Hi jrid, and congrats for getting this far! Stoicism is too often praised and approved in our society, so it's a very hard habit to break! It's also, in many families, a survival technique, making it even tougher.
Here's my suggestion: when I was doing the writing exercises, especially making lists, I literally heard my brain telling me "oh, don't write THAT down, THAT'S not important!". Or, even worse, "Don't write THAT down, it's too embarrassing/shameful/distressing". I had to fight against those messages, and write those things down anyway. When I went back to look at them in more detail later, which is part of the program, they were very revealing of past interactions and family relationships and helped explain who I was when I was much younger. Even the things that really did seem unimportant - it turned out that they were not earth-shattering or distressing, but they were revealing. Some of the things were from childhood, others were from young adulthood. It doesn't matter - anything that your brain tries to keep hidden is going to be important in discovering what things it has been repressing.
I actually had a very nice, secure, and loving childhood with both parents. But they were only human, and as Freud said, every child is full of resentments, anger, shame, and guilt over the littlest things that happen in childhood, mostly because we resent being forced to grow up and face the realities of the world outside the safety of our mother's breast! A child with a dysfunctional, neglectful, or abusive childhood has even more anger and guilt to deal with than those of us with happy childhoods. All of these things have to do with primitive survival techniques of the brain - they do not serve us in the modern world, but we are stuck with our brains as they are unless we can evolve WAY beyond where we are now.
Good luck, and keep posting!
~Jan
