The Emotional Inheritance You Never Asked For

"You've heard it your whole life: "You're overreacting." "Why are you so emotional?" Maybe you've internalized this chorus so deeply that you now tell yourself these things, all while feeling like you're drowning in sensations you can't quite explain. There might be an uncomfortable backstory behind this. What if the real issue isn't that you feel too much, but that you were never taught how to feel accurately?"

"An increasing number of studies point to a subtle pattern that many women have spent years (and money on therapy) trying to understand, often without realizing they are missing important pieces from the beginning. The cause isn't trauma as traditionally believed. It's something much quieter: a mother with alexithymia-an inability to recognize and express her own feelings-who, without meaning to cause harm, failed to pass on the emotional language her daughter desperately needed."

Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulty identifying and expressing feelings and affects about 10 percent of the population. Children raised by alexithymic parents often inherit emotional illiteracy because of failed emotion socialization. Daughters commonly struggle with intimacy, while sons may convert unprocessed emotions into physical symptoms. Research links parental alexithymia with higher rates of eating disorders in daughters. The condition is not necessarily rooted in trauma but in a lack of emotional language modeled by caregivers. Emotional literacy can be acquired in adulthood through learning and practice, enabling remediation of deficits left by caregiving.

Read at Psychology Today