08/01/2026
✨New blog post✨
What Is Alexithymia? Exploring Sensory Processing, Interoception and Masking
Alexithymia is often reduced to “difficulty identifying emotions.” That description captures part of the experience, but it leaves a great deal out.
For some autistic people, internal signals may be faint or hard to detect. At other times, the signals are already very noticeable, but sorting them, understanding what they mean and connecting them to the situation takes more time.
This distinction matters in therapy. Asking someone to “notice where they feel it in the body” can be helpful when signals are outside awareness. It can miss the mark when the person is already tracking ten sensations at once and needs support with meaning-making rather than more noticing.
This post explores alexithymia through the lenses of interoception, autistic sensory processing, trauma and masking.
https://www.talltreepsychology.com/blog/what-is-alexithymia-autism
