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Birdiebell is correct. I'm neither overly emotional or sensitive. I'm more analytical and pretty laid back. My typical reaction is not to get upset about a problem but to step back and analyze it and consider how to procede.
But I do see a lot of people who react emotionally to situations and act on their very temporary emotions and sometimes make very bad and unwise decisions. That's why the thread.
Of course, then you get the more extreme behavior where peoples emotional reactiins lead to mental illness.
But then on the non emotional end, you have an example like Joe Kenda, host a homicide detective with a show on Investigation Discovery channel. The show last night showed how he could go to a gristly murder scene, then go out to lunch with no problem. He's not emotionless, but he has it under control. But many people could never handle a job like that. I think its all nature.
Some people come out of war and see all kinds of horrible things and return home to their normal life. Some leave war and end up in mental institution.
Last edited by augiedogie; 10-10-2019 at 07:55 AM..
I came from a dysfunctional family. I carry all the family emotions. If the family needed that one person to "over" exemplify a situation I was it.
Tranference is common.
To this day though I suffer from not having a healthy manner to acknowledge or work with anger. It's the one emotion that was stifled as a kid. A girl just doesn't show "anger" or dare express it in behavior. So on the rare occasion that I feel that "anger" it goes from zero to 200 in a matter of seconds. Then just as quickly it's gone!
Yet have a sad song play and I am a puddle of tears.
Same with watching good comedy. I can have the best laughs...
My relatives mislabeled my being saying "ohh she is hyper sensitive". This ^^^ though came from the very dysfunctional members who would not nor could not express themselves with emotional conviction. It was often with muldane indifference when conveying.
Me, I'm very emotional......in a way. It all gets tied into my energy matrix.....and my energy matrix tends to make things into something like compression lift or a rogue wave. It is like my sexual energy. Since I am without a mate, my sexual energy gets dumped into how I relate to people.
At times, I find it quite interesting in that, I may be down, feeling a bad day or something, and I'll run into someone and I'll instantly shift, rather automatically these days, in "office cheerleader", in the blink of an eye, I'm like Cathy Baker.
Equally, though, however, gallows humor is part of my make up. Some one caught me on that the other day. This morning as I was pasting in pictures to my diary, I noted that the picture for a reflection that something had not been easy....................was a picture of Xena being crucified. Ie, "the ways things are going........"
It's just the way my mind works........that mind which is tied into the rest of me.
IMHO the question isn't whether someone is emotional or not...it's about how they manifest the emotions they do have and when they rise to public notice. Some people suppress emotions better than others. Doesn't mean they aren't emotional, they just don't show it. Think about how different people respond during a crisis...some appear very calm and collected in the thick of it but collapse later. Others lose it right off the bat but reach a calm steady state later once they've released the pressure. The emotions were there all along. Part of that is an inherent trait in that person. Other people may have started out as a wildly emotional child or teen but through practice, possibly nurture, or reinforcement could become a restrained adult. Or vice versa. I don't believe everyone has to handle or not handle their emotions in the same manner throughout their lives.
Yes. It isn't as if a percentage of people are emotional, and the rest of the population is not. We've learned to think of autism as a spectrum, and I think it would be good to view things like emotionality the same way. There are likely many permutations of how people experience, manage, and manifest their emotions.
I’m weird in this way, in that I can’t cry when you’re “supposed to†like at funerals yet I cry during some commercials and movies with really happy endings. I don’t think I feel the same way others do, yet I’m extremely empathetic at the same time. No one in my family is really emotional and when my mom hugs us it always feels uncomfortable like she does it similar to an “air kissâ€. I feel like it’s nature. We all have varying degrees of anxiety, ADD, OCD, and sometimes I wonder if I am just the teeniest bit on the low end of Aspergers. So if my mom was born with these issues then raised us, it’s hard to separate the two.
If you want to see a very interesting documentary on the subject, watch the movie “identical strangersâ€. It’s a true story about triplets who were separated at birth in order to do exactly this kind of psychological experiment. They were not the only ones multiple births at this one adoption agency were all part of this experiment and none of them knew. The subjects of the movie did not find out that they had brothers until they were college-age. The parents who adopted them also did not know.
In the experiment they split the three kids up. They put one child with a blue-collar family in which the father was very jovial and emotional, they took the second kid and put him with a wealthy family where the parents were a little more aloof, and truthfully I can’t remember where the third child went.
What they were studying was whether mental illness was nature or nurture, because the boys mother had some mental illness. They tracked these kids and tested them under the guise of something different throughout their entire lives until they found out.
Once they were adults the kids sued to try to get the results of the study and it took many many years for them to finally get them but when they finally did it didn’t really say a whole lot and conclusions were never drawn. The kids did turn out differently depending where how they were raised though in fact one of the kids committed suicide in middle-age.
