Alexithymia and Improv (part 1) – Ep #18

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If you improvise with or teach more than 10 people, then you've probably done improv with someone that experiences Alexithymia or is Alexithymic, which involves interpreting and processing emotions.

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Hello, this is Neurodiversity and Improv, and I'm Jenda Hahn.

:: 00:32

Greetings and welcome to season two of Neurodiversity and Improv, the podcast.

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I'm a neurodivergent improviser who is about to info dump all over you about the intersection of improv and neurodivergence.

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These episodes are intended to help improvisers of all neurotypes since neurodivergent and neurotypical humans are all on teams and in classes together.

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Before we get started real quick, the preamble.

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I'm only speaking for myself and my own lived experience in these episodes.

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Everyone's experiences are very different based on both their neurotype and their individual lived experiences and individual support needs.

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My ideas in these episodes and those of any guests or submitted ideas I might read, won't be right for everyone.

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So, the words I use and the things I do are just my own preferences, what works for me.

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I am not telling you what to do, so just throw away or adjust anything that is not right for you today.

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Again, this is just one autistic ADHD improviser's lived experience.

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Please don't diagnose yourself or any other people using this podcast.

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Talk to someone who's a lot smarter than me for diagnosis, therapy or advice.

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And finally, these points are just explanations.

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They are not excuses.

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Neurodivergent humans can't change the way we're wired, but we can understand how we're wired better.

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And finally, if you find this podcast useful, I'd really love it if you could share this episode with your friends, rate and review it on Apple Podcasts.

:: 02:13

That would be great.

:: 02:14

If you're able and capable to support my work at Neurodiversity Improv, that is really appreciated, and that will actually keep it going for a third season.

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So please consider doing that.

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And with that out of the way, let's get started.

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So Alexithymia involves how a person identifies and experiences emotions.

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So it has a lot to do with an improv practice.

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This is one part of a two-part series that explores what Alexithymia is, how it affects improv, and makes some suggestions of ways to practice improv if you experience it or you teach someone who does.

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So Alexithymia involves how a person identifies and experiences emotions.

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So it has a lot to do with an improv practice.

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This part is part one of a two-part series that explores what Alexithymia is, how it affects improv and suggests some ways to practice improv if you experience it, if you are a performer that is Alexithymic.

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Part two will cover some ideas about what students can do if they approach exercises or have other things that they're doing in a session that has assigned emotions, or if you're gifted an emotion, and what teachers can do to make their classes and exercises more inclusive for people with Alexithymia.

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So what is Alexithymia?

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Good question, you!

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Alexithymia is when a person has issues with emotions.

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This can include feeling emotions, attaching words to emotions, like having problems with that, issues with identifying and describing, or perhaps even expressing emotions.

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The etymology of the word itself, Alexithymia, is without words for emotions.

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So a human being, like yourself, with Alexithymia might feel a physical sensation in the moment, but not be able to describe it using terminology, using words.

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For example, that person might feel scared.

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They might feel that in their body, but not label the feeling with a word in that moment.

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They might not really understand how to put those two things together.

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The person with Alexithymia might not be able to communicate or describe the physical feeling in the moment.

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A person with Alexithymia might think in a really concrete manner about emotions.

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So they might think that there's a right or a wrong, and they don't really know what the emotion, the correct word or description for that emotion, what it is.

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That's me.

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Struggle to understand other people's or other characters' emotions in the moment.

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That might be Alexithymic.

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A person might have general discomfort with emotions entirely for a great number of reasons.

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If you naturally or regularly think, I don't know, when someone asks how you're feeling, or maybe it just really puts you in your head, like you need to fully analyze the scenario and what everything is happening, whatever, what's going on before you understand how you felt about that thing, or you're just really uncomfortable.

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This might be Alexithymia.

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For example, you might take time to think about the experience and ruminate on it, and then you're able to describe the emotion or label it even.

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Alexithymia is absolutely experienced in different ways, and is described as being mild to severe.

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It can also be a primary or a secondary trait.

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What does that mean?

