感情がわからない: When the Instrument Returns a Blank

Somebody asks how you are feeling and you answer with your week. Not evasively — it is the honest answer, because when you look for the other thing there is nothing there to report. You can describe the situation in complete detail, you can say what happened and in what order and what it will require, and if the question is what do you feel about it, the instrument returns a blank.

Most women in this state have concluded one of two things about it, and both are wrong in ways that matter. Either that they are cold — that something is missing in them that other people have — or that they are fine and the question is a bit silly. This page argues that neither is what is happening, that at least three completely different things produce this same blank, and that they have different remedies, so working out which one you are in is most of the job.

The research term is alexithymia, and there is a standard questionnaire for it with three components: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing them to other people, and a style of thinking oriented outward, toward events and facts, rather than inward. At high levels it shows up in somewhere around ten per cent of general populations.

One thing about it before moving on, because this library has now walked into the same wall four times and put a sign on it. Scores on that questionnaire are normally distributed across the population — which means this is a dimension, a position on a scale, rather than a kind of person you either are or are not. It is not a diagnosis and does not appear in the diagnostic manuals. So the question am I alexithymic has no clean answer, and the answerable question is the same one as always: what is producing this, and what does it cost me.

This is the part of the page worth keeping. The blank looks identical from inside whichever of these is producing it, and they want opposite things.

The first is that the vocabulary was never installed. Emotional words are learned the way any words are learned — by an adult naming a state while you are in it, repeatedly, for years. A childhood in which nobody said you look disappointed, or that sounds frustrating, or are you sad about it produces an adult who has the states perfectly intact and no labels attached to any of them. Nothing is broken. A file exists and has no name, so nothing can retrieve it. This library has a page on where a Japanese girl learns what to think about her own body, and the mechanism is identical: almost never from instruction, almost always from whether an adult said anything at all.

The second is that the channel is turned down by load. Sustained stress and exhaustion reduce access to internal signal — the same channel the capstone describes going quiet for years for reasons that had nothing to do with her. This one behaves differently from the first in a way you can test: it varies. It is worse in a hard week and measurably better after a genuinely restful stretch, and it tends to come back on its own once the conditions change, gradually and without announcing itself.

The third is the one that does not resolve by resting, and it is the mechanism this library described about the body in a different context: the signal is being actively held down, because feeling it would require something she cannot currently do. A woman who cannot afford to know how angry she is, because knowing would make the next twelve months unlivable, will reliably not know. That is not denial in the accusing sense and it is not weakness. It is a system correctly declining to produce an output that has nowhere to go — and it is the only one of the three where the blank is doing a job rather than being a gap.

The practical distinction between them is availability rather than intensity. The first has no words and no history of having had them. The second fluctuates with your week. The third has a specific shape — there is usually one subject the blank is thickest around, and she can often name that subject even while reporting she feels nothing about it.

A specific version of this arrives on its own and frightens women more than the general one: she has not cried in several years, and at some point noticed, and now cannot tell whether that means something has gone wrong in her.

Crying is a poor index of feeling and it is worth saying so plainly. It varies enormously between people for reasons that have nothing to do with depth of emotion, it is affected by medication, by hormonal state and by exhaustion, and it is heavily shaped by whether crying was ever safe. Its presence is not evidence of feeling and its absence is not evidence of the lack of it — which is a relief that a great many women have never been offered.

And the ordinary history of it is usually simple. For most women who have stopped, it stopped during a stretch when crying would have cost something — a workplace, a period of being relied on by small children, a family in which it would have been used — and then the stretch ended and nothing restarted it, because nothing restarts on its own after it has been suppressed long enough to become the default. That is a habit of the nervous system rather than a verdict about the heart, and the useful thing is that it tends to come back quietly in conditions where it is not costly. Frequently at a film, which is the standard first place, for the obvious reason that nothing is at stake.

There is a line of research on what is called emotional granularity — the degree to which a person distinguishes finely between their own emotional states rather than lumping them into a few broad categories. The finding is consistent and it is not what people expect: the difference between somebody who reports bad and somebody who reports specifically disappointed, or resentful, or apprehensive, is not merely descriptive. It predicts how well they handle the state.

People with higher granularity use reappraisal and problem-solving more and suppression and avoidance less, show lower rates of several poor outcomes including more severe anxiety and depressive states, and are less likely to reach for the blunt self-regulation strategies — heavy drinking among them — that a large undifferentiated bad tends to produce. The mechanism is not mysterious: a specific state suggests a specific response, and an unnamed one suggests only getting away from it.

And the part that makes it a remedy rather than a description: granularity is trainable, and the training is vocabulary. Not feeling more, which is not a thing a person can be instructed to do, and not introspecting harder, which mostly produces more of the same blank. Having more words available, and reaching for a more specific one than the default, changes what the instrument can report.