I saw this documentary. It was so moving. It showed how the boys were so happy to find each other at college age, and then later how it all fell apart. So sad. I don’t cry often, but I did cry for these men.
Birdiebell is correct. I'm neither overly emotional or sensitive. I'm more analytical and pretty laid back. My typical reaction is not to get upset about a problem but to step back and analyze it and consider how to procede.
I bet you're more sensitive than you realize; at least in terms of being a tactful and understanding person. It may be a bit of Chicken and Egg, but I wonder if your education and training as a Pastor has made you that way (or those traits led you to be a Pastor.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by augiedogie
But I do see a lot of people who react emotionally to situations and act on their very temporary emotions and sometimes make very bad and unwise decisions. That's why the thread.
Of course, then you get the more extreme behavior where peoples emotional reactiins lead to mental illness.
But then on the non emotional end, you have an example like Joe Kenda, host a homicide detective with a show on Investigation Discovery channel. The show last night showed how he could go to a gristly murder scene, then go out to lunch with no problem. He's not emotionless, but he has it under control. But many people could never handle a job like that. I think its all nature.
Some people come out of war and see all kinds of horrible things and return home to their normal life. Some leave war and end up in mental institution.
I think that much of it is nature, but not all of it. People can and often are conditioned to things. Many people think nothing of setting a snap trap for a mouse but have little stomach for say, watching an animal be slaughtered and butchered. If you're conditioned that mice are disgusting disease ridden creatures, you'll act differently. If you grow up on a farm where you butcher a hog every winter, you have a quiet understanding on how to keep it in check. So, a Cop that's mentally prepared to walk up to a scene of carnage, is often mentally able to compartmentalize, and isn't shocked. If you walked up on it while walking your dog your reaction is understandably different. I have an inlaw that's one of the most empathetic people I know; but she's been poisoned by her mother that another family member is a cold and evil man (he isn't.) We have a joke about her, "I wonder How is this going to be Steve's fault?"
But I do think much is nature. I'm one of three brothers, raised in a stable loving home. I'm the oldest. The middle brother is equally emotional to the rest of us, but he's the most stoic. He's also the most analytical. The youngest is the more outwardly expressive of his feelings; he's also the most likely to allow them to influence his life.
Seems to me, from my experience, that the “baby of the family” is usually more outgoing and expressive of their emotions, especially when they are young.
I've heard men call themselves unemotional, or "logical, not emotional" because they don't cry much, yet they might have a hair-trigger for over the top displays of anger, and act like that's not an emotional behavior, though I'm quite sure that if I had an angry temper tantrum, they would call ME "emotional" or some such. So I do caution people to consider the full spectrum, as some do not, as well as what people are socialized to consider appropriate.
Under significant stress, when I could cry I guess, I often go cold and detach. I suspect this is a result of certain people inflicting ongoing, long term, high stress trauma on me, especially in cases where any reaction on my part, would escalate the danger of them becoming violent. I got spanked for crying as a small child, too. If I am happy, I can be over the top demonstrative. And trivial things like even a movie moment that provokes nostalgia can sort of "poke me in the feels" and choke me up. But if significant life events have given me strong, negative emotions, whether sadness or stress or frustration, the more truly bothered I am, the more silent, avoidant, and outwardly calm and cold I get.
It could be said that I repress a lot of things, and that it is somehow unhealthy...but I don't tend to eventually blow my top. It just dissipates, the intensity of feeling goes away, leaving a sort of numbness and eventually nothing. Of course, the fact that I don't blow up also has to do with the fact that if someone is a source of stress, I will often just avoid them. I don't like confrontation and conflict. I will absolutely cut people out of my life, if they feel a need to instigate it often.
I now have a partner, who wants me to communicate with him if he makes me unhappy in any way. I know that he is able to calmly talk through conflicts, and it is safe to be more open with him. It's still a bit challenging to me.
The only part of my emotionality that I think is "nature" rather than the product of programming or "nurture"...is the biochemical aspect. If I neglect care of my basic needs for food and water and rest, if I smoke too much or when I'm trying to quit, or if I am having hormonal turbulence for some reason...I am aware that I can be prone to a bit more internal emotionality. I rarely show it, though. The worst of that, if I permit it to get a hold of me, can begin a depression spiral...but I'm pretty good at recognizing early signs and heading off the negative self talk that feeds those. I'll just make sure that the self care boxes are all checked, and then listen to some happy-brain-chemistry-inducing music.
I think that there is a healthy balance to be struck...because people who just let their emotions instantly generate behaviors, are usually very dramatic and difficult to be around. I had a coworker who would cry and yell and freak out, slam objects on her desk, and so on, rather often. She got fired. I've known people who seem to need to be able to yell and throw things at romantic partners. I don't think that's necessary and in fact I cannot tolerate it in my home. There is no acceptable level of "fighting" between me and a live-in partner. There's discussion, disagreement, and calm debate, but no dramatic screaming and yelling.
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