When Children Don’t Know What They’re Feeling (Understanding Alexithymia)

“I don’t know…”

You ask:
“What’s wrong?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Why are you upset?”

And the answer is:
“I don’t know.”

This can be frustrating.
It can feel like the child is avoiding, shutting down, or not engaging.

But often, they genuinely don’t know.

What is alexithymia?

Alexithymia is when someone has difficulty:

• identifying what they are feeling

• understanding their emotions

• putting those feelings into words

It doesn’t mean they don’t have emotions.

It means they struggle to make sense of them.

Why this happens

Emotions don’t just appear in the mind.

They start in the body.

A racing heart, tight chest, tense muscles, butterflies in the stomach — these are all body signals that help us recognise how we feel.

This is called interoception.

If those body signals are unclear, confusing, or overwhelming, it becomes much harder to understand emotions.

So instead of:
“I feel anxious”
“I feel frustrated”

The child experiences:
“I don’t know what this is”

What this looks like in real life

Children with alexithymia might:

• say “I don’t know” when asked how they feel

• struggle to explain why they are upset

• seem calm, then suddenly become overwhelmed

• react strongly without being able to describe the build-up

• find it hard to connect feelings with situations

From the outside, this can look like:

• avoidance

• lack of communication

• “not trying”

But that’s not what’s happening.

The missing link between body and emotion

For many children, there is a gap:

The body is sending signals.
But the brain isn’t making clear sense of them.

So the feeling is there…
but the understanding is not.

Why this affects self-regulation

Self-regulation depends on recognising what we are feeling.

If a child doesn’t know:
“I’m getting overwhelmed”

They can’t:

• ask for help

• use a strategy

• step away early

So regulation doesn’t happen at the beginning.

It only happens when the feeling becomes too big to ignore.

A different way to understand behaviour

Instead of thinking:
“They won’t tell me what’s wrong”

We can start to see:

They don’t yet understand what they are feeling well enough to explain it.

What helps

We don’t force children to “name their feelings” straight away.

We build it slowly.

Helping them:

• notice body sensations (“What does your body feel like?”)

• connect sensations to simple words over time

• recognise patterns (“This feeling happens when…”)

• feel safe not knowing

This takes patience.

But this is how emotional understanding develops.

A simple but important truth

You can’t describe what you don’t understand.
And understanding emotions starts with understanding the body.

What we need to remember

When a child says “I don’t know,” it doesn’t always mean they are avoiding the question.

Sometimes, it means:

They are feeling something…
but they don’t yet have the words or understanding to explain it.