This is a part of podcast series from the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center discussing emotional challenges after a traumatic burn injury (TBI). In this segment, Dr. Dawn Neumann discusses alexithymia intervention. 

The whole reason I got interested in Alexithymia was because I know the problems that it causes with regulating emotions. I know that if you have alexithymia, you're not going to be able to control your emotions. Also, if you have Alexithymia not going to be able to participate in therapy because if you can't talk to a therapist about your emotions, if you don't know what emotions you're having or how to label them or how to discuss them or how to describe them, that's a problem. So I got into this as a way to actually help with emotion regulation, especially anger and aggression. Because of this problem with alexithymia and people with brain injury, we have created an intervention to target this problem to help teach people with brain injury emotional awareness, to give them the vocabulary to label and describe their emotions, to know the difference between the different emotions that they are feeling.

And it's still early on in what we're doing, but the research is showing to be very promising that just through teaching them to be more aware of their emotions, we're actually improving their emotional control, including their anger and aggression, being less after participating in a therapy that teaches them how to recognize their emotions. The very act of being able to put a label on your feelings, that that helps to reduce that negative emotional experience. If you think about it, our emotions come from that reptilian part of our brain, right? The limbic system. And when you think about controlling your emotions, you hear about the prefrontal cortex helping to put the brakes on what's going on with the limbic system. What we're doing when we think about our emotions and we put a label on it, it's actually engaging a cognitive process. So it's engaging that prefrontal cortex and helping to put the brakes on that limbic system and that limbic emotional response. 

Visit https://msktc.org/tbi and get the answers you need from experts who conduct innovative and high-quality research, provide patient care, and work to improve the health and overall quality of life for people with traumatic brain injury. That’s https://msktc.org/tbi.