What Causes Alexithymia?

This video answers the question: What causes alexithymia? Alexithymia is a construct or a condition, but it's not a mental disorder. It won't be found, for example, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Alexithymia really has three distinct components to it. The first is a difficulty identifying emotions and what we commonly see here is difficulty distinguishing between bodily sensations and feelings. The second component is a difficulty describing feelings, so this would be a difficulty in expressing or communicating an emotional state to someone else. The third component of alexithymia would be an externally-oriented cognitive style. What this means is that there would be a low level of introspection so if somebody would tend to focus on external facts and not on feelings. We could think of this as concrete versus abstract. Someone with alexithymia would tend to think in concrete terms and not abstract terms. We could think of this in terms of the five-factor model as having some similarity to low openness to experience, specifically low imagination and low levels of fantasy. Another interesting point here with this third aspect of alexithymia is that this also tends to affect dreams. We also see increased levels of impulsivity increased levels of aggression. There is comorbidity with a number of other mental disorders. We see comorbidity with all of the Cluster B personality disorders except for histrionic personality disorder, so this would include narcissistic, antisocial, and borderline personality disorder. We also see comorbidity with substance use disorder, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Some research has indicated that alexithymia actually predicts posttraumatic stress disorder. Alexithymia is thought of as being highly stable, it's usually conceptualized as a personality trait and, of course, personality disorders are conceptualized as an extreme manifestation of certain personality traits. The theory in terms of the etiology of alexithymia is that child maltreatment leads to alexithymia and alexithymia tends to contribute in some ways to certain mental health symptoms. There are five types of child maltreatment: there's emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse. Of these five types, alexithymia has been most closely linked to emotional neglect and emotional abuse and really hasn't been linked very strongly at all to the other types of child maltreatment.
Brown, S., Fite, P. J., Stone, K., Richey, A., & Bortolato, M. (2018). Associations between emotional abuse and neglect and dimensions of alexithymia: The moderating role of sex. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 10(3), 300–308.

Видео What Causes Alexithymia? канала Dr. Todd Grande