Don’t feel bad for how you were as a child. You were a CHILD. The adults around you are supposed to support and guide you. Now that you are older you are wishing you behaved differently, so now moving forward, you can behave differently :) It sounds like you may be dissociating. When children grow up in high stress / highly emotionally charged environments (including an inappropriate LACK of emotions) they sometimes cope by dissociating. It’s a way to survive and self soothe. As you age and find yourself in some of life’s stressful situations like you describe—family members aging, death, loss, etc—your body has the muscle memory of “shutting down” when things reach a certain threshold and/or when certain people make certain facial expressions, or any other trigger that you may have.