🌈 My Alexithymia Discovery 🤯
A therapeutic LEGO creation of my emotional felt-sense and processing, 2025
Recently I learned I have Alexithymia. Alexithymia is the challenge with either sensing, understanding, interpreting or processing emotion.
I never suspected I have alexithymia, because I feel SO BIG and every feeling and sensation in my body is heightened. I had wrongly learned that Alexithymia is the absence of felt-emotion (i.e. challenges with emotional interoception), but there’s a whole spectrum of emotional processing.
Alexithymia literally means ‘without words for emotions” and this makes SO MUCH sense to me! To help understand my emotions, I often need to mindfully tune in and make art to depict and unpack my feelings. It’s a highly common trait in us Autistic / ADHD folk, somewhere between *40-65% mark! (see research links below).
Since my Alexithymia discovery, I realised that emotion inside me is often accompanied by colours, images, textures and metaphors.
Then I need to interpret what those sensory forms and inner poetics actually means.
To process all this information, I’ve been inquiring via therapeutic arts processes to make poetic art using drawing, painting, collage and digital media. Bricolaging these together (like a collage of different forms) into a single format has been so helpful to understand and articulate my emotional experience, and shared light on what I need.
(I’ll be sharing my poetic art as limited edition printed mini booklets in the coming months, so stay tuned! 💖🦄👇)
Experiencing Alexithymia - poetic excerpt, 2025 (printed booklets coming soon!)
Since learning about my Alexithymia, it’s made so much sense why I’ve always created art and became an arts therapist and arts-based researcher! Therapeutic art-making gives me tools to externalise my felt sense experience, so I can process it visually and meaningfully, instead of getting caught up in the deeply layered, ephemeral, tangled-ball-of-wool, inner whelms of it all.
Alongside the processing factor, art-making is my special interest AND it helps me regulate my nervous system, so my brain functioning can come out of flight-flight-freeze-fawn state, and back into a more responsive capacity.
This leads me to know that engaging in what brings me joy is a regulation tool, instead of just how capitalist society says I should do/be/act. In this way, cultivating joy, play and interest-based experiences are as important for my wellbeing as nourishing my body with healthy food, exercise, people and environments.
If you’d like to join me for some online, naturally therapeutic art-making, I have an Upcoming Workshops page HERE.
I hope to co-create and artistically regulate with you sometime soon.
💖 Chrissy
