Expressing emotions feels fake

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Do you ever feel that way?

I have thought for a long time that trying to describe what I feel in words makes the emotion seem superficial and silly and then often I didn't know if I was really feeling something. I would rather have all my feelings trapped in a wordless universe where they were real, true and beautiful. I keep thinking that some expressed feelings are silly and that people are dramatic when they express them. I have nothing against feelings (I believe any feeling is valid), but the act of their expression is weird.

They don't look real you know? They seem to be exaggerated for social purposes. I keep my feelings hidden, because when I express them it often seems that they lose their truth. Sometimes I show real feelings and see myself as a fake person when I do. My feelings are true, but the act of expressing them is weird. That's why I think expressing feelings is silly: because it doesn't come naturally to me, I feel like I'm acting. And I wonder why other people don't feel like me.

But I try to express feelings, who knows maybe with practice they will not seem to lose their truth, and I will be able to feel like other people and thus integrate my emotions. I don't want to feel like an actor in life.

Nietzsche said we find words for things which are dead inside us. I don't necessarily agree, but expressing emotion can let it leave you.

I feel the same way about affect, that it often makes emotions feel fake. Because that's not naturally how I express myself, for the most part. I suppose finding images to match emotion keeps them alive, for me.

Expressing emotions is tricky. To say the least.

If I do express what feels to be like real emotion, people think I am faking. So I don’t do that.

I’ve learned a set of responses to apply to different situations and that seems to keep the NTs satisfied. Makes me a bit dead inside. Gotta have time to recover. I am always trying to learn and adjust responses.

No, it feels impulsive for me. If I don't express my emotions I feel like I'm going to explode.

Yes I can relate. I've been told I never look happy. I FEEL happy sometimes, but it's hard for me to express that. It's just not me and if I try to fit in with the expressions of people around me, I end up feeling fake.

I’m not a really “emotional” person myself.

I've known it to be that way for me, to some extent. My family hardly ever described their feelings directly. I guess the atmosphere I grew up in was telling me that emotions didn't matter, weren't real, or weren't grown-up, that describing them was weak, stupid and irrelevent to anything important. And of course alexithymia is said to be common in Aspies, though I knew nothing of that at the time. So I didn't have the vocabulary to talk about them, didn't even know what they were. My first counsellor remarked that I never talked about my feelings, and wanted to know where they were hiding. I replied that I thought feelings were redundant in modern humans.

But the counsellor had given me this idea that feelings might be important after all. When I first started trying to describe them, it did seem like I was just making them up to please the counsellors who wanted me to talk about them. It was like trying to follow one of those stupid books about learning to see people's "auras" by staring at them - you follow the instructions, you start thinking you can see something, and finally you realise that you're just kidding yourself because you want to be one of those advanced people who can work the teacher's clever magic spell. Only with intense emotions could I really see that there was something real. I knew when I was very happy, sad, angry or afraid. But the milder and more subtle feelings just seemed too vague and chimeric. I couldn't pin them down. It took me years to somehow learn to get familiar with them, to describe them in anything like a robust way.

I usually have to process and think them through...if its a complicated situation.
Then I can say , I did this because I felt this..

I can relate to this. Expressing emotions make them lose their weight in a way. That's why i tried to be expressive for a while but i cant always recognize what i am feeling.

I suspect that I lack this ability.

When I try to express, I subconsciously start thinking about rhetoric. Then my emotions subsided because they weren't strong in the first place. So what I ended up expressing was just a piece of text that I edited, and it didn't actually have much to do with how I felt at the time.

When my emotions are really strong I don't have the ability to speak.

I have profound Alexithymia so I don't even know what my feelings are.
Expressing them is even harder.
Especially with mutism and trauma.
I can muck my way through with written language, but verbal is very difficult.
When I need to express strong emotions I stand the risk of having meltdowns.
When I need to express vulnerability I have PTSD attacks.
When I need to express concern I loop into anxiety.

Neutrality, avoidance, and not giving two f's seems to work the best in social situations.
Hence, my preference for written communication.

Expressing positive emotions feels fake to me. Negative emotions feel very real and raw.

I cant express many emotions only anger when im having a meltdown but then then turns into mutism or whatever its called where i just shut down and cant take anything in around me or let anything out verbally
i dont laugh hardly but it doesnt mean im miserable or depressed,i dont actually feel depressed at all im quite content with my life

sometimes i do cry though and thats probably the only time im letting my emotions out appropriately

I'm still trying to understand my feelings and how to express them.
A couple of things
When I'm aware of being sad, upset or just down, I'm at the bottom. Talking about it then makes me cry, which seems to scare people.
I often smile when I hear something sad or bad, I reckon it's me trying to show sympathy, I mean it's not me being happy about it. Or sometimes I even laugh, a nervous reaction I suppose.
Normally I show more or less the same expression: Smiling when around people and neutral/determined when not.
I think that perhaps when moving around I'm more graceful/"natural" when in a good mode and stiffer/awkward/clumsy when not.

/Mats

I wouldn't want to hang out with someone who only expresses negative emotions and not positive ones.

Positive emotions are just as "real" as negative emotions.