The Stoic

Where it began

The story underneath.

Feeling was unsafe or unwelcome in your home, so you turned the volume down to zero.

How it runs you

What it looks like now.

You stay level, calm, contained. Big emotion in others puzzles you, and your own is somewhere you cannot easily reach. People call you grounded. You are not sure you feel much at all.

The truth under it

What it really is.

You were a child who learned the safest feeling was no feeling. The flatness protected you. It also means you shut out the lows and lost the highs in the same move.

The everyday names

The things you have been calling it.

These are the household words people with this pattern tend to reach for. They are not character flaws, and they are not the whole story: biology, wiring and circumstance are always co-authors. This is the part the pattern adds.

• Low moodThe volume was turned down on everything rather than on the bad parts alone, so the pattern delivers a level, colourless baseline instead of a low.
• LonelinessCloseness runs on shown feeling, and the pattern turned the showing off, so you are around people without being in contact with them.
• OverthinkingFeeling was never allowed a voice, so instead of being felt, a worry gets turned over in the head as thought, working like feeling with the volume taken off it.
• Can't switch offStopping leaves a gap that feeling could fill, so the pattern keeps you occupied and calls it discipline.
• Letting people inFeeling was unwelcome, so showing it to someone else was never really an option, and the pattern keeps people at the exact distance where closeness cannot ask for more than that.

Not this pattern. The Stoic tends to get on with things steadily, feeling little about them either way.