Alexithymia

Alexithymia — a word she’s never heard —
is where she lives: no language for the heart.
Her feelings come like weather, without words,
and leave her with no map of where to start.
I grew up fluent in the language of need;
I learned to read a doorway for a sign.
I have ten thousand words for how I feel —
she has a silence where I lay down mine.
We met the way two old scars recognize
a shape they’ve known before a word is said:
her fear of holding on, my fear of goodbyes,
two childhoods braided into a single thread.
The closer that I came, the more she’d leave;
the more she’d leave, the harder I would chase.
Two nervous systems, armored to believe
that longing is a dangerous kind of grace.
She never left because I wasn’t enough —
I was more love than she had learned to hold.
The child whom no one comes for, in the dark, grows up
believing warmth is something to withhold.
And when the shame inside her starts to swell,
she nitpicks, distances, and turns away;
she calls my open heart “too much” — to hide
the words she was never given leave to say.
I’ve studied every pattern, every name —
Bowlby, the chase, the great and quiet retreat —
but knowing why a wound burns is not the same
as being healed; my pulse still skips the beat.
And love, I’ve learned, is real but not enough:
the healing has to be a mutual art.
I stay — but I will not abandon me.
I keep my worth, and I still keep my heart.
And still I count this strange and aching grace:
she woke me to my wounds and to my worth.
If we should ever heal, it’s face to face —
two warriors, laying weapons on the earth.
RSP

…

DCG

Alexithymia

A Post about the RSP/DCG epistolary collection, and the words she never had.

The Epistolary Collection
For nearly 3 years this blog has carried a single story told in installments — a collection of poems and reflections signed RSP … DCG: two initials, two people, one story. It began quietly with “A Leap of Faith” in 2017, a poem about the wounds parents leave when they cannot show love, and it has run through dozens of pieces since — “Heal with me RP”, “R and D”, “A heart’s whisper”, and “The dissolution of entropy”, among many others.
Read in order, the collection is an epistolary record of one relationship seen through the lens of attachment theory: my anxious attachment — the boy who learned to read a doorway for a sign, who sought approval because an absent father never offered it — and her dismissive avoidance, the woman who learned young that needing was dangerous and that the safest way to be loved was never to ask for it out loud.

This post is about the condition that sits underneath much of her avoidance, a condition that is tragic precisely because it is so often misunderstood: alexithymia.

What Alexithymia Is
The word comes from the Greek — a (no), lexis (words), thymos (emotions): literally, “no words for emotions.” It was introduced by the late Harvard psychiatrist Peter Sifneos in the early 1970s (Psychology Today).
A person living with alexithymia has difficulty experiencing, identifying, understanding, and expressing their own emotions. They may struggle to distinguish feelings from the bodily sensations that accompany them — a tight chest, a restless night — and their limited emotional vocabulary makes it hard to communicate what is happening inside them (Psychology Today; Luminet & Landré, PMC). It is not a mental illness or a character flaw. It is a trait, often forged in childhood, where feelings were not welcomed and no one came when the child cried.

The research links it directly to the attachment story this collection tells: the more avoidant the attachment style, the higher the alexithymia — avoidant individuals are particularly prone to difficulty describing feelings (De Panfilis et al., PMC; Zdankiewicz-Ścigała, PMC). The avoidance and the wordlessness are not separate problems. One grows from the other.
What It Is Like to Love Someone Without Words
I recently heard a widely shared video on Facebook — attributed to a speaker named Patrick, though I could not verify the source — about loving a dismissive-avoidant partner. Its central claim has stayed with me: your avoidant ex didn’t leave because you weren’t enough. They left because you were more than they could handle. Your emotional availability wasn’t the problem; it was the trigger. And underneath it all is shame — the quiet belief that they were not good enough for you.
That is the tragedy of alexithymia in a relationship. It is not coldness. It is not indifference. It is a person whose feelings still arrive — the ache, the longing, the shame — but who was never given the vocabulary to meet them. Imagine a life where your own heart speaks a language you were never taught, where every emotion arrives as weather without a forecast: unnamable, overwhelming, and therefore best avoided. Imagine being asked “how do you feel?” and having nothing to say — not because you feel nothing, but because you cannot find the door.
I am her opposite. I have ten thousand words for how I feel; I have written them here for years. She has a silence where I lay down mine. And that contrast — my fluency and her wordlessness — became the magnetic core of our dynamic: my anxious reaching, her avoidant retreating, the closer I came, the more she would leave. Two nervous systems, each armored by childhood, each mistaking the other’s survival strategy for rejection.
What I Have Learned
The hardest and kindest truth this collection has taught me:
Love is not enough. Not by itself. Healing requires mutual work. One person cannot do the interior labor of another, no matter how patient, how fluent, how willing. I know this now — I wrote it into “Cliff notes from the heart”: love that saves another must not teach me how to lose.

