I sympathize with you. I cry when babies are born and when people marry. I think I'm crying for their innocence and their hope, both of which will be crushed by living. When people die, their problems are over. I can feel bad for those who are left to deal with it, but no tears from me. You and I are not without emotion. We look at things differently and express our feelings differently. Not wrong, not bad, just different and not subject to judgment. If shedding tears fixed anything, if it created a different outcome I might indulge. Tears ruin my eye makeup, make my nose red and stuffy, and give me a headache. So you have taken lessons from people and the world and distanced yourself from them? Not a bad idea.

Hello

I've decided I process emotions differently than is typical. I don't waste my time on the things I can't change and take definitive action if it's something I can change.

Your external presentation may not always match your internal feelings/emotions.
Plus, everyone is different, and feels and expresses things differently.

Not everyone's internal state is externally manifested in a nice, expected, intuitive way for all external observers.

My resting face sometimes confuses my wife, who wonders if I'm honked off about something when I'm absolutely not. She just needs more open, smiley, cheerful facial expressions from me or she starts to wonder.

Rather than be annoyed by this, I take it as useful info: if this confuses her, it probably confuses others, including some others that I don't want to put off, like maybe my daughter or my clients. So I make more of an effort to "fake it until I make it" in the upbeat department, as I figure it's a win-win.

That said ... it's not really on me to have to do that perfectly by someone else's specifications, and it's not appropriate for others to assume stuff about me without asking, or to refuse to believe my answers and try to make themselves the expert on what I think or feel.

There's nothing wrong as such with me, or with people who misunderstand me, but hopefully I'll make the effort to be better understood and others will make the effort to be more understanding.

But I would not assume you're "doing it wrong" either. There are different / minority "ways of being" such as introversion, high functioning autism, HSPs, etc., that don't necessarily require "fixing" so much as they require people to understand themselves and others without judgment.

I've been called a robot more than once because I don't show much negative emotion. I don't see any purpose to lament on things I cannot control or change. I immediately go into adapting to a changing landscape in a positive, practical way.

You're not alone and there is nothing wrong with you.

I had to learn to not just "feel" certain emotions but how to express them. It took me years and there are still certain situations where I have to express emotions that I don't actually feel because people find it so abnormal and really seem to take things personally if the correct emotions aren't shown. I feel like it was really a combination of my own personality and my family that caused me to be this way. But I also find that different cultures express things differently and feel differently about things so I don't feel too badly about it.

I get that a lot, but it is not true. Just because we don't see things the way they do does not mean that you are emotionless. Shit happens . There was not any details on the situation, but I "think" I get were you are coming from

Sounds to me that you are simply being stoic, and this is a good thing. This video sums it up quite well.

You should have blown up in their face and told them to "STFU - you have no GD right to judge me. You F-ing shit headed ass-hat!!!" I bet they wouldn't call you emotionless after that!

As the saying goes: Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff. Looks like you just take that advice to heart.

The fact that you are posting on here and thereby talking to people, proves that you are a caring person even if you do not wear your attachments on an arm band, which can often simply mean that people don't mind offending others by showing off. Really cold people do not post on sites like this.

I'm not sure I understand the thrust of your post, or maybe I do but through my filters it comes out a bit differently. I get accused sometimes of being 'cold', but that is usually coming from folks who go three alarm fire over a smoldering coal in a steel pot. I get the feeling from what you said that it is a similar situation with you, and this is where I could be terribly wrong.

Empathy is something I have in abundance, but I also am able to prioritize/compartmentalize issues. If the bacon is burning on the stove and the baby has a runny nose, the bacon gets the first attention. I am able to maintain my 'cool' in high stress situations, but that doesn't mean I don't feel the stress. There are a fairly large number of us and we're the folks others want to have backing them up when TSHTF, but when it's something less of an existential threat, they are the same folks who will say we're cold, withdrawn, aloof. Where that is true in a comparative manner, the reality is something different. If I'm off base here, let me know.

Beware the criticism of others! What you feel inside can easily have Nothing to do with your outer demeanor and the critic has No business saying something like that when they have NO idea how you are feeling...just ignorant, literally!