Hi Kapable
You definitely sound like a powerful person who has mastered many challenges while, at the same time, facing intense mental and emotional challenges.
You mention 'I find understanding why we behave they way we do helps to understand and respect other people and change your own behaviours and often accept other people's behaviours even if they feel hurtful to you.' Agree with you 100%. I find that understanding our self also helps us define what we won't tolerate from others. So, with greater awareness, you could say 'I've come to understand why you behave the way you do and I accept the reasons (they make sense) but I can't tolerate this behaviour for these reasons...'. Typically, if there's no negotiation, no reformation of the relationship in any positive constructive way, intolerance remains. While 'intolerance' often gets a bad rap, I personally find it to be a very telling and handy emotion at times. Key question often comes down to 'What am I trying to tolerate here?'
If emotions or feelings are your 'compass' in life, good for you. Personally, I can't live without my compass. If someone was to tell me to suppress or ignore my feelings, I'd be wondering why. Actually, there are times when being told to stop feeling the way I feel I've found myself effectively detaching in the blink of an eye. I suppose it's kind of like 'Alright, if we're not going to have feelings here, I can do that'. Such a conversation can turn to pure logic with no feeling at all. To use your unpacking scenario, it would be like 'I can't help but wonder why you're so dismissive and you just go ahead and unpack. I can't help but wonder why you can't manage to understand how I feel and negotiate on some level. I demand a reason. I insist you become reasonable (reason able)'. Once I detach, wonder and the demand for reason comes into play. Pure wonder is a natural self esteem booster. My husband finds my sense of wonder, in this way, to be quite challenging and aggravating at times. The search for simple reason, a simple answer, rarely causes aggravation in a person with an open mind, for in their mind you trigger the same sense of wonder.
Kapable, I've found that I typically feel when people are raising me, I feel when they're bringing me down, I feel when they're leaving me vibing at the same depressing level and I feel when they're challenging me, leading to the question 'What's the challenge here?' What feelings do you get from the different people in your life?
:)