Art for catharsis. 👍🏻

I've learned to free my emotions a lot more by studying Acting (by, for a few years, doing short acting courses as an adult whilst living in London): it turns out modern acting techniques - the stuff that roughly falls under the Method Acting umbrella - are all about feeling truthfully as if you were indeed that character you're playing living that specific situation, so essentially I had a pretty much judgment free (in terms of other people judging you) license to let myself go and fully feel and show it (as that "person" which was the character in that situation).

Curiously it also unlocked my empathy (which turns out to be so high I'll literally yawn from seeing animals yawn) though I'm not sure if my blocking of most of my Empathy until then was due to social expectations on how men are supposed to behave or a childhood self-defense mechanism due to one of my parents being VERY intense and emotionally selfish (it makes sense I would block it merely not to constaly be overwhelmed by somebody else's rollercoaster of emotions).

All this even though I'm Portuguese and thus grew up in a culture were people are very expressive (compared to what I saw living in both Northern European and Anglo-Saxon countries, so think something like Italians), and all that expressiveness is backed by actual emotion (people really are enthusiastic or angry or saddened by what the other person telling you their story went through), though I would say that the range of emotions men are socially expected to express is limited to mainly positive emotional states or anger-related emotions.

Anyways, just my 2c as I think it's an unusual point of view and maybe food for thought.

PS: One of the things I learned in Acting is that not only does your body follow your mind but also your mind follows your body (really: if you have any ability for introspection try walking with a confident walk and see how it makes you feel. Then try a downtrodden walk or a fearful walk) which kind dovetails with the whole idea that if you're not expected to show certain kinds of emotional states you end up not feeling such emotions in day to day (except when you're overwhelmed by it and it hits you like a ton of bricks).

I had that too. When you're a cis male adult you've had decades of social conditioning telling you that's not allowed. I'm gay but being born in Spain I was brought up in a traditional macho culture. I'd "pass" except for those with the most finely tuned gaydar, not because I tried hiding it by the time I realised but because I was conditioned to fit in the straight cis male behaviour box.

It took me a few years of unlearning trying to shake it off myself and what helped most, a loving partner who is in tune with his emotions. I have gotten immensely better at understanding and expressing my emotions, verbally or otherwise, and also doing that without channelling them into "proxy" emotions that are acceptable for macho expectations and culture.

There's a great book called The Tao of Fully Feeling that helped me a ton with this.

For my it wasn't about expressing them, it was about feeling them at all. Only the very very strongest ones could even crack through.

Of course there was also the fact that my father threatened to beat me for crying "if I didn't have a reason", so there are obviously confounding factors, but interventions like therapy, meditation, changing my name, presenting female all the time, etc didn't have anywhere near as much effect on my access to emotions as a couple of weeks on HRT.

They were all helpful in different ways (sometimes enormously so), but it felt like there was an impedance mismatch between my conscious mind and the rest of my body, and the HRT fixed it.