[rsp1984]

The expressing of emotion comes with a lot of side benefits: the other person becomes aware of your feelings (yes, people generally don’t know how you feel about something). They will respect your boundaries better.

You can tell they've never dealt with a person with narcissistic / sociopathic personality disorder. You express your emotions to them, all it does is provide them with a crystal clear signal of how to push your red buttons and believe me they will.

A lot of therapy is based on the assumption that "we're all the same" or "we all mean well" but it's simply not true. There's real scum out there.

[torginus]

> There's real scum out there.

Yup, and that's a particularly important lesson in context of group dynamics, where a large enough group (of say 10+ people) almost certainly contains some bad eggs, and if you present yourself as either isolated or psychologically vulnerable, these people WILL single you out.

Though the corollary is true as well - if you meet enough people, sometimes you will get to find folks who surpass your expectaions.

[moralestapia]

This is particularly shocking if you were raised in a somewhat healthy family and then go out to the world oblivious of how ill-intended average people are (way more marked on big cities).

Many people actively work on making other people's lives miserable, everyday.

The solution to this, by the way, is not to become more sociopathic but just to be aware they exist and how they operate. The kind of schemes they put together are embarrassingly simple to understand and spot, but only once you know about them.

I always thought that coursework/lectures on this topic during high school would be extremely beneficial for the young and perhaps even quite fun to go through.

[rsp1984]

Agree 100%