[username]

I always hide my emotions. I purposely give people very little to read concerning how I feel, no matter who I am with. I feel myself pushing my emotions back when I do feel an emotional reaction or I simply choose to feel no reaction to something at all. The only emotions that I express outwardly are kindness and warmth. Do any of you do this too?

[NeedsNewNameNow]

yes..

I kind of filter my emotions and decide to try to hide the ones that trouble me. Ones that will cause undesirable reactions in other people mostly.. But I'm sure I overdo it too.

[Molock]

This type of reaction should be fairly common among INTP's. I do that also; always suppressing my emotional responses.

[Skewed]

For me, I do not know if I consciously hide them or if they are just flat out locked up. It does take a lot to pull an emotional reaction out me.

[username]

I try to hide all of them, whether they will affect people negatively or not. I just don't like giving people a glimpse of me on the inside.

Sometimes people try to gauge how I feel about something, but they cannot. They say something and anticipate my reaction, but I refuse to show them anything. It confuses them! If they took a more direct approach by asking me, I might just tell them. I guess I just don't like people looking in on me (reading me). I like what I reveal to be by choice.

[touched]

With major, emotionally upsetting issues I find that there's no point suppressing what I feel, pretending I'm over it or whatever -- all that negative feeling is still gonna turn up eventually. Sometimes I force myself to feel something fully in hopes that that will make it go away, like sweating out a fever. Sometimes I overdo it and get caught up in re-living a miserable moment, engineering self-pity for myself, listening to sad songs on repeat.

I'm not sure if I purposely make myself unreadable. I don't reveal my feelings to people, but I don't really know why either. It has just never seemed natural to open oneself up. Funny cuz I keep thinking that ONE DAY someone will come whom I can pour out everything to... but a couple of best friends have come and gone and still all my deep dark secrets remain more or less untold.

Sometimes I don't bother telling people about my feelings because I don't want to burden them, or I don't think they could do much about it anyway, or because I'm waiting for them to ask first(so I can be sure I won't be burdening them). I deal with negative feelings privately, by journalling extensively about them -- most of it consists of questions, wondering why I feel a certain way and how to make it go away. Sometimes these questions get answered, but most of them don't.

A couple of friends (one of them an entp) and I all realized that sharing feelings with others doesn't seem to have the promised therapeutic effect. How talking about our emotions seems to make them even worse (possibly because talking honestly, directly about them forces us to feel them?)

(I have a feeling I wrote more in this post than what the op actually asked for but... eh)

[Skewed]

I try to hide all of them, whether they will affect people negatively or not. I just don't like giving people a glimpse of me on the inside.

Sometimes people try to gauge how I feel about something, but they cannot. They say something and anticipate my reaction, but I refuse to show them anything. It confuses them! If they took a more direct approach by asking me, I might just tell them. I guess I just don't like people looking in on me (reading me). I like what I reveal to be intentional and by choice.

This kind of reminded me of my teen years when my parents made me see a shrink for my pot smoking. As much as she tried, she could never get a "feel" for me. She told my parents that she could not get inside my head to see what was really going on. All in all, she would never know anything that I did not want her to know, and she figured that out much to her frustration. Then I figured out how to lead her on a wild goose chase in a totally different direction. Although now I will admit it did help me see some things from a different perspective, and that the pot smoking was not the actual problem. But the whole thing was on my terms and at no time did she ever have control of where the counseling was headed. If she tried to get me to discuss something that I did not want to discuss, I would just send her off on a path that would give her what she wanted to hear, but was far from the truth.

[touched]

This kind of reminded me of my teen years when my parents made me see a shrink for my pot smoking. As much as she tried, she could never get a "feel" for me. She told my parents that she could not get inside my head to see what was really going on. All in all, she would never know anything that I did not want her to know, and she figured that out much to her frustration. Then I figured out how to lead her on a wild goose chase in a totally different direction. Although now I will admit it did help me see some things from a different perspective, and that the pot smoking was not the actual problem. But the whole thing was on my terms and at no time did she ever have control of where the counseling was headed. If she tried to get me to discuss something that I did not want to discuss, I would just send her off on a path that would give her what she wanted to hear, but was far from the truth.

Speaking of being unreadable... there was once I had this inexplicable dislike for a classmate. I didn't know why myself. My enfp friend couldn't figure it out either -- we spent quite a while trying to figure out exactly why I disliked that classmate. Enfp friend and I came up with a lot of possible explanations but none of them quite clicked or 'felt' right.

There are times when I apparently express emotion without knowing it, usually because I don't even know I'm feeling it. My nf friends pick up on my emotions earlier than I do.

Contradictorily, there are times when I'm perfectly conscious of what I'm feeling on the inside, but no one (except maybe perceptive nfs) on the outside can tell.

[Skewed]

Contradictorily, there are times when I'm perfectly conscious of what I'm feeling on the inside, but no one (except maybe perceptive nfs) on the outside can tell.

I agree, I think that I am very self-aware.

[SomeWeirdGuy]

I usually suppress all emotions that will cause harm or anything like that. But sometimes when I get really p**** off at someone I just let it out at them.