It seems to me that one of the trickier parts of this issue is that you don’t know what you don’t know. You’ve got the places in your emotional landscape that you’re used to visiting, and that’s where your attention naturally goes when you try to do a self-assessment. Reminds me a bit of something I learned in adolescence that when you’re playing hide and seek, people are really bad at remembering to look up; I’ve even had a friend that eluded police chasing him in the park by simply getting out of immediate few and then climbing up into the foliage of a tree. He saw the police walk right underneath him.
How do you break outside of the familiar? I think there are several, at least.
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Don’t hold yourself back from floundering around. Babies engage in Fairly random motions in order to learn how their body works. It’s a kind of search routine even if it does seem haphazard and pointless. A true random walk may not be optimal but it does tend to cover unfamiliar ground eventually.
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Put yourself into situations that are unfamiliar and don’t shut yourself off from them. You don’t necessarily have to pick the most unpleasant or aversive things that you’ve never done. But there should be good and bad novelty, and probably a whole lot of just weird. Give yourself a little bit of time in the new place so that you know What feelings emerge after your initial wariness to new situations.
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Spend quiet time with yourself, meditation or other reflective times and simply concentrate on feelings. Abstract emotions and just feelings in your body and look for the small things oh, the things that you would normally ignore and let them emerge. They may be the tip of an iceberg.
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Look to those times in your life that you seemed to have a diminished range of emotions compared to what people are supposed to have in those situations. If you don’t know what people are supposed to have in those situations oh, you probably should read more classic fiction from a variety of authors. I suggest both male and female authors because for whatever reasons it seems that there are different parts of the emotional spectrum that get covered. A lot of the Nobel prize-winning authors are quite good explorers of The Human Condition. For me, I’ve enjoyed Hermann Hesse and Doris Lessing oh, a lot of people like William Faulkner and James Joyce.
Is this an active and ongoing meeting?