You've heard it your whole life: "You're overreacting." "Why are you so emotional?" Maybe you've internalized this chorus so deeply that you now tell yourself these things, all while feeling like you're drowning in sensations you can't quite explain.

There might be an uncomfortable backstory behind this. What if the real issue isn't that you feel too much, but that you were never taught how to feel accurately?

An increasing number of studies point to a subtle pattern that many women have spent years (and money on therapy) trying to understand, often without realizing they are missing important pieces from the beginning. The cause isn't trauma as traditionally believed. It's something much quieter: a mother with alexithymia—an inability to recognize and express her own feelings—who, without meaning to cause harm, failed to pass on the emotional language her daughter desperately needed.

In the mid-1990s, I served as an advisor on a doctoral dissertation exploring a provocative hypothesis: that women with eating disorders tended to have mothers who were disproportionately alexithymic. I had never even encountered the word before. The study confirmed the candidate's hypothesis: Women with eating disorders were significantly more likely to have alexithymic mothers. That finding lodged in my mind for three decades. The research has only become stronger since.

Alexithymia, derived from the Greek meaning "no words for feelings," is not a lack of emotions. People with this trait experience physiological arousal, such as a racing heart or a tight chest, but the connection between the body and language is damaged or never fully developed. When asked how they feel, an alexithymic person might describe physical symptoms ("My stomach hurts") or external circumstances ("Work was busy") rather than emotional states. It's not avoidance; it's genuinely not knowing.

About 10 percent of the general population exhibits significant alexithymic traits. A clarification for the clinically oriented: Alexithymia is not a formal diagnosis. It does not appear in the DSM-5 or ICD-11 as an independent disorder. Rather, it is seen as a

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