The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what we are actually feeling. There are two ways of keeping that tension from breaking the heart — a surrender to the truth, or a falsification of feeling. When we don’t feel strong enough or safe enough to face our emotional reality, we manipulate it. It may be an outward act, masking for others… 
https://www.themarginalian.org..../2024/11/14/emotiona