You described it to the head of a nail... Check out Alexithymia.... I think all DP/DR people have it...
http://www.self-injury-abuse-trauma-dir ... thymia.htm
What is alexithymia?
In brief, alexithymia is the inability to talk about feelings due to a lack of emotional awareness. Alexithymics are typically unable to identify, understand or describe their own emotions, and the construct of alexithymia refers to some of the chief manifestations of this deficit in emotional functioning. (You can read some more precise definitions here.)
The term was coined from the Greek a- (prefix meaning "lack"), lexis ("word") and thymos ("feelings"), and hence can be read literally as "a lack of words for feelings". Note that alexithymia does not mean "a lack of words for feelings". Its meaning is determined by its definition and is not constructed from the literal senses of its etymological roots. The term means the syndrome described in the literature and not simply an absence of emotion words.
Two conceptions of alexithymia
There are two closely related conceptions of alexithymia in the academic literature?psychiatric (in medical literature) and psychometric (in psychological literature), though the distinction is rarely acknowledged.
The psychiatric concept emerged in the context of psychosomatic medicine. Alexithymia in this sense refers to a set of characteristics, similar to la pens?e op?ratoire, observed in a subset of psychosomatic patients. The classification is applied to people who exhibit the key symptoms of a deficiency in emotional cognition, as determined by a standard examination protocol, such as the Beth Israel Questionnaire. Alexithymia may be used to describe the behavioural profile of patients with a number of different syndromes, but it does not constitute a clinical disorder in its own right. It is a general clinical descriptor, like akinesia (lack of movement), aboulia (lack of will) or apnoea (breathing difficulties).
Alexithymia has a non-medical range of application in psychometric psychology. Here it is principally conceived as a dimensional personality trait. It implies a continuous range of abilities and although people who have an alexithymia rating above a certain arbitrary value can be classified as alexithymic, the term is not necessarily indicative of a clinically significant impairment. The difference in definition is subtle but important.
Most theoretical discussions of alexithymia seem to imply the psychiatric model, but most of the tests adopt the psychometric model. The confusion is often apparent within single publications. For example, many studies identify an assumption from the psychiatric literature, then examine the corresponding hypothesis by selecting non-clinical subjects with the psychometric questionnaire and conclude that the hypothesis is not supported; however the psychometric test has implicitly redefined the construct and widened its range of reference. Accordingly, it is questionable whether the results of many empirical studies have a direct bearing on the psychiatric conception of alexithymia.
