Ok, had this stored on my computer. It's from the field of 'Jungian' psychology, from a book on psychological types. It was aimed at people who had some chance of accessing unfelt or repressed feelings and so is too simple a recipe from breaking the alexithymic spell. Nevertheless, there may be a few helpful hints in there about where to start.
EDUCATION OF THE FEELING FUNCTION
"The education of the rational mind, much as we have been led to believe by the indoctrination of schooling, little makes us capable of coping with joys and sorrows. Rather the contrary is true: the education of the rational mind makes us less able with feeling, since feeling and thinking would seem, for the most part, to develop at the expense of each other. The Romantics knew this and said: "Feeling may err but it can only be corrected by feeling" (Herder). This statement denies the superiority of the reason of the mind over the reason of the heart and presents the Romantic threat to Classical order. Inferior feeling cannot be corrected from above by superior thinking. The beginning of feeling education is turning a deaf ear to one's superior functions, whose disapproval -even if tolerantly educative- of whatever is less acts mainly repressively. Feeling requires an education through faith; it begins to function only when we can trust it to function and allow its errors….
The education begins when I begin to trust my own spontaneous first feeling- "I don't like his face," "I feel mixed up," "I don't feel anything," -regardless of whether or not this first feeling is generally admissible and acceptable in the collective system of values. When I repress the simplest of feeling reactions, I prevent the feeling function from developing these contents into discriminated evaluations. For example, if I repress for moral reasons ("I am married and ought not to feel such desires," "It's wrong of me to hate him for no reason at all"), nothing further can come of my feelings; they remain nipped and stunted. Or, for example, depressive feelings get me and I say: "we all feel like this sometimes," which is another one of those habitual cliché's that prevents the specific movement of that specific depression from showing what it wants.
These little mechanical defenses against feeling keep it attatched to its affective roots, for anything newly coming into consciousness comes with a potential that is more affectively charged than the ego-system itself, else it would not make itself felt, could not get in. Before the animal can be tamed, it must be caught. Before education can proceed, there must be something to educate. This implies a responsibility towards one's feeling, whatever it feels like, and not only a responsibility to the ideals of how one should feel. This responsibility in fact puts to the test one's ideals, for it requires courage and honesty to give place to all that a feeling would say once it is let in.
It is not what contents a person carries in his unconscious that reveal his character, for we have our statistical share of the bomber, murderer, and pervert, but how one meets these contents. The criminal twist that each complex has as part of its potential is a shock to feeling. I may ignore this shock and simply not feel that shadow of my nature."
[Lectures on Jung's Typology: by James Hillman & Marie-louise von Franz]
Hope thats of value, see you soon,
Triton
