What does a child do with feelings?

What does a child do with their feelings when there is no place to express them, mediate then, or have then reflected? One of the answers occurred to me as I was reading the chapter stifled emotions in the book The Inconsequential Child : Overcoming Emotional Neglect :

Boxing a memory is the phrase I use to describe what happens when I put a memory and the corresponding feeling into an unlabelled box. Once in the box, it is thrown into the warehouse where it is no longer a part of my consciousness. I don’t want to give you the impression that boxing process is overt. It is not. It happens instantaneously, and I do not do it consciously. In this case, I know I started to feel an overwhelming amount of emotion about the words ‘contribution to family’. Then I felt nothing. No emotion, it had disappeared. That is how I know I boxed it. for much of my life I did not know I was boxing my feelings as (it) would occur faster than I could register the pain. At some point in my therapy, I figured out I was boxing my feelings, and I was doing it before I could feel them.

(when all my defences are up) I am intellectualising rather than feeling. Intellectualising is my default behaviour. It helps me avoid pain. I do this through a process of logical thought. I look at and analyse all of the events through reasoning. I do it devoid of emotion and as objectively as I can. Sometimes though (this process) does open the doorway into my feelings.

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The incident that triggered this reflection for the author Anthony Martino as a child and later in therapy as an adult, was one in which he was taken to and had to wait outside the principals office after being wrongly accused of something he did not do…just reading this made me realise how much in my own siblings this kind of thing goes on and how much I can also intellectualise and box my own true feelings as so often no one allowed me to have them or mirrored them for me as a child. Even for so long in adulthood I have struggled not to box and intellectualise my own feelings.