Alexithymia that seems limited to sexual contexts only

September 6, 2023 4:50 PM

Where can I learn more about alexithymia that is specific to sex? I understand my feelings and triggers generally but have a huge blind spot for sexually oriented things and I want to understand better, and maybe change it, so that my behavior is not becoming unconscious so frequently.

I am autistic and ADHD and I am newly aware that often, I am in a crap mood, cantankerous, petulant, etc and what's really going on is I miss sex with my partner (and the secondary things I get from it). I am repeatedly oblivious to this connection until an embarrassingly long amount of time passes where I am in this negative frame of mind and then I suddenly realize oh yeah I miss intimacy. I don't have a physiological signal that would help me realize this is where my ick feelings are coming from. I just get cranky, more critical, less gracious, and it's all wrapped up in unmet emotional and practical needs in my mind. But then I have a solid sexual experience with my partner and everything is fine. I'm wondering why I was so upset. Etc.

My partner isn't bad at sex by any means; he is patient and generous and open to non-vanilla activities but always respectful of my comfort zone. I don't think of myself as a person that "needs" sex. But apparently I do? And masturbation doesn't accomplish the same thing. It is specifically sex with my partner. I don't believe that sex is the glue for our marriage exactly, either. Maybe it is?

I am just frustrated with myself because I have done this several times now, where I will be upset with my partner and find fault in a lot of things and sex fixes it way more cleanly than I would expect it to. I suppose that sex is a convenient container for what I really need but I am aggravated that I have such little self awareness about this, that conflicts drag out, and I wish I could just know ah, I am not physiologically horny but I am missing sexual intimacy with my partner so I should ask for that instead of complaining about a bunch of different things. (Aside: this question is actually separate from pms related things as this issue happens regardless of what's going on with my cycle.)

How can I learn to connect these dots for myself better? I have told my partner in moments of clarity that it seems a lot of the time when I get all wound up, I just need him to **** it out of me. Like there is this subconscious or instinctual need that manhandling/submissive sex addresses. And I'm trying to "ask" for this but don't know how so it comes out as argumentative cranky stuff.

But, if I am not remembering that these things are related and my partner acts on this idea that I just need the irritation ****d out of me, it could end up disastrously terrible. I have state specific awareness I guess, and this specific state is especially diffuse for me to hold in my higher mind. Plus, asking someone to manhandle you kinda defeats the purpose of it on some level, at least a little bit, but I don't mind asking anyway. I just can't figure out that's what is going on with me very quickly.

I am trying to explore more kink stuff around this as clearly I am wanting him to take control but I need him to wrestle it from me because I don't know how to just give it up. And there's an element of the dominatrix appeal here, where I have most of the "power" and "status" outside the bedroom and want to be able to let go of decisions in this area. But how do you talk about that stuff when you just feel an itch about it and don't know why?

I am also really puzzled how I can be self aware in so many personal areas but this one is so elusive that it will take hours, if not days, for me to realize this is why I'm acting like this. How do I address it? I mentioned autism because alexithymia is probably a factor here but I hesitate to just try to address this in therapy as first, life is full of minor and moderate crises right now which should take priority in my therapy sessions. And also, because I don't have alexithymia in a more global sense, I suspect a therapist trying to guide me to more self awareness would just piss me off. Like I understand myself and how to find myself and my needs but this one area is cumbersome. And most therapists I know are not necessarily surgical in their approach, which is the style I feel like I need here, as I don't believe I'd have patience with the process in general.

So what do you have to suggest besides therapy? I've read Come as You Are and am a sex positive person. I've never felt ashamed of my own sexual desire as a woman or have toxic beliefs about sex aside from bright lines in my head between **** and making love and how if I need one then the other just upsets me. The way my needs feel entirely emotional, but are then fixed with sex, is perplexing and I am probably missing something in myself here. There are emotional things I am aware of wanting and needing, that I can get from sex with my partner, but I am aware of those things and this issue feels... eh, primal? Maybe that's why I can't connect to it better, it's not really conscious in the first place?

Thanks for your ideas, and please be gentle with the call outs. I know this is a sensitive topic and that some of my underlying desires and needs are not socially appropriate but there's this whole power thing behind this that I don't know how to pretend isn't there and don't think it ultimately serves me to try. It needs to be ok that I consider myself a feminist who has very traditional sexual instincts apparently.

posted by crunchy potato to Human Relations (10 answers total)

As a fellow autistic person, I find the concept of alexithymia to be somewhat poorly defined*. I think a clearer way to describe this is as a hyposensitive interoceptive channel, analogous to not being able to tell whether you're hungry, except from the fact that you're starting to get cranky and it's been x hours since you last ate. In that sense, I don't think it's necessarily possible to be able to "learn" to sense the need (maybe it is, but maybe it's just not a realistic goal); you may just have to develop a mental association of that particular flavour of emotional out-of-sorts-ness with that particular need, and/or develop a mental checklist that you can run down when you feel out-of-sorts. I also don't think therapy would be helpful here, at least not for the "sensing" part.

I don't have anything to contribute about the dom/sub aspect. It may be helpful to divide this in your mind into two issues (the interoception part and separately the kink part).

*The word a-lexi-thymia means without + words + emotions (i.e., a reduced ability to describe one's emotions in words), which is a very "external observer" definition. It is then rather sloppily applied to (1) inhibition in speaking of one's emotions, (2) not knowing the words for particular emotions, (3) difficulty classifying emotions based on their sensations, (4) difficulty perceiving emotions in the first place. Number 4 is the interoceptive version.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:07 PM on September 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

P.S. I did hear an excellent talk once about the failures of Cognitive Behavoural Therapy as applied to autistic people that pointed out that the practical solution to a person getting cranky when hungry is not to train them to use CBT methods to address their crankiness in the moment, but rather to just eat on a regular schedule. Similarly, maybe building that particular kind of sex into your weekly (or whatever) routine would solve the problem.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:12 PM on September 6, 2023 [23 favorites]

Seconding the scheduling idea!

