All you do by ignoring your emotions is that you become unaware of them. They don't go away. Psychology and neuroscience have again and again found how irrational and emotional we are even when we think we are rational.
> All you do by ignoring your emotions is that you become unaware of them
That's a bit silly to say.
It doesn't work like that, it's like saying that if you ignore your arm it stops working.
And nobody ever said you should ignore emotions, but that you are perfectly capable of behaving differently in different situations.
You're not always emotionally charged, you are not always made of steel, you can control what happens to you much more than you imagine.
> Psychology and neuroscience have again and again found how irrational and emotional
Irrational and hormonal, as in "driven by hormones", the layman term is emotional, but it isn't entirely correct.
Emotional is about emotions (nobody consider rage or sadness or loneliness or "I wanna be left alone" emotions, they are considered bad things, something to be removed), but being autistic is not being emotional, for example.
There are a lot of behaviours not caused by emotions, which, BTW, are located in our brain, our logic processing unit, not in our hearts. They are in its backend, the irrational brain, and they are perfectly rational: they are a tool humans used to survive and take life-saving decisions in the span of milliseconds.
They are the same thing as a fire alarm, they signal a change of state, possibly for the worse.
I'll go further and say that we all are at the mercy of our selfish genes, as R. Dawkins proved.
Ignore your arm and you won't learn how to use it. It won't go away. You'll just have an arm the is super uncoordinated and weak.
Ignore your emotions and you'll become emotionally immature and a person people won't like to interact with, because your emotions will come up when inappropriate.
The importance of learning to feel and label your emotions is one of the most basic findings in psychology.
I recommend reading about Non-Violent-Communication. It sounds like it is something completely different, but it is a practice for learning to labeling you emotions in different situations, and then being able to react more appropriately.
> Ignore your arm and you won't learn how to use it.
Sorry but no, it doesn't.
If you fall you stretch your arms forward, to protect your head, it's an automatism, your body works the way it is supposed to work even when you ignore it
Most of what it does it's independent from your will
It just works
The heart doesn't stop beating if you don't think about it
There is no switch that make it true just by flipping it.
That's why I said I've been trying for the past 25 years, it's a process.
On the other hand empathy doesn't work much better in practice.
People (we) are largely irrational.
> attempting an unemotional approach invaluable means accepting an incomplete understanding of the problem.
Of course!