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Finer than Fine: A Closer Look at Alexithymia

A few years ago, when I was working at a drug and alcohol counselling agency, a client gave me a curious look when she asked me how I was doing and I responded “Fine.”  She told me someone she’d met through AA told her that ‘fine’ stood for F***ed Inside, Nice Exterior. Since that day, I’ve taken the word out of my feelings vocabulary and hear it a little differently whenever someone tells me they’re “fine.”

Alexithymia, which literally translates to “without words for feelings,” is a relatively new term in psychology but one that has garnered some interest. While there are some people – mostly male people according to the research – who are diagnosable as alexithymics, most of us are at least somewhat fewlexithymics. Don’t bother googling it, I just made it up; it means using the same limited range of words to describe our feeling states.  So when someone asks us how we’re feeling we don’t say “ebullient” or “melancholy” or “grounded and content”. We say “fine” (or “shitty” as the case may be).

And what’s wrong with that? Well some would argue that it’s hard to have a feeling we can’t put words to (hence the interest in studying alexithymia). And even if there’s nothing lost in not being able to colourfully express our feeling states, surely there is something gained in finding the word or phrase that distinctly captures the quality and intensity of what it is we’re experiencing. After all, making the effort to describe our feelings at all is an exercise in connection, inviting someone else to have a glimpse of our internal world in that moment. “Fine” gives them a broad and unfocused view, while “thankful and inspired” or “anguished” or “curious but hesitant” offer a more defined landscape.

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