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That means it's genetic versus acquired due to injury or illness, and it can occur in people without any of those things as well.

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So the presentation and experience can vary quite a bit between different individuals, and of course can be complicated by co-morbid diagnoses or conditions.

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A few resources of many resources on the subject, this subject being too large to be covered in this single podcast episode, can be found in the written article for this episode.

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Some stuff to get you started.

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And of course, you can also access many informal personal anecdotes on social media and YouTube, on Alexithymia.

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So check out the science and check out some of those personal anecdotes to understand it a little bit better.

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So who experiences Alexithymia?

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About 10% of the general population does.

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With rates that are higher in certain demographics such as people with depression, people who are autistic like me, and youth.

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It is not a diagnosable condition, however.

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It's not in the DSM, but it is certainly recognized in the mental health community and also by professionals.

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It is something that is studied.

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Many autistic people have Alexithymia, and the percentages seem to vary widely, but about half of all autistic people are considered to be Alexithymic.

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Alexithymia, however, is often described as distinct from autism, from the autistic spectrum, and is not caused by autism.

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Some of the linked resources described this difference in detail.

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Autistic people, for example, often have interoception issues, which means that they have difficulty perceiving certain body signals, and this can include emotions, which is where Alexithymia comes in and can connect these two things together.

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Autism and Alexithymia can be compounding due to the combination of the traits of each thing.

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It can also lead to a lot of misunderstandings, those things that some of you might really understand, assumptions, you know what I mean, maybe, and misdiagnoses as well.

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Of course, allistic, which is non-autistic people, can also have Alexithymia, which is sometimes considered as a personality trait in non-autistic people, since it's not in the DSM.

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Alexithymia has been closely related to autism because many of the emotional recognition difficulties are part of the diagnostic criteria of autism.

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But because not all autistic people have these challenges, it may be better described as a common co-occurring condition rather than autism itself.

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There's some discourse around separating the part from the autism diagnosis, like I said, in those linked articles in the written essay on this.

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We're looking right now at how this is related to improv and performance, of course.

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So this next part will cover performers and teammates, your teammates, if you are not a Alexithymic.

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And the next part covers more of a teaching environment for learners and their teachers and coaches.

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So how does Alexithymia affect practicing improv anyways?

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So if your room or your team has 10 or more improvisers collected within it, chances are you're improvising with or teaching or coaching someone who has Alexithymia.

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So as I noted earlier, the experiences and how this is expressed and experienced will vary a lot between individuals even with the same condition.

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So if you take two autistic humans who both have Alexithymia, they are going to be experiencing that differently, quite possibly, or they might be very similar, but they are different conditions because it depends a lot on all of those comorbidities, all of that lived experience interacting with the Alexithymia.

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So it's important to offer options and encourage everyone, encourage all the improvisers, your teammates to think about their own situation and how they are experiencing it, because even being aware of this as a thing, whether or not you have it, is a significant first step in just getting better and playing better together.

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So let's talk about some of those emotional labels.

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That is the thing that I first noticed I got quite angry about.

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This was in a teaching environment when I was being taught Improv really early on, and I noticed whenever I had those exercises where you are assigned an emotion at the top to start with or use in the scene, just having that word, having that label made me angry, even though I love doing big emotions in the scenes and my teachers knew that.

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So they probably would have never thought just getting that specific label was such a problem for someone who loved being big and emotional in scenes.

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Just making that connection is an issue.

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So let's talk about gifting emotions, which is something that happens in performances, in the scenes.

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You might notice something about your scene partner.

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You might say something that ends up being an emotional label, and that might put them in their head.

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That's a gift, especially early on in Improv.

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You're giving gifts like that.

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Oh, you look terrified or whatever it is.

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That can put your scene partner in their head.

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And this is something to be especially cognizant of.

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If you are playing with people, you're on a team maybe with newer performers, or you're a newer performer yourself, because in that scenario, you're all kind of already in your head, thinking about all the things that you need to think about in a performance.

