Negative Self-Evaluating Emotions as Mediator in the Relationship between Childhood Emotional Trauma and Alexithymia in Adulthood

Alexithymia, a cognitive deficit in the experience of emotion, is associated with low mentalizing and emotional dysregulation (Taylor and Bagby 2013). Empirically, alexithymia has been associated with childhood trauma and the experience of negative emotions in adulthood (Kooiman, et al. 2004; Paivio and McCulloch 2004). However, research findings about these relationships are too sketchy and general to inspire a specific causal model for the development of alexithymia. How does trauma lead to difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions? What do negative emotions tell us about the deficits in emotion regulation at the heart of alexithymia?

The original formulation of alexithymia, stemming from psychoanalytic observation of psychosomatic patients, has emphasized a deficit in mentalization (Taylor, Bagby, and Parker 1997). Trauma has long been thought to be an etiological factor contributing to alexithymia. In such a view, alexithymia is seen as a defense or adaptation to trauma, more or less associated with dissociation (Krystal 1988). Trauma is seen mostly as a unitary “quantitative” phenomenon, and alexithymia is conceived as dealing with an emotional overflow. However, studies have shown that some types of trauma, more emotionally based, might be more closely related to alexithymia (Paivio and McCulloch 2004). They point to etiological mechanisms more directly related to the regulation of emotion.