Alexithymia - music - tuning into one's emotions ?

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Has anyone with alexithymia ever noticed if music helped to have a better clue of your emotions ?, sometimes when I'm listening to music and start to think, I'll find my self recognising emotions that relate to whatever I am meditating about, I know this might sound strange but I sort of like when music does this on me, but that is not the strange part, I like to have sad thoughts which make me cry, not sad as in something that makes me sad because of something that happened to me but rather thoughts such as the pain in the world, of every living being, I suppose my hyper-empathy plays some sort of roll, I don't know why I like to feel such sadness, that which makes me cry. I am not talking of depression or any sadness that may be caused by my misfortune, I am talking about catharsis I suppose, sad thoughts which I call sad because they make me cry, I think it's because they make me feel like I can feel when I am mostly numb or unaware of my sentiments.

is there any music or any other good thing that makes you behave the way you have seen other people behave when they are feeling demonstrable joy? IOW like when somebody wins something or sees/experiences something subjectively awesome?

Same here. Sometimes there's a great beauty and elation in references to sadness and/or other negative emotions when they're expressed in a form of art. As someone who suffers from depression I certainly wouldn't crave such experiences if they really made me feel more depressed. I don't think that's the case with me. I'm definitely not a masochist. I don't think it's just a catharsis for my own feelings or a sense of relating to the music either. I mean, that's often part of it but it's not necessarily the whole of it. Sometimes expression is just something beautiful in it's own right. There's also some music where it seems like great sorrow and great joy come full circle and meet as one so that you can't tell which it is. All you know is it makes you feel something deep and poignant that's missing in the ordinary mundane routine of life.

I don't think I have alexithymia but I do experience a sense of emotional blunting from anxiety and depression and all the medication I take for those. Oddly I can miss feeling genuinely sad about something rather than just being depressed.

i indeed feel more in tune with my emotions when i listen to music, and music is able to summon very deep emotions as well, deeper then i have ever felt on my own.
actually, my entire life runs on the speed of the music i'm listening to; if there is no music, i don't do anything at all, and i'm unable to write/type/think/walk/cylce/drive a car at any decent speed when listening to slow music, for example...

That's really interesting. I can relate to the idea of a dependence on music to set the mood for the task at hand as a kind of motivational necessity almost.

Everyone likes to cry for the fun of crying once in a while.

Thats why we have tear jerking movies and other art forms.

People pay money for the priviledge of being terrified as well ( roller coaster rides and horror movies) which is even more bizarre if you think about it.

You may have a greater need for that than some.

When I was sick once I helped myseld to a tee spoon full of some perscription cold medicine mom had on the bathroom shelf unused up for years.

The red liguid resulted in one of the strangest drug induced mental experiences Ive ever had ( and Im not a stranger to mood alterting drugs).

It put me into this exagerrated mood- melecholy but not really melancoly ( like you're not really yourself depressed). Just had this urge to cry for the fun of crying.
Out of desperation I dug up an old Time-Life book on "the Mind" and found the chapter with artwork by psychotic mental patients and found this paintng by a guy who chroniclcled all of his childhood traumas (being abused by people) as rooms inside his broken open skull ( the same painting was used as the cover of a Van Halen album in the eighties). Sort of an exageratted version of sfuff everyone goes through. Just starred at the page and cried about the human conditon unil l litereally drained my tear ducts and was physically unable to produce anymore tears.
Then went to sleep.

The next morning I tossed that medicine botlle in the trash.

Years later I took a training workship in radio. Most of us brought stacks of uptempo rock cd.s to practice running the board with but one guy brought nothing but Patsy Cline CD's. When asked why he said " I dunno, I think its this cold medicine I was perscribed- it put me into that kinda mood."

I don't have alexithymia, but music does definitely stimulate stronger-than-normal emotions for me.

i don't have alexithymia but i do have stendahl's syndrome which makes me extraordinarily sensitive to emotional cues in music. i drained my tear glands watching "Il Volo Takes Flight" on PBS tonight- something about those beautiful voices and beautiful musical accompaniment and the soaring italian singing just did me in. i didn't even have to know the italian lyrics, just the emotions in the voices went past my frontal lobes into my limbic system and i became flushed, short of breath, heart pounding/palpitating, weeping, etc. just listening to leo delibe's "lakme- flower duet" and to the butterfly lover's concerto did the same thing. i can only handle a limited amount of sheer beauty- otherwise, my brain's emotional circuits overload just like Data's in TNG.

I have thought about having some music all the time but my issues with light spectra make me more sensitive to noise, not necessarily heightening my hearing but making them hurt very easily

I do have noticed that some rock makes me more sentimental, sad, reflective, perfect for when I am writing; Indie music makes me feel more giggly and what I can only explain as a "more-self-conscious-about-my-body" of an emotion - I know pretty weird but it does. And some electronic music makes me get more active.

Some times I just lie down and listen to music that I like with the lights off and somehow without me making much of a conscious contribution a movie starts to roll in my head, I love doing this sometimes I get some of my best ideas this way. I guess thinking in pictures does has some great advantages.

A question, does anyone else ever get the sensation that you can feel the music, physically, when I am listening to music I feel as if someone where tapping on my chest in the way of the sounds, depending on the music I feel tapping dots or stairs or swirls or as if things where happening in my chest, I am almost certain this must be another form of synaesthesia, I know for a fact I have some forms of synaesthesia but I have never heard of that so it may be just something everyone experiences one way or another.

Here is something I once wrote:

<< When Cate Blanchett impersonated -Elizabeth I-... from the moment she metamorphosed in to the virgin wife of England as its people's queen and walked in with awing magnanimousness to present her self thus. I, whilst feeling naught at the sight of such awe without omniparity, cried cathartic tears of physically convulsing ecstasy in front of such overwhelming wonder of grandeur. >>

I think I might have something similar, but what ever it is I just love to experience it, I certainly can relate to what you described. There is something about soundtracks in films, Opera, classical music and some other things that have this effect on me.

Not that I've ever noticed, that is something; I never share those subjectively awesome feelings, sometimes people think I am mad that such good things happened to them which is not the truth, I just don't. But hey neither do I panic in situations where people normally panic, I just go and address the situation calmly as long as it doesn't include social interaction which on that case I would still not panic but would feel so shy I maybe wouldn't communicate my ideas

It's true that I am hyperempathic but I am also asympathic so that's probably it with me, the reason why I can't share that subjective awesome-ness I mean