I know what you mean. I've generally not taken things personally for the same reasons. See how clinically you explain this? The Four Agreements isn't saying "be clinical about your feelings"; it's saying, "don't believe others' emotional bullshit."
Heh.
You have to let yourself feel and empathize in a way that could potentially hurt you. (Not permanently, and just emotionally.) When you do that, you start seeing why other people do what they do based on emotions. And you start seeing how some emotion-driven behavior is wonderful and wouldn't even exist if not for the emotion behind it, and of course some emotion-driven behavior arises from emotional bullshit, and varying degrees of the two.
It helps to remember the study (I keep forgetting the name but someone always reminds me) where people whose emotional centers have been removed can be completely rational and logical, but they apparently lose their ability to make decisions. In other words, rationality can let us see the consequences, but it is our emotions that guide w/r to choosing which of those consequences are preferred.
If emotions
always inform our choices, then it behooves us to figure out which emotions we're listening to.
What about
disinterest in emotions?
What about believing that emotions are just simple base instincts that make people act "irrationally"?
Exactly. This is not the bullshit you're looking for.
I think you're getting very close to the point. Note what's missing here:
discernment of emotions. If one regards emotions as "getting in the way" of rational thought, one has only the information that the emotions exist, but lacks the information about what they mean. You've used this pattern in the recent political debate about immigrants, arguing that those who want tighter controls are having "blanket knee-jerk reactions coming from fear". In other words, emotions are equivalent to irrationality for you, at least insofar as any meaningful content they have.
The irony is that this is not only an
assumption breaking the third agreement, it's an emotional reaction on YOUR part. One might even argue it's a fear of emotions. Remember, according to the third agreement, assumptions are our own emotional bullshit that we tell ourselves. "Emotions are always irrational" is bullshit. Another example of an emotional assumption is the belief that one doesn't allow oneself to be affected by emotions (and is therefore being more rational, etc., than those who do allow themselves to be affected by emotions).
I think you sense this to some degree, otherwise you wouldn't have started this thread. Objectively, you have evidence that there is something that you aren't quite getting, but you aren't sure what it is. To use your password analogy, it isn't that I haven't handed you the password, but that you've ignored it based on your assumptions, in kind of a "Who's on first?" way.
The examples are interspersed in my reply.
The key is in the "what does that even mean"? What does "all emotions are valid" mean? What does "it is bad to deny our emotions" mean?
The answer is that all emotions are valid, and we shouldn't deny them, because dealing with the world without understanding the role that emotions play is like walking around with your ears covered. Yes, you're getting a lot of information through your eyes that is carried by light, but you're missing all the information carried by sound. You can see that the street is clear and that you can cross it, but you can't hear the car that just screeched around a corner and is about to collide with you as you cross.
In your case, you tend to assume that emotions result in bogus analyses - which is often true - and therefore that it is not useful to listen to your emotions.
There is awareness of one's emotions, and then there's awareness of what the emotions mean. Metaphorically, how many boxes do you have for your emotions? The movie Inside Out specifies 5 general classes of emotions, for example. (It's limited to 5 for story reasons, as having a 100 or more characters in the cast would be difficult.) For some people, especially IxFPs, there is a huge rainbow of emotions, a symphony of instruments and chords, and they can hear when any note is "out of tune". But it takes them a really long time to turn those observations into words, because emotions are so subjective and we don't share a good vocabulary for them.
I did say "probably"
I just doubt that you're going to wallow in your emotions long enough to start hearing them as music instead of noise.
I believe that in your case it is strongly linked to your being a type 5 Enneagram. MBTI type plays a role in the actual processing, but Enneagram gets a lot closer to what the emotions, the fears, the desires are. In particular, check out the integration levels:
https://sites.google.com/site/upatel8/personalitytype5 (towards the bottom of the page)
That's the Riso-Hudson version of 5s. Helen Palmer has some other insights, which I found best summarized in this bullet-point list:
This is the map you've been looking for. See how your Enneagram type (which I am
very sure is a 5 based on our interactions) describes a kind of aversion to emotions? Now here's the thing: it's not going to FEEL like an "aversion". It's not going to FEEL like a "fear". The way you do it is by "not feeling" in the first place: that's part of your coping mechanism. Mine as a 9 is an aversion to feeling anger. In the past, I would truly believe that I was not angry even when I was extremely angry. This is the "emotional bullshit" I'm getting at.
The 5's version of "emotional bullshit" is "I'm not emotional". (And variations on a theme - don't get nitpicky with me on this, please. It's an intrinsic fear of emotions and the lack of control they represent.)
Hence my saying that I probably can't explain it to you: every time I do so, you push back. You don't want to go there. You turn it back into some sort of rational thing when it isn't. You aren't pushing back on purpose. Your pushing back because this is a part of who you are, intrinsically.
Worse, it's not as if I'm an expert on this. In many ways, I'm brand new, and all I can do is say, "Here's the starting point." But each individual's inner terrain is different, and even if I know where the starting point is, I can't easily see where
that individual's path leads from there. I only know what my path looked/looks like, and I followed the 9 side, not the 5 side.
Maybe start by asking yourself "What is the
emotional reason I made that choice?" when you choose things. All of your choices are informed by your emotions. Think of rationality as the proofs and lemmas, and the emotions as axioms. What axioms do you choose and why? And come up with reasons other than "it's rational" or "it makes sense". Why does it "make sense"?
I'm just stabbing in the dark, here. ... So I'll end with a tl;dr synopsis.
TL; DR - Emotions, both ours and others', contain a lot of useful information. This isn't four-color comics level of information, but a detailed oil painting that explains why people do what they do. The Four Agreements strives to show us how to separate the "drama" of the emotions from the "information" of the emotions. A rejection of drama can seem to align with the superficial message of the book, but usually such a rejection entails a rejection of emotional processing overall, and thus misses the information inherent in emotions.
) to me.
I have a very bad reaction to it). At the same time- when it comes to the inner circle of people I trust the most- I find I do need a certain requisite amount of the other person noticing on their own when they are doing something that rubs me the wrong way. It's just all a sort of intricate dance of interpersonal relating. I do need for people to be able to instinctively entertain the possibility that my reactions are because of something they said or did, and to have a sense of 'when to bring it up' or know 'when to back off without being explicitly told' that jives with my own sensibilities. Because it's too exhausting for me, at least with those whom I am closest to, to have to put every 'the elephant in the room' into words all the time. There are obviously times when it is necessary to put it into words, and it's important to be ABLE to put it into words- but having to do that for every tiny little incident is too exhausting. I find I need to keep certain folks at a distance because I can tell we're at different wavelengths where this is concerned- it's not that I think it's 'wrong', but interacting with someone very different from myself in this regard feels like walking across territory with hidden landmines. 
