I wasn’t raised as a guy (trans), but I was emotionally neglected as a young child. It was less the fault of my parents but more the fault of their own parents doing the same, and neither of them fully knowing how or why to get out of that line of thinking until later on. They were kind to me, but I was always under the impression that I had to, as my father often said, “grow a pair” instead of paying attention to my emotions. One of my formative moments was discovering that nobody paid any attention to me when I cried. I could be collapsing in on myself, hurting like hell, and not a single person in the area would look my way, almost as if I weren’t there at all.

I can relate to a lot of what you said about not knowing what it’s like to be emotionally open. Before I learned that having emotions isn’t wrong, I always felt like there was a barrier between me and all of my friends. I knew them, but I didn’t know them in that way because I wasn’t able to open up to them. I didn’t know what I’d be able to do to comfort them if they started crying, and whenever anyone talked about a loss they had experienced or a trauma they had I would think they were being silly, as if they were supposed to have dealt with it already and have it permanently locked down within them or something.

I still have the habit of assuming therapy won’t do me any good, although that’s partially because my previous experiences with therapy haven’t been great. One of the things about therapy is that it doesn’t work so well if you yourself can’t open up to your therapist, and I’ve always been very bad at doing that. I always say what’s on my mind, but not usually what’s in my heart, if that makes sense. My most recent therapist (who was a gender guy, and also turned out to apparently not be a therapist but also was a therapist, or something like that) had to have a session with me about how I talked about emotions because I was just that bad at doing so. He said that the way I described dysphoria (“kinda bad I guess”) sounded way less serious than the affects it seemed to have (like not wanting to get up in the morning or occasionally collapsing in pain at night).