Alexithymia

Alexithymia is often described as difficulty identifying and describing emotions—but for many autistic or neurodivergent people, this challenge is not rooted in emotional absence or detachment. Instead, it reflects a mismatch between dominant expectations of emotional communication and the individual’s way of experiencing and processing internal states.
For those with a local processing bias—who naturally attend to detail over summary, to moment-by-moment shifts rather than overarching labels—the demand to name a singular emotion can feel reductive or even intrusive. Emotional states may be experienced as layered, ambiguous, or sensory rather than linguistic, and attempts to compress them into one-word answers like “sad” or “anxious” may feel untrue, flattening, or actively disorienting.
Rather than being confused or emotionally blocked, the person may simply find greater meaning in describing the texture, rhythm, or physicality of a feeling than in assigning it a conventional name. In this way, alexithymia is less a deficit than a divergence in the way emotional data is interpreted—and often reveals a rich, complex inner world that resists neat encapsulation.