There is a Theory of Mind that as children in an emotionally healthy environment we come to realise that what we feel is for real; and that other people feel what they feel; and we are prone to friendship. 

Kids who get the hang of this long process of intellectual experimentation can well manipulate their parents something rotten until they learn to give as good as they get; all this makes for a robust family life. 

Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language is a good read on the Theory of Mind. Maybe doing Sorefeelings and moving into the meta language of realising the potential of our fundamental needs is an introduction to what he calls the "long process of intellectual experimentation" we somehow missed as children.
 
Those of us who were too fearful to work it out for ourselves were cloned into a system and destined to live the rest of our lives not knowing what we feel and incapable of identifying with others in their distress. 

With no sense that what we felt mattered, or believing what we did feel was disgraceful or shameful, so we dumbed ourselves down to became phantom people with no mind of our own. 

So we were seduced into a phoney sense of identity that it’s easier to go along with what is required of us; anything for a quiet life; and joined in a dysfunctional world with everyone at war with each other, rushing about doing their own thing, all of which denies the value of what we feel.
 
Dumbed down we fell into the trap of not getting it right; with no valid sense of our own feelings we either became apparently successful and oppressive; or we succumbed to whoever rode roughshod over us and accepted it as the will of god, or were silent in our resentment. 

Either way we were inept and helpless, unable to see the way out of our plight; in effect obedient to some rule that we were of no consequence; in effect we were "strangers and afraid, in a world we never made".
 
Sixty years ago Uncle Horace used to come, occasionally, to tea; he was fun and could ride a bicycle backwards; he was also a torment and would wait until I had saved a cherry from the fruit salad, to eat last; quick as a flash he would lean over and scoop it up, and eat it. Only now do I see he had mastered the Theory of Mind. 

He knew he could take us all the way, and mean it; he could read our minds (which was not difficult) and we were at his mercy, powerless and stupid.
 
Yet social intelligence was allways a matter of survival; and still is if we are to develop a sense of credibility.  
 
To become human we have to go through a "long process of intellectual experimentation" until we get the hang of the idea that what we feel is for real, and come to know our own mind and risk sharing it with others. 

That's got to include developing our innate sense to smell a cheat; yet as children we were taught to believe what we were told rather than see what was really happening. 

Now we are learning how to "recreate social environments in which we work best" with no resources other than our own humanity.