Aphantasia and Alexithymia #AtoZChallenge

Hi everyone and welcome to the #AtoZChallenge for 2024, letter A. I don’t have a theme, but I thought I’d do a repeat of what I did several years ago (I think it was in 2019), sharing posts on topics relevant to myself. I might still go off on a tangent every now and again. Awareness posts are one of my strengths and I’ve covered autism more than enough, so today I thought I’d cover two subjects I’m still relatively new to myself: aphantasia and alexithymia.

Aphantasia is also known as “mental blindness”, although it can be related to any of the senses. It’s an inability to form a mental image of something (or to imagine a sound, smell, whatever). As it turns out, most people can see relatively vivid images in their mind’s eye when they think of an object or person even when said object or person isn’t with them right then. They can also picture a scene, such as a beach scene, in their mind’s eye. I, however, can only picture objects and people very vaguely if at all, even when they’re things I used to be able to see in real life when I still had some sight.

Moreover, like I said, aphantasia can affect the other senses too. This was what made me realize I probably do in fact have aphantasia and am not just a blind person who has forgotten what it’s like to be able to see. After all, when doing a meditation practice that, for instance, tells me to imagine a beach scene, including hearing the waves crashing against the beach, seagulls making their sounds in the distance, feeling the sand between my toes, etc., I can’t. And it’s not for lack of trying. I mean, I remember once, many years ago, one of the child alters creating an inner beach by writing its description out here on the blog. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t actually effective.

Aphantasia is related to a phenomenon I did hear about several years ago, called alexithymia. This is the inability to recognize, identify and describe one’s own emotions. I remember getting a questionnaire on this at my last autism assessment in 2017, but was in denial about how significantly alexithymic I am in fact, because I, unlike the stereotype of alexithymia, don’t consider deep, emotional discussions a waste of time. In other words, I am not unwilling to describe my own feelings, but merely unable.

Neither alexithymia nor aphantasia are classified as disorders in their own right. They often co-occur with autism, which of course isn’t necessarily a disorder either but is classified as such and is, in my case, certainly disabling. Then again, so is my inability to identify my own emotions.