I confirm this and I didn’t have access to much of my emotions for a long time either. But my path is different. I think I avoided most of the pitfalls of suppressing emotions but there are some lessons on this path too.
There are more and less adaptive emotional defense mechanisms. Repression and denial are not adaptive and the examples from the OP sound more like that. But altruism and sublimation are actually adaptive coping mechanisms, and I believe I did more of that. But there are problems that you can’t avoid even if you have positively regulated emotions and I want to talk about those.
I grew up in a fostering, loving, and caring family and the biggest emotional conflicts were between us siblings. Strong emotional reactions were subtly discouraged, and I must have picked that up early. For sure, I’m good at emotional regulation, but if you are smart enough, you can often navigate difficult situations in ways that avoid stressors, to begin with. That’s what I did. In some cases, this led other people to be stressed, e.g., my outsmarted siblings. Not nice, but I realized that only later. I didn’t feel a strong urge to suppress negative emotions, and I remember situations where I cried, and that was OK, e.g., in my relationship. I never had difficulty expressing positive emotions like joy and happiness. So, negative emotions were very rare. Great, right?
No. Even if you genuinely don’t experience negative emotions—you just don’t have them—this still has some problems:
You can’t relate and imagine and mirror other people having them. It is really difficult to put yourself in their shoes. Sure, you can understand the difficulties of their situation in abstract terms like “having an abusive parent must be stressful,” but you can’t share the anger and pain because you can’t go to that emotional place in your imagination. You miss that part of the mental map.
If you eventually do get into a stressful or painful situation, you are woefully unprepared.
(cutting it short for now, may write more later in thread)
I confirm this and I didn’t have access to much of my emotions for a long time either. But my path is different. I think I avoided most of the pitfalls of suppressing emotions but there are some lessons on this path too.
There are more and less adaptive emotional defense mechanisms. Repression and denial are not adaptive and the examples from the OP sound more like that. But altruism and sublimation are actually adaptive coping mechanisms, and I believe I did more of that. But there are problems that you can’t avoid even if you have positively regulated emotions and I want to talk about those.
I grew up in a fostering, loving, and caring family and the biggest emotional conflicts were between us siblings. Strong emotional reactions were subtly discouraged, and I must have picked that up early. For sure, I’m good at emotional regulation, but if you are smart enough, you can often navigate difficult situations in ways that avoid stressors, to begin with. That’s what I did. In some cases, this led other people to be stressed, e.g., my outsmarted siblings. Not nice, but I realized that only later. I didn’t feel a strong urge to suppress negative emotions, and I remember situations where I cried, and that was OK, e.g., in my relationship. I never had difficulty expressing positive emotions like joy and happiness. So, negative emotions were very rare. Great, right?
No. Even if you genuinely don’t experience negative emotions—you just don’t have them—this still has some problems:
You can’t relate and imagine and mirror other people having them. It is really difficult to put yourself in their shoes. Sure, you can understand the difficulties of their situation in abstract terms like “having an abusive parent must be stressful,” but you can’t share the anger and pain because you can’t go to that emotional place in your imagination. You miss that part of the mental map.
If you eventually do get into a stressful or painful situation, you are woefully unprepared.
(cutting it short for now, may write more later in thread)