I’m not alexithymic; I directly experience my emotions and have, additionally, introspective access to my preferences. However, some things manifest directly as preferences which I have been shocked to realize in my old age, were in fact emotions all along. (In rare cases these are stronger than the ones directly-felt even, despite reliably seeming on initial inspection to be simply neutral metadata).
Specific examples would be nice. Not sure if I understand correctly, but I imagine something like this:
You always choose A over B. You have been doing it for such long time that you forgot why. Without reflecting about this directly, it just seems like there probably is a rational reason or something. But recently, either accidentally or by experiment, you chose B… and realized that experiencing B (or expecting to experience B) creates unpleasant emotions. So now you know that the emotions were the real cause of choosing A over B all that time.
(This is probably wrong, but hey, people say that the best way to elicit answer is to provide a wrong one.)
Here’s an example for you: I used to turn the faucet on while going to the bathroom, thinking it was due simply to having a preference for somewhat-masking the sound of my elimination habits from my housemates, then one day I walked into the bathroom listening to something-or-other via earphones and forgetting to turn the faucet on only to realize about halfway through that apparently I actually didn’t much care about such masking, previously being able to hear myself just seemed to trigger some minor anxiety about it I’d failed to recognize, though its absence was indeed quite recognizable—no aural self-perception, no further problem (except for a brief bit of disorientation from the mental-whiplash of being suddenly confronted with the reality that in a small way I wasn’t actually quite the person I thought I was), not even now on the rare occasion that I do end up thinking about such things mid-elimination anyway.
I’m not alexithymic; I directly experience my emotions and have, additionally, introspective access to my preferences. However, some things manifest directly as preferences which I have been shocked to realize in my old age, were in fact emotions all along. (In rare cases these are stronger than the ones directly-felt even, despite reliably seeming on initial inspection to be simply neutral metadata).
Specific examples would be nice. Not sure if I understand correctly, but I imagine something like this:
You always choose A over B. You have been doing it for such long time that you forgot why. Without reflecting about this directly, it just seems like there probably is a rational reason or something. But recently, either accidentally or by experiment, you chose B… and realized that experiencing B (or expecting to experience B) creates unpleasant emotions. So now you know that the emotions were the real cause of choosing A over B all that time.
(This is probably wrong, but hey, people say that the best way to elicit answer is to provide a wrong one.)
Here’s an example for you: I used to turn the faucet on while going to the bathroom, thinking it was due simply to having a preference for somewhat-masking the sound of my elimination habits from my housemates, then one day I walked into the bathroom listening to something-or-other via earphones and forgetting to turn the faucet on only to realize about halfway through that apparently I actually didn’t much care about such masking, previously being able to hear myself just seemed to trigger some minor anxiety about it I’d failed to recognize, though its absence was indeed quite recognizable—no aural self-perception, no further problem (except for a brief bit of disorientation from the mental-whiplash of being suddenly confronted with the reality that in a small way I wasn’t actually quite the person I thought I was), not even now on the rare occasion that I do end up thinking about such things mid-elimination anyway.