thejabberwock:

Here’s a post I did about Dean’s self awareness, as part of my dean is not emotionally stunted series, but honestly there could be much more added to that set. Like you said, the way he apologizes. His self awareness is part of his emotional intelligence. And I was thinking the other day: How in the world did that man get his emotional intelligence because it wasn’t from John, and it wasn’t from Bobby. I think it starts with his innate empathy. 

Check out this comparison from s5 where both Dean and Bobby are depressed and hopeless at different points and Dean’s reaction to Bobby in 5.07:

Compared with Bobby’s reaction to Dean in 5.18:

Don’t think Dean learned a lot about empathy from Bobby. 

And I know people like to speculate that Dean was forced into being a person who cares about other people because John forced him to take care of Sam. But there’s an important distinction that I’ve talked about before. John forced him to take care of Sam but he didn’t force him to care about Sam. Or even to take care of Sam well. Mostly it was about keeping him from harm. It wasn’t about making sure Sam had his mac and cheese with marshmallow fluff (gifs from 10.12).

or a nice fourth of july (from 5.16):

He did that purely because he liked seeing his brother happy. Because of his natural empathy. His empathy is definitely innate. He’s been comforting people since he was four years old. We saw in his memory rom 5.16 that he was able to recognize when Mary was sad and comforted her.

Standard caveat, he shouldn’t have been in a position where it was his job to be his mother’s emotional support. But because he’s innately empathetic, he wants to comfort people, and make them happy. He sees how his mother responded to comfort and he’s not only learning about her emotions from things like this, but his own as well. More of the same, as he went on to exhibit empathy toward Sam and John in the same way. 

(2.01) And since no one else was paying attention to Dean’s emotions, that became another job for him. He had to learn ways to hide them in order to keep functioning. Because the burden was just too great for a child to bear otherwise. This level of emotional care for others was extremely  damaging to Dean, because while he was busy being empathetic and taking care of everybody else, no one was taking care of his emotions:

(2.22, 5.16)

And that’s why he dismisses his own feelings. He understands them perfectly well. He just doesn’t think their worth consideration and care from others. Because they never have been. 

But his empathy (from which his self-awareness grew) was never snuffed out, despite everything that he went through. The lack of any emotional care? All that talk about being a good soldier? John punishing Dean by leaving him at a boys’ home for months? None of that snuffed it out. I think about that a lot.