A lot of comments here use this metaphor of emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed or they will accumulate and explode.
I think this can be traced to pop-psychology bullshit, and there isn't any neuroscientific basis backing it up.
It seems like wishful thinking by people who like expressing their emotions to others and want to justify their spend on therapists, or their occasional emotional outbursts.
Instead, the evidence points to the brain building habits around emotions and their regulation the same way it builds habits around everything else.
If you practice not feeling emotions or becoming identified with them, then that habit will continue and they will become easier to not feel.
There is not a debt to be paid, or a buildup to be released.
This is often framed in different ways, mediators talk about "creating distance" and "noticing but not indulging".
The timeless grug-brain approach is "ignoring", described by emotional people as "bottling up".
These are different ways to frame the same phenomenon, which is that the brain does what it has practiced.
A Stoic would say that negative emotions have root causes in the misconceptions you hold about how the world works, and what you can and cannot affect about it. If you don't proactively address those root causes (which doesn't require "expressing" the emotion, but does require noticing and judging it without reflexive acceptance) the negativity will in fact "keep flowing" and your short-term disregard of it will be less and less effective.
It's not a good "habit" to disregard negative emotions without also examining them.
“Ignoring” is not the same as “noticing”; the difference is right there in the words!
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
>emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed
Yes, this does seem to be the assumption that many are (uncritically?) making. I wonder where this idea comes from. Anyone know the provenance of this? Has this concept been handed down from antiquity? Or Jung or Freud or ? Or is this something relatively modern?
Instead, the evidence points to the brain building habits around emotions and their regulation the same way it builds habits around everything else. If you practice not feeling emotions or becoming identified with them, then that habit will continue and they will become easier to not feel. There is not a debt to be paid, or a buildup to be released.
This is often framed in different ways, mediators talk about "creating distance" and "noticing but not indulging". The timeless grug-brain approach is "ignoring", described by emotional people as "bottling up". These are different ways to frame the same phenomenon, which is that the brain does what it has practiced.