The downside of emotional detachment

How much leeway is there for a revision of one's behaviour through culturally conditioning when one is already predisposed to act in a certain way?

There is the issue of changing one’s thought processes, which often cannot be done effectively. When I was a a preschooler, I was dragged away from playing with bricks in order to play house. I didn’t understand the rules of playing house, which seemed to me at the time much more complex and mystifying than playing with bricks. You could see the bricks and what you were doing to them but you couldn’t see the rules which told you how to act when you were playing house. As a three year old, I felt really put on the spot at having to improvise a drama, when I couldn’t understand the gender roles we were to play out. Also, there didn’t seem to be any point to the playing out of these gender roles, since there was no defined objective to the ‘game’. I became very bewildered by the situation, although I tried to hide this by keeping calm.

At various other times in my life, I’ve had the same experience. I can’t undestand the point in playing certain social games when the objective hasn’t been defined for them. Why try to keep up with the Joneses or attempt to become Miss Perfect, when the meaning of that objective hasn’t been defined? I am bewildered by these situations, and my mind goes on a constant error-check cycle, as if I’ve missed some vital piece of infomation from my consciousness. In some instances, when it seems really necessary for me to solve “the problem”, I can end up emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed.

For example, school teaching. To be an effective female school teacher, it seemed to be necessary to read some very subtle emotional signals all the time. This was not impossible to do, with some effort. Far more difficult was the task of trying to nourish my own mind and to keep myself emotionally above water in a situation where I couldn’t compete against myself to achieve a well-defined objective, but had to narrow my ears to listen for subtelties all the time. I began to feel like my head would burst because I was trying to keep all sorts of pieces of information, which were not intrinsically important to me, in my head at all times. It felt like everything that I should be focussing on in this job was somehow in my peripheral vision, but that when I turned around to face it, it had already gone. In short, I had trouble developing the social sensitivity to understand my environment.