Alexithymia is defined as a neurological disorder which produces in people who suffer from it a notorious inability to have control and recognize their own emotions and consequently, leads them to have various problems when they want to express themselves verbally. Therefore, it could be said that the characteristics of every person who suffers from this pathology are mainly the difficulty to identify and describe feelings and emotions, as well as the capacity for fantasy, difficulty in differentiating what is which are the sensations that the body experiences regarding what are feelings, just to name the most important.
Taking some statistical data, alexithymia affects 8% of men and 1.8% of women. In addition, it affects approximately 30% of people with psychological disorders and 85% of patients with autism spectrum disorders. Alexithymia term was developed by psychiatrist Peter E. Sifneos in 1972.
Neurology experts have discovered that alexithymic patients have an abnormality in the brain area that is responsible for analyzing and formulating emotions. But instead of developing a brain activity that is consistent with the emotional level of each scenario, those affected by this neurological disorder reflect a process that is highly variable, which can range from very tenuous to very intense, and which affects the fair appreciation of the emotions. The causes of this disease can appear during the first years of the infant's life, in the stage in which the child still lacks hierarchical mental states and therefore are not associated with concepts. Is for that reason, which addresses emotions through your body.
In addition to the above, it should be noted that Alexithymia is divided into two types. In the first place, the primary is located, which has its origin by biological causes, so it appears because of some neurobiological defect or deficiency that at the same time is the responsibility of hereditary elements. Secondly, there is the so-called secondary alexithymia, which is the one that occurs from a series of dramatic situations the individual lives both in childhood and in his adult phase
