “grown-up” term for emotional confusion and it is something that I have been diagnosed as now, applicable to me. 

 

It can be summarised as a difficulty in recognizing and correctly articulating, one’s own true, emotion. Rather more applicable to myself, is that it can also characterised as involving a misinterpretation of the feelings of others. To adopt some jargon – limited emotional intelligence.

 

In common with others, I will frequently experience more than one feeling at the same time. As an alexithymic person, I can incorrectly, decide that one or other is the real or strongest, emotion.  For example, I might want to undertake something, but also, feel cautious about doing it.  Emotional confusion can (and has!) seen the desire as paramount, with a resultant trivialisation of the trepidation. The dangers in this ought to be fairly obvious!  

 

Of course, an exaggeration of prospective “pain” can (and does) limit “pleasure”. To give a trivial example, I might be planning a walk, but an excessive fear of bad weather can make it feel so unappealing as to result in me refraining from doing so.  

 

As previously mentioned, another aspect of alexithymia is missing or misreading the emotions of other. This is something that very much, affects me. 

 

In particular, I tend to mistake the correct, proportion of mixed emotion that someone else exhibits. I will sometimes exaggerate negative emotion and miss the dominance of the positive. 

 

For example, someone might be trying to assist by advising me to think about something in a different way. The desire to assist can be (incorrectly) seen as secondary and I will often feel criticized and restrained.  Rather than being grateful for help, I often find it easier to perceive an exhibition of hostility, when in reality, it isn’t there – quite the opposite!    

 

Although less of a problem for myself, it is of course possible to overestimate the positive emotions of third parties – or to just not know how that person feels.

 



Turning briefly now, to issues of emotional memory.

 

Given that it can be affective of interpersonal relationships, and sensitive accordingly, I will only talk in general terms and keep it very short.

 

I think that memory and emotion are inter-linked in more than one way:

 

For example, there can be a limited recollection of past emotion. I suffer from this and it is fair to say, that my own emotional infrastructure arising from prior emotions to a large extent, needs to be rebuilt. A significant part of this involves making new memories and taking steps to retain them.

 

Further, there are issues over a present emotional response, to other (non-emotional) memories.

 

For example, I might (and this is only hypothetical) now recall, what was in reality, a very enjoyable family holiday. Accordingly, my memories of it ought to be positive. However, by reason of my alexithymia (resulting in a sometimes surprising and inappropriate emotional response), coupled with non-emotional memory loss (so I am in danger of failing to remember (or misremembering) its positive aspects) my present emotional reaction might be very negative indeed. To put it simply, I could tell myself and believe, that it was an unmitigated disaster – from start to finish!



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