It just occurred to me that people who try to hide their feelings are actually pretty creepy.

And I would include myself in this category for the moment, but not because I feel creepy so much as what it must be like for others to encounter it. What’s going on when i’m trying to hide my feelings?

Obviously, as a kid, I had to do this in order to avoid getting assaulted… but just the general principle where you feel like you have to hide your feelings…

And the problem isn’t that you decide upon “appropriate” displays of emotion, I don’t think… it’s that when you get to the point of hiding your emotions from others, they still find a way to come out, to manifest themselves.

This occurred to me when i got a reply to an email this morning and I don’t think I could really say what it was the sender of this email was feeling.

In any case, I think back to when I was a kid… and my father was a big “fan” of hiding his feelings until they spilled over as rage. I’m not saying it was something he enjoyed but it was certainly something that worked for him, something that was better for him than facing whatever feelings he was bottling in.

Oh and of course… my mother’s the same way, really. She doesn’t express nor explore her feelings but tries to hide them until she also spills over with rage.

So, in my experience, if somebody is hiding their feelings from themselves, they’re actually quite dangerous… or, at the very least, unstable.

And of course… the more access I have to my emotions, the more of a threat I become to my parents, even as a little kid. Not that I had any means at my disposal to threaten them but my raw emotional experiences threatened their tenuous grasp on the lid that bottled their own feelings of pain, anger, fear, and sadness. So… they attacked me for it.

I’ve been noticing more lately, in slight degrees, just how other people hide their feelings… and I’m starting to see it within myself.