Which is this library’s argument about naming, arriving in the most intimate place it could arrive. A sensation with a good name gets noticed, reported, counted and treated. The same is true of a state, and the instrument that seemed to be broken frequently turns out to have been reporting into a vocabulary of four words.

The first is to name the body before naming the emotion, and the order matters. Asked what she feels, a woman with a quiet channel gets nothing. Asked what is happening in her chest, her jaw, her stomach, her shoulders, she can usually answer immediately — tight, heavy, hollow, hot. Physical sensation is far more available than emotional label, it is the input the label was going to be built from anyway, and it can be reported honestly without any claim about what it means.

The second is vocabulary, and here is the nicest thing on this page. The essay on 肩こり argued that Japanese carves out a bodily sensation that most languages do not name, and that having the word is why the thing gets noticed and treated. The mirror is true for interior states, and in your favour. 切ない. やるせない. もどかしい. いたたまれない. 億劫. 後ろめたい. 物足りない. Not one of those has a clean single-word English equivalent, and each of them names a distinct, recognisable state with a specific shape to it.

The fine-grained vocabulary the research says would help is already in her language. It is simply not in her daily use, because ordinary adult conversation in this country runs on 疲れた, 大丈夫, 忙しい and 別に — four words that cover a year. The practical instruction is small and specific: once a day, reach past those four for the more exact word, even silently, even if nobody hears it. That is the training, and it is the whole of it.

This produces one specific, painful domestic situation often enough to deserve its own paragraph. He asks what she wants, or what is wrong, and means it kindly. She genuinely does not know. And I don’t know is a true answer that sounds exactly like a refusal — so he hears withholding, she hears an accusation, and the exchange makes the channel quieter rather than louder every time it runs.

The repair is the same move as above, said out loud instead of privately: report the body rather than the emotion. I do not know what I feel, but my chest is tight and I do not want to talk yet. That sentence is fully true, requires no introspection she does not have, and is legible to the other person in a way that a blank is not — it gives him something to respond to instead of something to interpret.

And one thing worth naming for the other direction, because it is the same mechanism this library described about the body. A partner who treats I do not know as a tactic — who presses, or reads it as punishment — is applying force to a channel that closes under force. It will get quieter, reliably, and the quietness will then be read as further evidence. If that loop is running, it is not going to be solved by her trying harder to know.

Women who recognise the first of the three causes in themselves frequently arrive at an uncomfortable second thought within about a minute: that they have no idea how to do the thing that was not done for them, and that there is a child in the house.

The intervention is smaller than it feels and requires no skill she has to acquire first. It is narration, not therapy: saying the state out loud while the child is in it. You look disappointed. That sounds frustrating. You have been quiet since we got home. No question attached, no request for confirmation, and no correction if the guess is wrong — a wrong guess works nearly as well, because what is being taught is that interior states have names and that somebody is looking.

It is worth doing even if it feels artificial, which it will at first, and it is worth doing in front of them about yourself as well — I am tired and a bit irritable, it is not about you. That is the whole transmission mechanism, running forwards this time, and it costs a sentence.

Three things move this out of the territory this page covers, and they are worth knowing because the remedies above will not touch them. If the flatness arrived over a few months rather than having always been how you are. If it came with changes in sleep or appetite, or if the things that used to be enjoyable have stopped being so. Or if what is underneath the blank, when you look at it directly, is not nothing but something you are keeping down deliberately and have been for a long time.

Each of those has a different address, all three are ordinary rather than alarming, and every prefecture has a mental health centre that is free, confidential, requires no referral and no diagnosis, and exists precisely to be called by somebody who is not sure whether she qualifies.

Most of what this page recommends costs nothing and requires nobody. The one thing worth saying about a paid hour is narrow and specific to this subject rather than general.

A quiet channel tends to report when two conditions hold at once: nothing is being asked of her, and nobody in the room needs her to be fine. Those are rarer than they sound. At home somebody usually needs her to be fine. At work certainly. Even with a close friend there is a mild obligation to be all right enough that the friend is not worried. An hour with no task in it and no relationship to protect is one of the few settings where a signal has nothing to compete with — which is not therapy and does not resolve anything, but is occasionally the first time in years that a woman notices something without having to manage it at the same time.

So: you are almost certainly not cold. Three different things produce this same blank — no vocabulary was ever installed, the channel is down under load, or the signal is being held because feeling it would require something you cannot presently do — and only the third is about the subject you think it is about.

And whichever it is, the training is the same and it is not feeling harder. Name the body first, because it answers when the other question does not. Then reach past 疲れた and 別に once a day for the word that is actually true — 切ない, やるせない, もどかしい, 億劫. The instrument was probably never broken. It was reporting into four words, and you are allowed to give it more.