A great place to start is to simply open your mind and revisit your past with the will to honestly explore how your relationship with your parents (or teachers or peers) influenced your emotional development. Recognizing the way in which a negative aspect of your personality, behavior, or self image is tied to an event or relationship in your past is the first step towards growth. Once you come to this recognition, you can make a decision to stop repressing the negative emotions associated with that event or relationship. When you come to deal honestly with these feelings, you will find that you are able to let them go. When you do let these feelings go, you’ll find that it’s easier to break away from the behavior patterns associated with them and to begin forging healthier patterns. At the same time, releasing these repressed emotions will do wonders for your self esteem.

Dealing honestly with your past and experiencing the emotional growth that this allows is serious business. There’s no way that reading the few paragraphs we have on the topic here will be enough to help guide you through this process. Our intent here isn’t to provide a guide, but rather to give you a sense that gaining mastery over your past is possible, and to encourage you to undertake this journey for yourself. There are a lot of good books on emotions and development that can be a great place to start. And perhaps beginning to ask questions about your past and how it influences who you are today will open your mind to therapy down the road. The fact of the matter is that just about everybody could be more in touch with themselves and emotionally healthier. Though it has faded in recent times, there is still a stigma associated with therapy and a desire for improved mental and emotional health. This is crazy. Wanting to be more emotionally healthy is just as noble a goal as wanting to be more physically healthy. The first step to attaining greater emotional health is wanting to, and wanting to requires believing that it is possible. Hopefully the brief overview we’ve provided has shed some light on how we all bear the legacy of our emotional past, and how we all can take control of it.

2. Deal Honestly With Your Emotions

Just as emotional health is all but impossible if you aren’t in touch with your past, it also requires dealing honestly with your emotions in the present. Pain, doubt, and fear, when repressed, act like emotional poisons. Whenever we avoid dealing with a stressful situation, push down unpleasant or troubling feelings, or swallow our anger or upset with another person or event, we do serious damage to our emotional wellbeing.

We are taught not to show strong emotion, and that virtue consists in a stiff upper lip and a stoic approach to grief, sadness, frustration, and other negative feelings. Following this prescription is a recipe for disaster. Emotions have to be experienced to be let go of. If you believe someone has wronged you, allow yourself to feel the appropriate emotions, and confront that person in a rational and open way about your feelings. If something is upsetting you, let it out. First of all, be open with yourself about it. Beyond this, talk about it with your parents, spouse/significant other, or close friends. Dealing honestly with your feelings can be painful at first, but really commit to it, and you’ll be amazed at how much lighter and better you’ll end up feeling.