Is it normal to not have emotions

It seems fake. Because it is fake. And you can only pretend for so long. He and his current wife stopped living together in He saw a general practitioner and was prescribed antidepressants. Though he was still in contact with his wife, it was clear that the relationship was no longer working.

In June , he attempted suicide. I was taken to hospital and treated. A psychiatrist referred Stephen for a series of counseling sessions and then a course of psychodynamic psychotherapy, a type of Freudian-based therapy that, in trying to uncover unconscious drivers of thoughts and behavior, is similar to psychoanalysis.

Source photograph from iStock. Freudian ideas are now out of favor with most academic psychologists, as Geoff Bird , associate professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford explains. But when Bird read about alexithymia, he found the descriptions intriguing. Bird started his academic career studying autism, empathy and emotional awareness, which led to his interest in alexithymia.

In one of his first studies in this field, he linked alexithymia, as measured with a item checklist developed at the University of Toronto, with a lack of empathy. But what really drew Bird into alexithymia research were his interactions with people with autism. And you can see that immediately as soon as you meet some autistic people. In other words, emotion-related difficulties are intrinsic to alexithymia, not to autism.

Bird is passionate about spreading this message. But he volunteered to work at a care home because he wanted to do something productive with his time. Bird has since run a series of studies exploring alexithymia outside the context of autism. He has found, for example, that people with the condition have no trouble recognizing faces or distinguishing between pictures of people smiling and frowning.

That is really quite strange. As well as better characterizing alexithymia, Bird and his colleagues have also dug into what explains it, taking what could seem to be a circular argument — Stephen has problems with emotion because he has alexithymia, which is characterized by problems with emotion — and blowing it right apart. It makes me want to either run away or react verbally aggressively. Fear and anger — and confusion — he understands.

Source photograph from iStock by Getty Images. The ability to detect changes inside the body — everything from a racing heart to a diversion of blood flow, from a full bladder to a distension of the lungs — is known as interoception.

Different emotions are associated with different physical changes. In anger, for example, the heart rate rises, blood rushes to the face and fists clench. In fear, the heart rate also rises, but blood drains from the face. What Bird, Brewer and others have found in people with alexithymia is a reduced ability, sometimes a complete inability, to produce, detect or interpret these internal bodily changes.

People with the condition have normal-range intelligence quotients. As a child, Stephen suffered extreme emotional neglect. When he was 6, his mother intentionally set fire to their home in Nottingham while she, Stephen, his younger brother and even younger sister were all inside. His father was a steelworker who worked all kinds of shifts. These allow you to participate in exercises to help improve mental health.

One possible step towards emotional recognition is to start being mindful of your own physiological responses. Some research has suggested the importance of beginning with your heart rate. Notice whether your heart rate goes up in certain situations, and explore the possibilities of why this could be. A heart rate monitor or fitness watch can also help. With practice, you may become better able to distinguish anger from excitement and fear, for example.

A journal can also help you document your physical responses and emotional patterns. Learning how to identify these emotions and work with them not against them can help you lead a more fulfilling life. Alexithymia can cause frustration for people who experience it, as well as friends and loved ones.

They can help guide you to the right therapy options to help improve on these important life skills. While not inherently dangerous, this condition may inadvertently lead to interpersonal and relationship issues. The good news is that there are therapies available that can help you improve on mental health skills. Not only will this help with relationships with others, but more importantly, you may feel better, too.

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Learn more about why this occurs. Even as his wife walked down the aisle, the only sensation he felt was his face flushing and a heaviness in his feet; his mind was completely clear of joy, happiness, or love in its conventional sense. In fact, Caleb claims not to feel almost any emotions — good, or bad. When you struggle to feel any emotions yourself, others' behaviour can seem alien to you Credit: Getty Images. Getting to the bottom of this emotional blindness could shed light on many serious illnesses, from anorexia and schizophrenia to chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome.

How can you fall in love, for example, when you lack all the basic tender feelings of affection that normally spark a romance?

To understand that emotional numbness, it helps to imagine emotions as a kind of Russian doll, formed of different shells, each one becoming more intricate. At the heart is a bodily sensation — the skip in your heart when you see the person you love, or the churning stomach that comes with anger. The brain may then attach a value to those feelings — you know if it is good or bad, and if that feeling is strong, or weak; the amorphous sensations begin to take a shape and form a conscious representation of an emotion.

The feelings can be nuanced, perhaps blending different types of emotions, such as bitter-sweet sorrow, and eventually we attach words to them — you can describe your despair, or your joy, and you can explain how you came to feel that way.

The scientists hypothesised that this may result from a breakdown in communication between the two hemispheres , preventing signals from the emotional regions, predominantly in the right, from reaching the language areas, predominantly in the left.

This could be seen, most dramatically, when surgeons tried to cure epilepsy by cutting the fibres that connect the two hemispheres; although it reduced the seizures, the patients also appeared emotionally mute as a result.

This might create a noisy signal a bit like a badly tuned radio that prevents emotional cross-talk, she thinks. When surgeons cut the dense connections between the two hemispheres, patients become emotionally mute and unable to express their feelings Credit: Science Photo Library. Today, it seems clear that there may be many types of alexithymia. While some might have trouble expressing emotions, others like Caleb might not even be conscious of the feelings in the first place.

In the same way, a damaged neural circuit involved in emotional processing might prevent sadness , happiness or anger from bursting into consciousness. Along these lines, a few recent fMRI scanning studies have found signs of a more basic perceptual problem in some types of alexithymia. Goerlich-Dobre, for instance, found reduced grey matter in areas of the cingulate cortex serving self-awareness , potentially blocking a conscious representation of the emotions.

For instance, one day at school he was working with the student theatre. Eventually, his boss lost his cool and started ripping into him. It seems that almost no event can penetrate that indifference.