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So adding on another layer of putting this label of an emotion that makes your scene partner, who might be Alexithymic, have to identify it and figure out how to express that as their character is an extra difficult thing to do.

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So having those conversations of figuring out where your teammates at, how everybody in the room, how they kind of feel about this sort of thing, having that conversation or just trying to notice if somebody seems a little bit caught off guard when you're dealing with emotional labels.

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Knowing these things, noticing those things, and accommodating for them can be extra helpful.

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So I want to encourage teams to talk to each other about this.

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If you're on a trusted team, you're in a trusted environment, talk with each other.

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If you consider yourself to be in a, you know, beneficial, safe enough space to share these things.

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And of course, you only have to share as much as you're comfortable with.

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I've been extremely open about this.

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Obviously, I mean, I'm talking about it to all of you right now.

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I'm lucky maybe, but I haven't had a bad experience.

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Not that I've been able to tell anyway.

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I mean, I guess that's a bit of the point, right?

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So maybe I have had a bad experience and I just don't know about it.

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But hey, I don't know about it.

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So I feel okay right now.

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What can performers do?

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So I can only speak for myself here.

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Although, of course, I always, as an aside, I welcome input from this week's survey is about this.

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I would love for you to go to neurodiversityimprov.com and go up into the top menu.

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There's a button up there.

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It says survey on it.

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And lo and behold, if you click that button, you're going to find some surveys.

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I know, shocking, right?

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But there's surveys in there.

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And there are surveys on all of these topics that I talk about.

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And if you fill it out and put something in there, it will help me.

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It will help the whole Improv community, in fact, because I'm only talking about my experience of Alexithymia.

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And I've said over and over again in this episode alone about how it's different for everyone.

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And I can only speak for myself.

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I would love to speak for some other people as well.

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So go find that survey link, survey, the word survey written at the top.

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You're going to click it.

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There's going to be surveys in it.

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Go do that.

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Fill it out.

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That would be great.

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Back to the episode.

:: 14:48

Where was I?

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In the section, what performers can do, I'm going to cover how I personally handle being gifted in emotion or assessing and responding to other people's emotions, which can be another difficulty as well.

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All those social cues that some of us have issues with.

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Noticing what is that thing that that person, that character trying to express.

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In addition to varying from person to person based on how they individually handle emotions, this will also be affected by the style of improv you're doing.

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For example, the style I do is heavily reliant on verbal discourse and justification.

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This helps me a lot.

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It's why I like it.

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There's not a lot of subtext.

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You are supposed to verbally say the subtext and someone who's autistic like me, that just works really well.

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So I'm going to be helped by that.

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But some of you are obviously not doing the style that I'm doing.

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And there might be some more work there.

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There might be more subtext.

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So if you notice somebody's having a difficulty maybe reading the subtext, you might want to feel a certain way to act that way.

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Show don't tell.

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This is common advice you may have received in a class or from a coach.

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It's good advice.

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It's probably why you're doing it in your performances after all.

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It's also more common in certain styles of improv than others.

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But even in mine, the style that I do that's highly verbal and a lot of justifications.

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I love justifications.

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A lot of you don't like justifying everything.

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That's bad improv to some of you.

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But even in my style, we get told, show don't tell.

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So the approach that I have, which I think spans probably more styles than improv.

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Correct me if I'm wrong.

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Use that survey if you want.

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The approach that I have is just be honest.

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Be honest with your emotions or your lack thereof.

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Show whatever it is your character you feel.

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So either one of those things, you or you as your character, whatever that character, whatever you feel, show that.

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And for me, there's two ways.

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You can play the character as themselves.

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I be the character.

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I feel what the character feels.

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This is actually easier for me.

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I think it gives me permission to not stress about what is, I'm doing the air quotes.

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You can't see it, but I'm doing it correct.

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So I'm not stressing about what is air quotes correct.

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And I don't struggle as much with trying to analyze facts for my own emotion or the other persons.

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I know I miss their cues, but I just read them as I do.

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And I don't worry about what's right.

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And well, the next section, I'll get into this a little bit more.

