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Same, and I've still to develop them - or keep them under wraps as they are now, seems to work fine for my career and such. It's I think a level of emotional maturity, or maybe even a fear of feeling - like, keeping them suppressed is doable, I can live with that, but what would happen if I stop suppressing them? I don't want to break down bawling at work for example, or get angry and start throwing shit. The emotional maturity there is to feel the feelings but be able to deal with them in a mature way. Like, you can be angry at your significant other, raise your voice if need be, but there has to be a lid on it, a reasoning. There's an area between suppressing / ignoring feelings and letting them control you.



Letting them control you is the amygdala overriding conscious forebrain processing. In healthy functioning people, their amygdala contributes an integral part of their conscious experience. Your limbic (emotional) center is constantly running in the background, coming up with reactions and those reactions sometimes trigger the amygdala to start the process of overriding consciousness. The first few times it happens, it can be rather scary, but this mostly happens in children as a normal part of development. The forebrain receives the override and the flood of energy and has to make a decision about what to do. If the events are traumatic enough, they'll cause the mind to develop certain emotional blocks, keeping the limbic system from being able to trigger amygdala overrides.

But the amygdala overrides are a crucial part of social experience, they 'alert' you when something's 'wrong'. Developing emotional maturity involves being able to sensitively process the overrides in a way that contributes to social harmony instead of, say, getting really mad and huffy and demanding.




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