Anhedonia and alexithymia

Anhedonia: the inability to feel any ‘positive’ emotions

Alexithymia: not having words for feelings

My future-proofing work is based on 2 core areas: neuroscience and emotional literacy. Though I learned and trained in both fields I read about both topics as extensively as possible. I don’t believe in one school of thought. And it is great to get various perspectives in both areas.

But one book addressed both (neuroscience and emotional literacy) for me and that is Calm Clarity by Due Quach. A truly amazing read. It is a thick book but one that I could not put down. I am re-reading it presently and hence this article. What captured my attention was her story. The book is about Quach’s life and how she overcame her childhood trauma by working on herself (her brain).

It resonated with me because I fundamentally believe we can heal ourselves, psychologically and emotionally, by rewiring our brains. And Quach is a living example.

Here’s her brief backstory. She came to America as a child with her parents on a boat from Vietnam. She is Vietnamese of Chinese descent. She and her parents moved to the poorest part of Philadelphia where they were met with racism, violence, and more, daily. None of them spoke English. Their journey from Vietnam (and their past) was traumatising, but their new environment was adding to their trauma.

Quach somehow ‘survived’ her environment and progressed through school to be accepted to Harvard. She had to fight her parents’ beliefs that girls didn’t need an education. They (parents) focused their attention on her brother. For them, a girl’s main purpose was to be homemaker upon marriage and never to leave home until then. But much against her parents’ wishes she made it to Harvard!

Where her whole life fell apart. She became depressed and suicidal. She didn’t ‘fit’ into her environment where most seemed to come from privilege. She kept her backstory to herself. The initial euphoria of making it to Harvard gave way to depression.

She finally got help from a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD based on her early life experience. She accepted medication prescribed by her doctor but soon after felt that she didn’t want to be dependent on medication for the rest of her life. The medication did help elevate her symptoms, but they also gave her side effects.

That’s when she wondered if she could use the very thing that was malfunctioning, her brain, to heal (rewire) itself. The book goes into detail about the steps she took to do so. She graduated from Harvard and became a management consultant before moving into finance in Asia (China, Vietnam). But today (after just over 10 years of the corporate world), she works mainly with school children in Philadelphia in her old neighbourhood to help them gain calm clarity. To help them articulate their emotions and find their voice.

The main thing that stood out for me in Quach’s book is the importance of emotions. And 2 concepts she mentions support this. Both concepts that she experienced herself: anhedonia and alexithymia.

Anhedonia is the inability to feel any pleasure or ‘positive’ emotions. It can impair our capacity to make simple choices making simple decisions hard. Because emotions guide our brain’s decision-making process. Without them, we can get lost in endless, paralysing analysis.  

Alexithymia is when traumatised children and adults are unable to describe what they are feeling because they cannot interpret what their interoceptive (sensing internal signals from the body) sensations mean. And reliving traumatic memories tends to shut down the area of the brain that processes language. Quach overcame her alexithymia by turning to neuroscience to find a rational and reliable approach to deconstructing and understanding emotions without being weighed down by the judgement of what is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ emotions. Writing the book gave Quach’s neural circuits an intense workout to strengthen her language processing and interoception.

I highlight these because emotions are central to being human and the ‘world’ tends to consider emotions a ‘nuisance’. Emotions are often seen as an unpredictable by-product of the predictable world of reason.

But it shouldn’t be this way. They (emotions) are an inseparable part of us, and we need to leverage them - understand them and what they are telling us.

Helping us make better decisions.

As always, you can reach me at yoga@yoganesadurai.com