The Emotional Inheritance You Never Asked For
If your mother couldn't name her feelings, she couldn't teach you to name yours.
Posted December 9, 2025 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
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.
How I Stumbled Into This
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.
The Mother Who Couldn’t Feel (Or Couldn’t Express It)
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 personality trait or dimension—one that often co-occurs with conditions like PTSD , depression , eating disorders, and autism . Researchers assess it using tools such as the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and although you won't find it on insurance claims, therapists increasingly recognize it as a focus for intervention when treating related conditions.
Why does emotional fluency seem so hard to grasp? Research shows it is passed down within families.
What the Research Actually Shows
A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Affective Disorders found a significant correlation between mothers and children (r = 0.24) across all three alexithymia dimensions: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally oriented thinking. The father-child correlation was weaker but still significant (r = 0.16).
Correlation isn't causation. But when correlations are consistent across multiple studies and populations, they warrant closer examination. The " emotion socialization" framework offers a plausible mechanism: Parents who can’t recognize their own emotions can’t teach emotional literacy. You can't give what you don't have.
Guttman and Laporte's foundational 2002 study found elevated levels of alexithymia throughout entire family systems where daughters had developed psychiatric conditions. A 2023 study in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment showed that maternal difficulty in distinguishing emotions specifically predicted internalizing problems—such as anxiety , depression, and withdrawal—in children.
The pattern is strong. The developmental path makes sense. We can't say for sure that parental alexithymia alone causes problems for children; human development is rarely that simple. But the evidence clearly shows that growing up with an emotionally unreadable parent significantly increases the likelihood of becoming emotionally unreadable yourself.
The Curriculum That Was Never Taught
Children learn emotional literacy through countless interactions where feelings are named and validated. A mother notices her toddler's face crumple and says, "You're frustrated. It's hard when someone takes what you were playing with." This repeated exchange teaches the child that internal experiences have names.
An alexithymic mother faced with a distressed child usually reacts in one of two ways: neglect or control. The neglectful approach leaves the child to figure out her emotions on her own, like learning Mandarin by being dropped in Beijing with no dictionary. The controlling approach manages emotions from the outside, dismissing or correcting feelings that the mother can't recognize. Neither method teaches the daughter what she truly needs.
The 2023 study found that although maternal alexithymia predicted internalizing problems in both genders, sons showed a stronger tendency toward withdrawal and somatic complaints—expressing distress through their bodies rather than words. While daughters may struggle with emotional identification in relationships, sons often turn unprocessed emotions into physical symptoms or social withdrawal.
The research has mainly focused on mothers—partly because they have historically been primary caregivers and partly because emotional labor remains culturally gendered. But fathers also matter. The Davies and Griffin review found a significant, though weaker, link between paternal and child alexithymia. A 2023 study in Children showed that fathers' alexithymia predicted behavioral problems in young children, especially when it led to overreactive parenting .
Cultural factors complicate this: Men are socialized to suppress emotions, making a father's alexithymia more common and less obvious, dismissed as "just how men are" rather than seen as a deficit. When both parents are alexithymic, the child has no emotional translator at home. The curriculum isn't just left untaught; it doesn't exist.
When Intimacy Becomes the Battlefield
This is where the research becomes personally meaningful to women whose relationships keep failing for reasons they can't understand.
Alexithymia creates a significant barrier to emotional intimacy. Partners of individuals with alexithymia often feel unsupported, unseen, and unheard. Research consistently shows that alexithymia negatively impacts relationship satisfaction; difficulty expressing feelings leads to poor communication and conflicts with one's partner.
For daughters of alexithymic mothers, this risk increases across generations. A mother's alexithymia is associated with her child's development of insecure attachment , either avoidant or ambivalent. When that daughter enters romantic relationships , she carries both an insecure attachment schema and her own alexithymic traits. She may desperately seek connection while unintentionally sabotaging it, not out of perversity, but because she lacks the emotional tools needed for the task.
Recognition as the First Step
I'm not suggesting that every woman facing relationship issues had an alexithymic mother. Mothers with alexithymia are often shaped by similar backgrounds—the pattern is passed down through generations like a whispered secret that no one realizes they're holding onto.
But recognition matters. Could your mother describe her emotional states in detail? When you were upset as a child, were your feelings acknowledged or dismissed? Do your relationships struggle with emotional disconnection, with partners saying you're "impossible to read"?
Rewriting the Curriculum
The good news is that emotional literacy doesn't have a critical window that permanently closes. It's harder to learn as an adult—like acquiring a foreign language after childhood —but entirely possible.
Start by trusting your own experience. That discomfort isn't proof you're broken; it's information you were never taught to interpret. The responses others called "too much" may be proportional; you just lacked the framework to trust them.
For women recognizing their mother in this description, the most important realization might be this: The emotional vocabulary you struggle to speak isn't your native language because no one taught it to you. That's not a personal failure. That's an inheritance—and unlike genetic traits, you can consciously revise this one.
What your mother couldn't give you, you can still learn to give yourself.
Davies, R. N., & Griffin, K. (2025). A systematic review of alexithymia in young people and their parents. Journal of Affective Disorders . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.119855
Fukunishi, I., & Paris, W. (2001). Intergenerational association of alexithymic characteristics for college students and their mothers. Psychological Reports, 89 (1), 77–84.
Guttman, H., & Laporte, L. (2002). Alexithymia, empathy, and psychological symptoms in a family context. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 43 (6), 448–455.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.