Alexithymia
ay-lex-ih-THIGH-mee-uh
n.Difficulty identifying and describing your own feelings.
Sifneos, 1973Established psychological concept
A trait measured on a spectrum, not a diagnosis.
The Word for It
"How does that make you feel?"
"Fine."
"Aaron."
"Bad. It makes me feel bad."
The therapist put her pen down, which she did about once a session, and said: "You've used 'bad' eleven times in forty minutes. Can you get more specific?"
And Aaron, who had a PhD and could describe the failure modes of a distributed system in language of great precision, sat in a chair and found he could not.
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The difficulty is not that he feels nothing.