There are some activities I do where, if I do them, I feel WAY BETTER and some pre-existing crankiness, fuzziness, or other bleh feelings get cleared away for a while. But I haven't yet learned to associate the problem with the need. Your question helps remind me to

1. work on mindfully noticing them AS problems and not just ordinary conditions, which might then help me remember the associated needs and the opportunities to do an activity that will help
2. schedule! Schedule recurring appointments for the biking, the hiking, the seeing-friends, the stand-up comedy performance, etc.

So thank you for asking this question!
posted by brainwane at 5:25 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thirding the schedule. First, a regular schedule will help you automatically hit these gaps and absences you don't even know are there. Second, you'll get regular practice of assessing your state vis-à-vis sex right before and after the events.

Specific to that, one thing you didn't mention is HOW you figure out or WHEN you figure out that this time is a time when you want to be sub, and this other time is when you want to be tender and equal. So if it's during the first stages of touch, say, you can practice recognizing it, noting it, and communicating it (both when the pace and vibe match what you want AND when they don't) with the goal of moving that recognition in front of the scheduled events. Then you can communicate what you're hoping for ahead of time (also during, of course, good communication being the bedrock of healthy sex).

Both of the things above (the importance of scheduling things that are important to you, and moving internal realizations forward in time to earlier cues) are the only good things I ever got out of CBT, btw, but I think they could work here.

Good luck! You're already so far ahead of the game by seeing all of this about yourself! And what a great thing to be able to practice with someone you love!
posted by AbelMelveny at 6:00 PM on September 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

First, you're beating yourself up for not recognizing that sometimes when you're cranky you need sex, and I'm here to tell you that a LOT of people are in the same position, including a lot of neurotypical people. So I hope you can stop being frustrated with yourself for that reason. Scheduling or keeping it in mind as part of a checklist you run through when you're out of sorts can solve the problem, as others have said.

I'm not entirely clear on how submissive sex vs. vanilla sex plays into this. I think you're saying that sometimes you want submissive sex, vanilla sex would be annoying in that situation, and asking for it explicitly makes it less effective? In that case you might be able to develop ways to indicate your preference to your partner which aren't a turn-off for you, such as clothes, keywords, how you position yourself, etc.
posted by metasarah at 6:41 PM on September 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

I am also really puzzled how I can be self aware in so many personal areas but this one is so elusive that it will take hours, if not days, for me to realize this is why I'm acting like this. How do I address it? I mentioned autism because alexithymia is probably a factor here

As William Burroughs so famously remarked, "language is a virus".

And like other viruses, language has the power to hijack and compromise human physiological systems in order to reproduce and then pass itself on to other individuals.

Which casts a different light on alexithymia, as heatherlogan has very succinctly characterized it:

The word a-lexi-thymia means without + words + emotions (i.e., a reduced ability to describe one's emotions in words), which is a very "external observer" definition. It is then rather sloppily applied to (1) inhibition in speaking of one's emotions, (2) not knowing the words for particular emotions, (3) difficulty classifying emotions based on their sensations, 4) difficulty perceiving emotions in the first place. Number 4 is the interoceptive version.

When language is seen as a virus, all these various aspects of the reticence we feel when talking about sex look very much like the actions of a kind of immune system as it seeks to protect us from the ills that words have made us heir to.
posted by jamjam at 2:52 AM on September 7, 2023

One of the additional upsides of scheduling intimacy opportunities (and obviously nobody is obligated to perform, sometimes this might just mean "turn off the TV and talk over a pizza" if that's the mood of the day) is that if you're having trouble reconciling "explaining clearly what you want" with "submissive" power dynamics, you can come up with a shorthand system with your partner to indicate your relative mood, to avoid those kind of oversteps that's going to leave everyone feeling bad.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:29 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don’t have an easy answer but I do this too and it is really difficult to handle. Lately, something that is moving me toward thinking about it in a better way is this podcast, especially the episodes about pursuers and withdrawers. Admittedly, it is pretty much built around a binary notion of gender, but acknowledging that, there is a lot there that has helped.
posted by umbú at 6:51 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well, I don't have the answer to all your questions, but I have one response to this specific part: "But, if I am not remembering that these things are related and my partner acts on this idea that I just need the irritation ****d out of me, it could end up disastrously terrible." -- A reminder that this is what safe words are for. You and your partner can use a subtle green/yellow/red or safe word check in system so that he can try aggressively manhandling you when he thinks you might "need" it, AND give you the chance to tag out if it's coming at the wrong time. This doesn't have to kill the vibe, he can check-in with you in a bossy, strong, assertive and sexy way -- that still gives you a chance to say "No really screw off, not right now!"
posted by amaire at 4:10 PM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I read this it strikes me as possible that you don't get cranky if too long goes without sex/intimacy the way people get cranky if they go too long without sleep. Maybe you get legitimately irritated by legitimately irritating things and the happy bonding chemicals of sex tamp down that legitimate irritation for awhile.

So maybe an analogous situation would be someone who works at a shitty job with long hours and mean bosses. When that person comes home fried and edgy, a six pack of beer smooths those rough edges off and they feel better. Do we think, oh that person just needed beer, lets make sure to schedule the beer so they don't accidentally forget and are unaccountably grumpy after 18 hours of working in a sweat shop?
posted by Jenny'sCricket at 2:11 AM on September 8, 2023 [1 favorite]