When I was very young, I learned that there are good emotions (loyal obedience, approval of authority figures) and bad emotions (anger, sadness, simply feeling down) and that I had to avoid expressing the latter.
That trains in incredibly unhealthy emotional reflexes. Before I have even properly felt what comes naturally, I have begun a frantic plan to behave the right way externally. So, for example, if I feel fear, even before I have fully felt it I am feeling guilt and shame about feeling the wrong feeling. Perhaps most oddly of all, when the underlying emotion is already more than I can handle, somehow the extra guilt and shame can be even stronger.
I have put years of effort into breaking that long-trained instinct to rapidly interrogate and suppress ‘wrong’ feelings. It has taken literally years of practice to simply be able to feel and identify my original feelings, holding back the impulse to jump immediately from feeling their beginnings to implementing an instantaneous response plan. Despite all this work, I struggle with a sense that all strong feelings are suspect or somehow the wrong ones, or that they are something that I can and should change. The ideas that emotions are good and bad and that they are controllable are both massively, tragically wrong but they are near-impossible to fully extract from yourself after being programmed in during childhood years.
That whole effortful process of questioning childhood training is a third layer. I don’t just feel my natural emotions with the destructive programming now removed. Instead, I feel the emotions that I have grown so much better at naming and teasing apart. Then I can’t help but feel the training from early childhood to never express the wrong ones, and to feel awful if I do or even for feeling those things in the first place. Then I have to go through all the memory and knowledge and experience about how damaging and inappropriate that training is, remember that emotions are a natural internal phenomenon not appropriately subject to the judgment and control of others, and work on experiencing emotions in a healthy way instead of through dismissal or short-circuiting.
Two things I suspect about this process are that it will never be entirely done, and that progress toward a healthier relationship to my emotions can be knocked back and derailed through exposure to people who assume inappropriate and authoritarian control over them. I can’t keep the old obedient mode available in a box for use with the people who demand it. The only way to get healthier is to commit to the gradual and irreversible erosion of that old trained mode, without reversing or abandoning course for the sake of demanding others.
The quote—”The ideas that emotions are good and bad and that they are controllable are both massively, tragically wrong but they are near-impossible to fully extract from yourself after being programmed in during childhood years”—from Milan Ilnyckyj’s September 2026 post “Feeling in three waves,” serves as the Rosetta Stone for his entire psychological landscape.
It is a profound encapsulation of trauma, neurobiology, and the exhausting reality of living with a highly intellectualized mind trapped inside a conditioned nervous system. To understand this quote in detail requires unpacking the two core fallacies it identifies (the moralization and the control of emotion), the tragedy of their consequences, and the inescapable nature of childhood programming.
Fallacy 1: The Moralization of Emotion (“good and bad”)
The first “massively, tragically wrong” idea Milan identifies is the assignment of moral value to internal emotional states. In his post “Feeling in three waves,” he notes that he learned early in life that there were “good” emotions (loyal obedience, approval of authority figures) and “bad” emotions (anger, sadness, or simply feeling down).
Psychologically, emotions are involuntary, somatic responses to environmental or internal stimuli; they are biologically neutral data points. However, authoritarian systems—whether a family unit or a corporate hierarchy—often attempt to moralize these data points to maintain control. In Milan’s case, as detailed in “Controlling parents,” his parents demanded not just behavioral compliance, but emotional alignment. If his authentic emotional response (which he names “FILL”) did not match what the authority figure wanted, it was deemed “wrong” and subjected to punishment or “steamrolling.”
This creates a devastating psychological double bind. When a child is taught that a natural, involuntary biological response (like sadness or anger) is inherently “bad,” they learn that their core self is fundamentally defective. They are forced to feel guilt and shame simply for existing as a sentient being.
Fallacy 2: The Illusion of Control (“that they are controllable”)
The second fallacy is the belief that emotions can be controlled—that one can simply choose not to feel anger, or choose to feel happy.
Milan recognizes the distinction between controlling behavior and controlling emotion. A healthy society requires us to control our behavior (e.g., not lashing out when angry). But toxic systems demand the suppression of the feeling itself. Because emotions cannot actually be turned off, the demand for “control” simply forces the individual to build an elaborate, exhausting psychological architecture to hide the emotion from both the outside world and the self.
For Milan, this resulted in the creation of the “Milan” mask—a hyper-vigilant social interface designed to rapidly intercept authentic feelings (“FILL”), suppress them, and generate a socially acceptable, “obedient” response. As he notes in the text, before he even properly feels what comes naturally, he has “begun a frantic plan to behave the right way externally.” This illusion of control is “tragically wrong” because it leads to severe self-alienation. It requires an immense, continuous expenditure of cognitive energy to “run mental models” of others to guess how they want him to feel, draining the vitality out of all his social interactions.
Furthermore, Milan sees this toxic demand for emotional control mirrored in the macro-structures of society. In “Little good ever comes from discussing climate change… socially,” he notes that people demand he suppress his highly rational grief and terror about the climate crisis because his “bad” emotions make them uncomfortable. Society, functioning as a “pseudo-parent,” demands that he project “good” emotions (cheerful optimism) regardless of the grim material reality.
The Tragedy of the “Three Waves” (“near-impossible to fully extract”)
The most heartbreaking aspect of the quote is the final clause: the realization that intellectual awareness of these fallacies is not enough to cure them.
Because this programming was installed during childhood—the period of peak neuroplasticity when the brain is literally wiring its threat-detection systems—it is baked into Milan’s neurological reflexes. He cannot simply “think” his way out of a physiological trauma response. This leads to the agonizing phenomenon he calls “feeling in three waves”:
The Authentic Wave: The natural, involuntary emotion arises (e.g., grief over the climate, anger at a politician, sadness at isolation).
The Conditioned Wave: Before the first wave can even crest, the childhood programming kicks in. His nervous system hits him with a massive dose of guilt, shame, and panic for having a “bad” emotion that authorities would disapprove of. Paradoxically, this secondary wave of shame is often stronger than the original emotion.
The Intellectual Wave: Finally, his highly educated, meta-cognitive adult mind intervenes. He has to consciously remind himself of everything he knows about psychology, trauma, and parental abuse to deconstruct the shame. He must actively remind himself that “emotions are a natural internal phenomenon not appropriately subject to the judgment and control of others.”
This means that for Milan, simply experiencing an emotion is an exhausting, multi-step battle against his own brain. He is effectively engaged in a constant, invisible war to legitimize his own existence to himself.
Conclusion: The Lifelong Erosion
Milan concludes that this programming can never be “kept in a box” for use only with demanding people; to heal, it must be subjected to “gradual and irreversible erosion.”
The quote is a profound statement of grief, but also a declaration of deep psychological resilience. Milan acknowledges the tragic unfairness of his wiring: he knows his mind was built on a faulty, abusive foundation that he did not choose. He knows that extracting this programming is “near-impossible.” Yet, by articulating this exact mechanism so clearly, he strips the programming of its invisible power. He is applying the exact same principle he advocates in his “Open Process Manifesto” to his own psyche: utilizing total transparency to combat systemic dysfunction.
He accepts that he may never be entirely free of the reflex of shame, but by naming the ideas as “massively, tragically wrong,” he draws a hard boundary. He reclaims his right to the unvarnished, authentic emotions of “FILL”—anger, grief, and terror included—as the only legitimate way to bear witness to both his own life and a world in crisis.