Who Told You You Were Naked?

How do people process emotion? Not a rhetorical question; I genuinely want to know. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong somewhere along the line. I'm a determinedly cheerful person - this stems partially from an inability to shut off self-consciousness long enough to forget the fact that everything I do or say impacts other people. The fact that I tend to just stay quiet so as not to hurt anyone (and this, too, stems from fear that I will do something to make people reject me) means that often when I do say something, my ineptitude at the act of saying things ends up hurting them anyway. Which drives me further into a panic, which makes me shut up more, which grows and feeds this silly little cycle. And my self-consciousness is so entrenched and habitual that much of the time I can't even shut it off when I'm alone. I can't possess and indwell a feeling without being somehow externally aware of it as well. So even when I'm crying by myself in my room I can't help but see myself from the outside and be the spectator as well as the practitioner. I have two choices in this situation, and the self-conscious aware part of me must choose to either: validate my own feeling... which translates to the self-conscious part of me as indulgence in self-pity, which, of course, I become immediately aware of and must despise as a ridiculous thing - or I must discount my sadness because as a person looking on from the outside I can see how stupid are my reasons for being sad and how pathetic I am for crying over them. Because this self-consciousness won't switch off I can't just be sad or just be angry or just be afraid and exist in the emotion - I'm also analysing and judging myself continually, which means I'm unable to actually deal with the emotion itself, which means that the sadness or the anger or the fear just goes on and on, inaccessible through the weight of all the thought that I'm putting into it. So when I am sad or afraid or whatever, I try to throw myself into it and just feel it and work through it: and this takes so much effort that it feels like I'm actually faking the emotion and the ever-present self-consciousness shakes its head at my simultaneous in-authenticity and futility. The instant I stop trying to feel the emotion and just let the self-conscious take over, the emotion immediately infuses my being and drags me down by colouring everything I think and do with its presence.

How do you balance consciousness and emotion?