I must not self-abandon. Staying in the push-pull is only survivable — only humane to us both — if I keep my worth, my boundaries, my self. Understanding her condition does not require dissolving into it. Empathy without self-erasure is the discipline.
Knowledge helps, but it does not heal. I have studied Bowlby, the patterns, the chase-and-retreat. My pulse still skips. Knowing why a wound burns is not the same as being healed — hers or mine.

And still — gratitude. She woke me to my own attachment wounds. Because of her, I found the boy in the doorway, and I have spent years learning to take his hand. Whatever else this relationship becomes or fails to become, that awakening is a gift I will not stop counting.

The poem below distills all of it — her alexithymia, my anxious heart, the shame she carries, the work only she can do, and the strange, stubborn, profound love that remains.

Alexithymia — a word she’s never heard —
is where she lives: no language for the heart.
Her feelings come like weather, without words,
and leave her with no map of where to start.
I grew up fluent in the language of need;
I learned to read a doorway for a sign.
I have ten thousand words for how I feel —
she has a silence where I lay down mine.
We met the way two old scars recognize
a shape they’ve known before a word is said:
her fear of holding on, my fear of goodbyes,
two childhoods braided into a single thread.
The closer that I came, the more she’d leave;
the more she’d leave, the harder I would chase.
Two nervous systems, armored to believe
that longing is a dangerous kind of grace.
She never left because I wasn’t enough —
I was more love than she had learned to hold.
The child whom no one comes for, in the dark, grows up
believing warmth is something to withhold.
And when the shame inside her starts to swell,
she nitpicks, distances, and turns away;
she calls my open heart “too much” — to hide
the words she was never given leave to say.
I’ve studied every pattern, every name —
Bowlby, the chase, the great and quiet retreat —
but knowing why a wound burns is not the same
as being healed; my pulse still skips the beat.
And love, I’ve learned, is real but not enough:
the healing has to be a mutual art.
I stay — but I will not abandon me.
I keep my worth, and I still keep my heart.
And still I count this strange and aching grace:
she woke me to my wounds and to my worth.
If we should ever heal, it’s face to face —
two warriors, laying weapons on the earth.

RSP

…

DCG

Sources
• Alexithymia — Psychology Today
• Alexithymia — Luminet & Landré, PMC (NIH)
• Adult attachment and emotional awareness impairment — PMC (NIH)
• Attachment Style, Early Childhood Trauma, Alexithymia — PMC (NIH)
• Understanding alexithymia: a review — Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmacology Sciences
• Thunder God Blog RSP/DCG collection: A Leap of Faith · Heal with me RP · R and D · A heart’s whisper · The dissolution of entropy · Cliff notes from the heart · Full RSP/DCG index
•

Alexithymia

Let me reassure you: your avoidant ex didn’t leave because you weren’t enough. They left because you were more than they could handle.
You were emotionally available. You were intentional, vulnerable, expressive, loving, compassionate, and invested. You offered real intimacy, the kind they never learned how to hold.

And here’s the part that hurts. They saw how special you were. They knew exactly what they had, and that is why they ran. Your emotional availability wasn’t the problem. It was the trigger.

People with dismissive avoidant wounds grew up without emotional safety. Feelings were not welcomed. Affection wasn’t consistent. Their needs were minimized, or even ignored. So they grew up believing: “My feelings are wrong. Love is unsafe. If someone sees the real me, they’re going to leave.”

Their childhood taught them to protect themselves by shutting down, by avoiding closeness, by suppressing their emotions to the point that they can’t even feel their own. So when someone like you shows up, open-hearted, expressive, and emotionally mature, it exposes every single wound they’ve spent their entire life hiding.
They don’t have the capacity for deep connection yet. That’s not because they don’t want it. It’s because they were never taught how to do it. They can only handle surface-level connections, casual intimacy, and relationships that require very little emotional depth.
That’s why many avoidants end up with emotionally unavailable partners: narcissists, other avoidants, people who keep everything on the surface. It feels safe. It’s not fulfilling, but it’s safe.
But when they meet someone like you, someone who loves with depth, who sees them clearly and cares anyway, it overwhelms them. Deep down, they don’t even feel worthy of that kind of love.

So instead of dealing with that shame, they blame you. They nitpick. They distance themselves. They make excuses. It’s not because you did anything wrong. It’s because facing their wounds is too painful. They tell themselves you’re “too emotional” or “too much,” when really, you were everything they wished they could be.

Until they’re ready to self-reflect, sit with their own insecurities, face their shame, and heal, they’re going to keep running from the very thing they long for.
Your love didn’t scare them. Their unhealed wounds did.
And please tattoo this on your heart: it was never because you weren’t good enough. It was because, deep down, they believed they weren’t good enough for you.

— Patrick Gaudet