Alexithymia: The Word That Finally Explained Something About My Own ADHD

Alexithymia ADHD wasn’t a phrase I’d ever put together in my own head, not properly, until I was working through a unit in my own coursework on autism and ADHD, the one on supporting fathers of autistic children. I was taking the kind of half-attentive notes you take when a unit is useful but not obviously about you, when one of the presenters said a word I’d never properly sat with before. Alexithymia. The inability to put emotions into words. He was talking about it as a male socialisation issue, boys taught early to be less emotionally fluent than girls, and it made total sense in that context. What I wasn’t expecting was the small, quiet jolt of recognition that had nothing to do with the fathers in the training and everything to do with me, sitting there as a mum of two girls, Zara and Bella, thinking about how I’d actually parented them.

I have ADHD. I’ve known that for years. What I hadn’t quite put together, until that unit, is that the thing I’d always privately described as being “bad at knowing how I feel until it’s already too big” has an actual name, and it’s disproportionately common in people with brains like mine.

What alexithymia actually is

Alexithymia isn’t the absence of emotion, which was the first thing I got wrong about it. The feeling is there. What’s missing, or delayed, or foggy, is the ability to identify it and put language to it in the moment.^[1] Therapist Kristen McClure describes it as a gap between feeling and knowing, not a gap between feeling and not feeling, and that distinction mattered to me more than I expected it to. It explained a specific pattern I’d never had a word for, where I’d notice I was snappish or flat or strangely tired before I could tell you why, sometimes long before.

The condition is usually assessed using something called the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, which looks at three things, difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing them to other people, and a tendency to think in externally focused, practical terms rather than internal ones.^[1] Reading through that list felt uncomfortably familiar in a way I wasn’t quite prepared for.

Why this shows up so much in ADHD, and gets missed in women

Alexithymia ADHD research is still a fairly young field, but what exists is consistent: it’s significantly more common than in the general population, and it’s increasingly understood as a contributing factor in the emotional regulation difficulties that come with ADHD, not a separate, unrelated issue sitting alongside it.^[2] For autistic adults specifically, research suggests it affects somewhere around half, compared to roughly one in twenty people generally, and ADHD carries its own elevated rate too.^[2]

That last point is the one that sat with me longest. Women with ADHD are so often diagnosed in adulthood, frequently after a child’s diagnosis prompts a parent to look at their own patterns, that a lot of us have spent years quietly compensating for something we didn’t have language for either. I didn’t grow up with a word for what I was doing. I just had a vague, private sense that other people seemed to know what they felt while it was happening, and I usually found out on a delay.

The thing that’s actually helped, and it wasn’t what I expected

The same unit mentioned a reframe that stuck with me more than anything else: asking someone “how do you feel” often shuts the conversation down, especially for people who struggle to access that answer quickly, whereas asking “tell me your story” or “what was that like for you” tends to open it up, because it lets the feeling arrive sideways, through narrative, rather than demanding it show up on command.

I started trying this on myself, quietly, when I noticed the familiar fog of not knowing what was going on internally. Instead of asking myself how I felt, which usually got me nowhere, I’d ask what had actually happened in the last hour, in plain, boring detail. More often than not, naming the events got me to the feeling faster than asking for the feeling directly ever did.

There’s some real research behind body-based approaches helping with this too. A study by Bornemann and Singer found that nine months of contemplative, body-based practice measurably improved people’s ability to accurately sense what was happening internally, and reduced alexithymia scores over that time.^[3] Even brief mindfulness interventions have shown improvements in emotional labelling over much shorter timeframes.^[4] None of that surprised me once I’d read it, the body seems to know before the words catch up, which tracks with what therapist Tania Fragoso describes in her own writing on this exact overlap in autistic and ADHD mothers, the body as the actual route in, not a workaround.^[2]

Why this matters beyond just me

I keep coming back to how much of my parenting instinct around emotional coaching, the stuff I already write about here, was built on an assumption that naming a feeling is the easy, obvious first step. Looking back at Zara and Bella’s childhoods with this lens, I can see moments with both of them where I asked “how do you feel” and got nothing back, not because they didn’t have an answer, but because I was asking for it the wrong way. For a lot of ADHD kids, and clearly for at least one ADHD mother, naming the feeling isn’t the easy first step. It’s often the hardest part, arriving last, if it arrives cleanly at all. Knowing that now shapes how I’d talk to a younger child about big feelings, less “how are you feeling right now,” more “tell me what happened,” and letting the feeling surface on its own terms rather than demanding it show up to order.

It’s also just been a genuinely useful thing to know about myself, at this stage of life, with both girls grown now and enough distance to look backward properly. I spent a long time assuming I was simply bad at some emotional skill everyone else had been handed for free. Turns out there was a name for it the whole time, sitting in a unit about someone else’s parenting, of all places, before I finally recognised it in my own.

Where this fits with everything else here

This connects directly to the piece I wrote on the start together task trick, since both come from the same place, ADHD brains needing a different entry point into something that looks simple from the outside but isn’t. And if you’re newer to how ADHD shows up in fine motor and everyday tasks generally, our piece on pencil control activities covers the parenting side of that same territory.

References

1. McClure, K. Alexithymia and ADHD: When You Can’t Read Your Own Emotions.
2. Fragoso, T. Alexithymia in Autistic and ADHD Mothers.
3. Bornemann, B., & Singer, T. (2017). Taking time to feel our body: Steady increases in heartbeat perception accuracy and decreases in alexithymia over 9 months of contemplative mental training. Psychophysiology.
4. Aaron, R. V., et al. (2020). Brief mindfulness-based interventions and emotional labelling. Frontiers in Psychiatry.
5. Hannon, M., & [co-presenter]. PESI Autism Summit, Supporting Fathers of Autistic Children (course unit notes, personal coursework).

Related topics for parents

• The ADHD start together task trick
• Pencil control activities for restless hands
• Child development milestones and how children grow