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But I also think that this might have to do with my personal wiring or just how I do improv myself.

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It's easier for me to be that person and feel what they do, my character.

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And if I actually feel it right around, there is no right or wrong.

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I'm them, there's no right or wrong.

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There might be a right or wrong if I'm doing it myself.

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So I have to apologize here.

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I'm not sure how I do this or even if I am doing it.

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I don't know.

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I think that's what I'm doing.

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But whatever is happening just seems to happen.

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And it seems to really help for this thing.

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I think in part to the hyperphantasia, I just I really see the person and I see the world and I'm just rolling with however I see it in that hyperphantasia world.

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Anyways, none of this might be helpful, so I'm going to move on.

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The other way, thing two, I play really close to me.

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I reach the emotion as one would in the outside world, outside of the scene.

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And if you miss your scene partner's emotion, their character's emotion, you just interpret it the way you do.

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React naturally, react honestly.

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And in my opinion, there is no wrong answer there.

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Even this might work better for you that don't have this concrete thinking issue.

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So try not to feel as much as you can that there's a right or wrong because there isn't.

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This is make-em-up.

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So just read it as you would.

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It's honest, it's real, so it's correct.

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There isn't a wrong answer here.

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If you air quotes, misinterpret what your scene partner meant, it's still how it would have went down in reality for these characters in this scenario, whatever's happening in your scene.

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A person with Alexithymia is still 10% of the real population and can be a character in the scene too.

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It's still real life.

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If anyone, the audience, a teammate, your coach, feels like it was a problem or feels like it was wrong, this is where some open discussion, ideally facilitated by coach or built up with, you know, trust between team members, that can help have a conversation about it.

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Be honest as much as possible, both on stage and in those discussions.

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And if it causes issues or stress, then perhaps a new team or a new coach is in order.

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I have a few episodes that I just did on doing notes and having those kind of conversations and discussions.

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So if you haven't checked those out, maybe go back and check those out.

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If this having a discussion seems like a very stressful situation for you.

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All right, next section, we're going to talk about, you get an emotion as a gift.

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So in a scene, your scene partner says you are terrified and you want to show terrified to the audience.

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Now, I mean, there's definitely improv styles and a lot of improv people that would say just show it, don't tell it because saying you are terrified is telling the thing, but let's just roll with this.

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Your scene partner says you look terrified.

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What do I do in this situation?

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For me, I almost ignore the word itself.

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I just relate the word, whatever they said, you look terrified to just whatever else has been happening in the scene, the other actions, what the game is, whatever it is, I just kind of ignore the word and just kind of check in.

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How do I feel?

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How does my character feel with everything that's kind of going in the scene right now?

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And I act appropriately.

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And I don't worry too much.

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I think more, I put that you are terrified more into the context of the scene and the action.

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For example, if someone says, you look really perplexed or confused or whatever, which is probably going to be accurate.

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I'll simply relate that phrase to the action, take it in and just do whatever I would honestly, and just let it flow as naturally as possible.

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Feel whatever I would without trying to tie that word perplexed onto it.

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This is the main issue I have with emotions.

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It's sorting out how I feel or what word to attach to that feeling, that physical thing.

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I almost don't understand the bodily sensation at all.

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Like if you tell me I feel something in my gut, I'd be looking to my stomach and thinking about the actual food in there.

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I would be taking it literally.

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I have a lot of issues thinking about that body thing, where the feeling comes from.

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That is immediately where my brain goes, and that's not going to help me in improv.

:: 22:42

I'm thinking about how accura is that word, is that emotion the actual thing that's appropriate for this actual contextual situation.

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So if I'm trying to figure out all those things, I can't do improv, I can't do the scene, so I just, I don't do that.

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It's putting me in my head, and it's going to make me worse as a scene partner.

:: 23:08

So I just ask what my character is feeling in the moment, and I don't think about that actual label.

:: 23:16

So overall, I feel that this is better for the scene than trying to act, quotes, however the word would be expressed best.

