So not philosophy, but in therapy you are taught to:

• Recognize your emotion and label it.
• Validate and feel your emotion.
• Then formulate how you act or react.

Using anger, its important to recognize that thats a "secondary" emotion, as in its not truly the emotion you are feeling and is merely the way you are responding to said emotion. Anger usually stems from places like fear, shame, stress, and being hurt. In your example, you arent angry that someone honked at you. You are startled by the sudden stimuli (a fear response), you are feeling stimulus overload after avoiding a potentially dangerous situation (fear), you are ashamed that you did something thatd cause someone to honk at you (shame).

So to follow the steps:

• You get angry at being honked at, because you swerved into another lane after the car in front of you abruptly stopped.

• You recognize, examine, and label it the true emotion you are feeling.

• You validate that feeling and feel it. Its important in this step to avoid imperitives like 'should' and 'need'. Don't focus on next steps to lessons to take away, just the moment you are in. So if you avoided a potentially dangerous situation and someone honked at you, you would say to yourself "They are reacting to the method I chose to protect myself. I am safe now. My adrenaline is pumping right now and my heart is racing, but I am currently safe."

• Now you can formulate your response to being honked at, which would likely be ignoring it and working on clearing your stress, whule continuing to your destination.

Notice that this doesnt suppress or subdue your emotions. Outwardly, it makes you less reactive and volatile, but at no point are you saying "I shouldnt feel this, I am not allowed to be angry, Im not upset at all and everything is hunky dory". You are simply taking the next step after having an emotional response and addressing it. If anything, not addressing the true emotion and simply saying "Im angry" is as much suppression as saying "Im not upset" and not addressing the root emotion.

I dont think that would make you have no personality or be okay with everything.

I would also challenge you to examine why you feel that someone choosing to not react with anger, fear, sadness, etc. and instead processing their emotions and working through them would make someone less of a person, or a less interesting one, it why someone being reactive to their negative emotions make them more interesting and "more" of a person.

To use a topical example, look at how many people are experiencing lonliness, a sense of nowhere to belong, and instead of examining it are saying "Im angry" and allowing that to blind them and get wrapped up in the incel movement, terrorist (domestic or otherwise)pipelines, or otherwise hateful ideologies. (NOTE: Not trying to say that these people are intetesting and therefore what you are talking about.) Does getting angry and lashing out at a demographic of strangers really address that sense of lonliness? If you took an incel and gave them a "perfect" woman by their definition, would that really resolve the underlying state they are in and reacting to?

Part of why the "monkeys paw" is such a powerful trope is because rarely what we think we want is truly what we want, its just merely a reaction to something triggering our fright, flight, or freeze response.

I don’t know about stoicism, but controlling them could also mean using them as a tool in pursuit of a goal.

I think for your second example, loneliness should sting a little to act as motivation and provide a direction to seek change. But it’s not for wallowing in.

>However, if say relationships arent working out for me, or I cant seem to make friends and feel lonely, and if I have to tell myself "This is ok. This is a natural part of life. I should be content", etc I find that very damaging as it is really just a lie. I feel sad, angry, lonely etc on the inside as much as I tell myself that I am not, I just become far removed from understanding myself.

In this particular case, stoicism would tend to motivate you to change the situation for an entirely different reason. The fundamental definition of a human being to nearly all stoic philosophers was along the lines of "a rational animal that exists/thrives in a society". So stoicism developed to be innately pro-social, to a certain extent, and the basic stoic concept "living the good life" includes having meaningful relationships with other people. In otherwords, to a stoic philosopher persistent isolation and loneliness for a human being would be fundamentally unnatural conditions that need to be rectified just as much as the inability to control one's own anger.

However, beyond that I think you still aren't quite understanding what the stoic perspective on emotions. To them emotion *is not intrinsically wrong, as feeling emotion is a part of human life. What they did believe was wrong is when emotions control one's thoughts and actions. Yet, even that doesn't mean emotions cannot serve as prompts to rational decisions. For example, it would be entirely acceptable to a stoic for someone to use the feelings of disappointment, frustration, etc... of not achieving an end as an impetus to rethink how one is trying achieve that end and/or reconsider if that end is worthwhile. They would probably would view it as similar to a situation like somone's aching muscles while carrying heavy things from one side of a warehouse to another causing them to decide to use a cart or wheelbarrow. In both cases even though the irrational feeling starts a chain of events, there is a rational decision that governs it. That is what they mean by "reason over emotion".

There is a difference between "how you feel" and "how you act". A stoic wouldn't argue to not feel, or force themselves to feel everything as okay. Rather, they would investigate why they feel this way and try to find the root cause and think of the most fitting action. Therefore, they make their emotions constructive rather than destructive.