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Mar. 13th, 2021 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrienmundiI (re?)realized today that I feel obligated to shut down my own emotions if someone else is feeling a related emotion. I haven't run a full inventory through history, but this is very definitely the case for sadness, depression, loneliness (anger is erratic: if it's someone about whom I care, I shut down to deal with their anger most of the time; if it's not someone important to me, my response is often escalated anger).
There are times that this happens in which I feel resentful of the person allowed/able to express their emotions, whose handling I feel compelled to prioritize over my own emotional expression.
How fucked up must my childhood have been to so deeply ingrain responses like this? I don't remember overt signs of capital 'A' Abuse, but emotional neglect, dismissal, and enforced closeting are things I recall. Based on the symptoms alone signs point to erratic and unpredictable parents whose emotional state I had to manage for a sense of survival and security. I don't remember that, exactly, which leads me to question the validity of my memories an sich, particularly as they would have been made when my cognitive toolkit was much less developed.
There are times that this happens in which I feel resentful of the person allowed/able to express their emotions, whose handling I feel compelled to prioritize over my own emotional expression.
How fucked up must my childhood have been to so deeply ingrain responses like this? I don't remember overt signs of capital 'A' Abuse, but emotional neglect, dismissal, and enforced closeting are things I recall. Based on the symptoms alone signs point to erratic and unpredictable parents whose emotional state I had to manage for a sense of survival and security. I don't remember that, exactly, which leads me to question the validity of my memories an sich, particularly as they would have been made when my cognitive toolkit was much less developed.
