It was Tuesday evening around 6pm when I got the call from my mum to tell me my grandpa had passed. The moment was surreal, and like most things, I didn’t process my emotions straight away. The initial feeling was jarring, shock maybe.
As a person who is alexithymic, I don’t always identify my emotions or feel able to express them. I don’t use emotion labels very much to describe my emotions. A lot of the time, I know there’s a feeling, I just don’t know what it is exactly. Emotions are extremely confusing for me and I don’t tend to be aware of them until they become very intense. I often describe a scale of intensity of emotion to my clients, where I can only recognise the emotion when it becomes an eight of ten. By this point, it’s usually too late to regulate the emotion and it becomes a meltdown or shutdown. Being completely unaware of your body sensations (interoception differences) doesn’t help the process of identifying these emotions.
So, as an alexithymic person, I needed to process my grief and emotions differently. Instead of seeking physical and verbal comfort from my partner, I needed space to process. I didn’t want to talk it through, because I didn’t know how to express how I was feeling. Instead, I shut myself in the bottom of my wardrobe, with noise cancelling headphones, the lights off and a teddy, for three hours. Instead of thinking about how I felt, I listened to music, because that’s the only way for me to process my thoughts and feelings.
Three months ago, I made a playlist with tracks on it that I felt would represent the feelings I might experience after my grandfather passed. Luckily, I knew it was coming, so I could prepare myself. Music has always spoken to my emotions in a different way. I have had hundreds of thousands of playlists over the years to encapsulate each specific emotion I have experienced at different periods of my life. I can re-process and feel emotions attached to memories just by listening back to certain songs. Without music, my emotions would stay trapped, never being processed or identified.
And so, I sat in that wardrobe for three hours, listening to a carefully curated playlist that hit the sweet spot of emotion. The music spoke to a range of emotions I was experiencing but didn’t have a name for. Some brought a sense of calmness, some evoked sobs and pain, others made me smile at memories. For three straight hours, music healed and helped me process my grief. Even after the headphones had died, the songs repeated in my head like a lullaby, which gently coaxed me in sleep.
I woke up with a need to keep listening to the same songs on repeat, just to keep feeling the emotions and giving me a language for them. Then, I moved onto my secondary strategy for feeling the emotions. Once the music has given me a vocabulary, I can then write about it. I have written about every single traumatic experience, any beautiful memory, every moment of pain and suffering. The story of my life and the emotions associated are laid out on pages with each new chapter. Only with pen to paper (or fingers on keys) can I fully understand the propensity of my emotions and experiences. Without writing, I’m stuck in feeling the emotion without release or processing the event. And so, I write this now.
Dealing with the grief was not just about the emotions. It was also about the vulnerability. Painful emotions demand to be felt and I have to shut out everything around me just to understand the pain and process it. When other people surround me, or there are demands and expectations on me, I dissociate from my emotions and leave them buried. Shutting myself in the wardrobe felt safer because I knew people wouldn’t demand anything of me. It was my way of setting a boundary.
My partner asked what I needed and it was very simple, I needed no communication. I wanted complete silence, I didn’t want to be surrounded by sympathy and attention, I just wanted to not be perceived for a while. I experience significant demands just by being looked at, so I asked my partner to tell others to try not to look at me if I entered the room and not speak to me. I can see how this might be unnatural for people. Generally, people want to be soothed and surrounded by safe people whilst they grieve. I just need no communication. I could feel people wanting to hug me, not leave me alone or go to work. That was the opposite of what I wanted. And with that came periods of mutism. I didn’t want the demands of speech. I also didn’t want the demands of listening to another person. I wanted silence.
As I now navigate the ongoing grieving process, I have to be careful in my coping strategies. It is so easy for me to turn to unhealthy ways of dealing with this. I know that with big emotions comes a need to control various aspects of my life. I already have a drive to run a ridiculous distance just to push my body to its limits, so I can feel anything but the uncomfortable feelings. I know that I will likely regress in my eating disorder recovery by trying to take back control through food restrictions. Already, I’ve had urges for self-injury just to cope with the uncomfortable emotions. When you can’t process emotions easily, these methods become the default, just for a sense of reprieve. It can be such a lonely and isolating experience.
I know things will be okay, but I’m going to need time to look after myself for a while.
