This is an interesting, important topic Spalding! So often the people in our lives discourage us from expressing, and if those people are our caretakers when we are little it can leave us feeling confused, or even incapacitated, when we try to express ourselves as adults. So, you can imagine what effect that might have on future relationships
This article pans out to look at things from a societal perspective, and a feminist one at that (emotions are feminine, to be feminine is weak, we need to hide our weakness, etc).
There's a section of one of books I'm reading that has a bunch of exercises exactly about this. I'm not in the place where that book is but I'll come back to this thread when I am.
(My FOO wants to know how I am, but REALLY I think they want to know that I'm totally 'over' 'all that stuff from last year' (my mom) and that I'm 'back on track' (in school/something similar). I don't know how to tell them anything about how/what I'm actually doing and have them
hear it on any level. Sigh.)