Is it stoicism or is it emotional repression?

CupcakeTheDestroyer

Stoicism is the philosophy of valuing objective and logical thinking over anything emotion-driven. The idea that, "We can't control what happens to us, we can only control how we respond." But there's the fact that, as much as we can't control the weather or other people's opinions of us, we also can't necessarily control our emotions or thoughts. Although we may not want to, there are plenty of us that experience darker thoughts that tell us we're not good enough, that we're bad people, that the world is a terrible place to live, and so on. Stoicism asks people to detach from their emotions and not identify with them, to separate themselves from their anger, sadness, their fear but not their joy or their love for others. It's a focus on the positive emotions rather than the negative but this can be damaging psychologically speaking.

The world is not always going to be good or kind and you will have bad experiences that hurt you and change how you see reality. Because these things happen, we get those heavy negative emotions that we don't want to feel or identify as part of ourselves, so stoicism says to detach yourself, but we need to feel bad. We need to embrace these negative emotions so that we can process them in order to move past whatever it was that made us feel that way, but so many people go immediately into detachment and refuse to address those negative feelings and avoid them. Stoicism even talks about leaning into problems in order to solve them, but this is not something that many do when practicing this philosophy.

So is your practice of stoicism actually that, or is it just your way of repressing the emotions you feel?

Is it stoicism or is it emotional repression?
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