Why do some people totally dismiss the idea of themselves having feelings?

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Poor self-awareness or deception. These are the only possible explanations.

Everybody has emotions. We label any brain activity that affects conscious thought that’s not itself conscious ‘emotion’. Nobody is totally feeling-less. Show me a person who says they don’t have feelings, and I’ll quickly prove them wrong by being so incredibly annoying that they’ll want to punch me in the face.

Being annoyed is an emotion, being angry is an emotion. For some, it’s the only emotion they regularly have.

What people generally really mean when they say this is that they don’t feel like they have any ‘softer’ emotions, like altruism or empathy. This is variably true.

Everybody’s at least a little altruistic, everybody’s got some semblance of a moral code, things they will or will not do for various reasons. Ask about why they have these reasons and you’ll get the same sort of answer that most anybody that’s not a philosophy major gives about their morals. “I don’t know why I act that way, it’s just my personality I guess.”

And everybody can generally tie that moral code, as vague and indistinct as it might be, to an underlying wish to be useful and helpful to their fellow humans. Nobody is totally, 100% selfish. Nature won’t let us. Instead people hide their selfish desires behind moral words. Their selfish desires might be closer to them than their moral expositions, but that doesn’t mean the morals don’t exist somewhere.

People rarely look very deeply into the motivations behind their actions. And this is the source of the claim that they don’t have feelings. Feelings are just semi-conscious motivations for action. And everyone has those.

They just might not want their motivating factors to be clear and legible to others. Perhaps they’re consciously or subconsciously trying to deceive. Perhaps they’re worried about being manipulated themselves. Which is ironic because the first thing that makes you really easy to manipulate is intent to deceive. The second is poor self-awareness.

All in all, dismissal is a very poor way to deal with feelings. They’re there whether you want to acknowledge and understand them or not. The only question is just how much of them reaches conscious awareness. You should be wanting more of these things and not less. I recommend emotionally-deep media, I cut my teeth on anime.