Sidenote: Mindfulness (AKA vipassana or insight) meditation can give you that gap between feeling something, an emotion in this case, and responding to it. It's potentially useful for a lot of usecases - the NHS have been offering mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for a while now - but what you're talking about sounds very relevant!
Thanks I will look into this
It might be a sign for you being too ego-centric in general. It could also be completely unrelated, though.
But there definitely seems to be some kind of fear at the root of that.
I've been trying to get myself to a place where even if I'm reacting in a knee jerk fashion that at least I'm keeping it to myself but man, it's hard to overcome something that's effectively instinctual.