:: 23:25

I do my best to honor the gift that my scene partner has given me, but I don't try to think about it.

:: 23:31

I don't want to overthink that as I would in real life.

:: 23:35

I just be my character, or if I'm not thinking as a character, I would just react truthfully as myself.

:: 23:44

And I have no problems feeling or emoting in a scene.

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So in part two, I will cover how I quickly access and feel emotions for real in an exercise when I've been assigned a word like this.

:: 23:59

Again, this is just my experience and how I made the situation best work for me.

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And I would love to know what you think if you experience this and what you might have tried yourself, what works for you or what didn't work for you.

:: 24:15

So find that survey button top of the Neurodiversity and improv.com website and let me know.

:: 24:21

So you have a scene partner.

:: 24:23

You have a scene partner.

:: 24:25

You might be Alexithymic.

:: 24:26

Your scene partner might be Alexithymic.

:: 24:29

Now what?

:: 24:30

If you know that this is an issue, just don't give emotion words to other people.

:: 24:37

You don't need to.

:: 24:38

It's good improv to not do it.

:: 24:39

So avoid the actual words as labels.

:: 24:43

Just react, show, and feel if you can, but just react to each other.

:: 24:51

Talk about the situation, talk about other things, and just kind of show as your character would honestly.

:: 24:57

We don't need to say you look perplexed in a scene.

:: 25:01

Just do the stuff in the scene.

:: 25:03

Show what's happening, and let your scene partner react to those actions and feel it out as they might, as opposed to telling them what to feel.

:: 25:13

If this makes sense, of course, there's gonna be outliers that don't make sense, and you'll need to do something else.

:: 25:20

If you notice that your scene partner is struggling or is not responding in the way that you expect, give them hints through the verbals.

:: 25:30

Yes, this is telling as opposed to showing, but this might help them process what you are emoting.

:: 25:37

Maybe this affects the scene, but it will help both you and your scene partner and the scene itself move along.

:: 25:45

It might even help some of the audience who may have missed whatever the emotion is, or they might not be able to see it due to where they are sitting in relationship to the stage or your face.

:: 25:58

So, it might help them too.

:: 26:00

In part two, I will cover some of the tips for students and teachers in learning environments and jams.

:: 26:10

So, that's it for part one of Alexithymia.

:: 26:14

Podcast episodes are going to be going out every second week for this season, which is going to progress through most of the rest of this year.

:: 26:24

Next week, paid supporters will find an essay on this topic, and then we'll proceed to the next episode, which will be part two on Alexithymia.

:: 26:37

You can find the articles and episodes at neurodiversityimprov.com website, which I have mentioned too many times in this episode already.

:: 26:46

You can subscribe to the newsletter notifications, and you can receive the essay by email from this website.

:: 26:55

You can also support this ongoing effort and get written essays on these subjects, and support this writing and production of these episodes, which is a lot.

:: 27:06

It really helps me to know that you want more of these kinds of resources to help with your practice.

:: 27:11

This will help us get to season 3.

:: 27:13

I really appreciate it, and I thank you so much to the person out there that is subscribed.

:: 27:20

Of course, if this is what you like and you find it useful, please tell your improviser friends, word of mouth would be really helpful, much appreciated, and of course, also rating and reviewing in Apple podcasts would help a lot, and a button with that link is right in the article.

:: 27:41

So please use that and help out.

:: 27:43

And of course, the survey for this episode is right in the show notes.

:: 27:48

If you're listening to this in your ears, go look at those show notes, click that survey link, and let me know what you think.

:: 27:55

And I created and I write this episode, and I've edited it, and it's produced by stereoforest.com.

:: 28:04

I have a bunch of shows that are about to start dropping.

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They're all improvised comedy, audio dramas, and so on.

:: 28:10

And so if you want to check these out, please go to stereoforest.com.

:: 28:14

And these links, of course, are also in the show notes along with some others.

:: 28:19

So thank you so much for joining me.

:: 28:20

Next one is part two on the same topic.

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And thanks again.

:: 28:25

I'll talk to you later.