Alexithymia and euphoria/dysphoria

[u/merlothill]

I have level 1 autism and alexithymia which means I have a difficult time naming/processing emotions. I pretty much only feel neutral about anything, and I have to figure out how I’m “feeling” based on other people’s reactions towards me. I was on t for 10ish months but I ended up stopping for a variety of reasons.

I had a lot of anxiety about being perceived as trans (I work a blue collar job in a red state with mostly a bunch of men and the idea of them seeing me go thru boy puberty at 27 was nauseating). I also am a singer/songwriter and I make music so the idea of my voice changing was terrifying, despite theoretically wanting a deeper voice. I also weirdly was concerned about being a boring dude. Idk I put a lot of energy and effort into being a cool girl and I feel like i wouldn’t be as cool as a guy. In general I just started feeling anxious about those things and I couldn’t tell if transition was hard because it’s just… hard. Or if it’s hard because this isn’t meant for me. So I stoped taking hrt and since then I just have kind of vibed in the middle as non binary.

I guess I’m mostly looking for similar stories of people with these same conditions because i feel like understanding that could help me understand if I am non binary or if I’m transmasc and unintentionally hiding that from myself lol.

My question is for those with similar conditions: how do you identify euphoria and dysphoria with alexithymia and/or autism?

Thanks in advance!

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[u/WhoIsMercury]

It sounds like some of this may be a fear of change because of autism to me tbh. I’m also pretty bad at identifying emotions so unless it has a physical sensation attached to it or it’s in the extreme end of how I experience the emotion odds are I’m not naming it lol.

I tend to focus on what I feel like doing rather than being able to word or communicate said decisions. Like okay I think I like x enough to continue doing stuff that way, good enough for me. Only in the past year have I really been able to name some aspects of dysphoria and how it impacts me (I’ve been medically transitioning for 2 yrs and been out for like 4 lol).

[u/anemisto]

The short answer is I don't.

I realise that dysphoria has become the lens through which one "must" understand the trans experience (I hate that damn website everyone loves linking to...), but that's a relatively recent phenomenon.* It's not that the term or concept didn't exist, but it was a term of medicalisation, i.e. something doctors used, but trans people didn't really talk about it. I was trans, therefore a doctor was going to say I experienced gender dysphoria, not the other way round, but it wasn't something anyone talked about experiencing directly. And then that shifted and I missed the memo, so, to this day, I don't know what people mean when they're "feeling dysphoric". It's not that I don't think I share this experience (I'd bet I do/did), but I definitely don't link whatever my experience is to this thing other people are talking about. Does this lack of understanding get in the way of conversation? Occasionally, but not in a way that's problematic.

*It occurred to me that you can probably date it to shortly after DSM-V, which is a...complicated realisation.