Skills-based Treatment for Alexithymia: An Exploratory Case Series

Abstract

A lexithymia is a psychiatric term meaning lack of words for emotion (Sifneos, 1967) and it is a relatively recent term, having been coined in the late 1960s. The newness of the concept is reflected in the small number of well-validated assessment instruments in the area (Stephenson, 1996;Taylor, 1984) and the lack of research studies exploring the efficacy of treatment interventions. Alexithymia is characterised by the following:(a) difficulty describing feelings; (b) difficulty distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations that accompany emotional arousal; (c) lack of introspection; (d) social conformity; and (e) impoverished fantasy life and poor dream recall (Taylor, 1994, p. 64).

Establishing the theoretical components of alexithymia via factor analysis: Introduction and validation of the attention-appraisal model of alexithymia

“…The goal is to facilitate the patient's progression to a higher level of emotional awareness at the attention and appraisal stages of emotion valuation (Gross, 2015a;Lane & Schwartz, 1987). Psychotherapy techniques compatible with this approach have been described previously by several authors, including Kennedy and Franklin (2002), Lane et al (2015), Taylor et al (1999), and Neumann, Malec and Hammond (2017), and we consider mindfulness techniques (e.g., mindfulness of emotions; Harris, 2009) to be of particular relevance. Research on the treatment of alexithymia in the context of psychopathology is still in its relative infancy (Samur et al, 2013), and the attention-appraisal model could provide a useful framework for the design of alexithymia focused psychotherapy programs to be tested in future work.…”

A

“…Research supports the effi cacy of these approaches (e.g., Becker -Stoll & Gerlinghoff, 2004;Kennedy & Franklin, 2002;Linehan, 1993). These approaches typically focus on increasing emotion awareness and labeling capacities through skills training.…”

Change in Alexithymia in Two Dynamically Informed Individual Psychotherapies

“…However, none compared active treatments to determine whether alexithymia is differentially affected by different therapies. A widely held assumption is that interpretive or expressive forms of psychotherapy are ill-suited for alexithymic patients and that supportive therapy is likely to be more effective with these patients [8]. It is believed that interpretive or expressive therapies rely too much on the skills that alexithymic patients appear to lack.…”