Ok, this requires a little imagination, but bear with me. Picture this:
When you're born, you're like an empty lot or open field-- green grass, maybe some flowers, some hills, but basically an untouched piece of land. Then, as things begin to happen in your life, you start to accumulate memories and experiences. The positive, healthy memories and experiences are like fertilizer, letting your natural lot grow and flourish. But the negative, unhealthy memories and experiences are like 'mental garbage', and they fall on the field in big piles of clutter.
Eventually, if there are too many negative/unhealthy memories and experiences, the clutter will start to grow into a thick layer, hiding the grass and flowers and hills. For example-- a critical parent can cause you to feel rejected, worthless, anxious, insecure, self doubting, judgemental, out of control, and angry. Every time you are criticized, you gain another bit of clutter, and the feelings that come with it add to the mess.
Sometimes we're taught how to deal with the negative experiences in a healthy way, or the positive experiences outweigh the negative so much that the clutter just doesn't get a chance to accumulate. But, if we aren't able to sort through and deal with the negative experiences- over time, they begin to add up. The piles get bigger and bigger, until eventually, you wind up with an 'emotional landfill', full of unprocessed feelings and issues.
The problem is that what's in the emotional landfill can be very painful, so a lot of the time we cover it up and hide it away. There are many ways to do this. Some people put up emotional walls and barriers, never letting anyone get too close for fear that they might discover what's beneath the surface. Other people put on a happy face, smile, and push any problems and unhappy feelings to the back of their mind. It's basically like covering up the landfill with a layer of sod/grass, planting a few flowers, and hoping no one will find out that underneath all that prettiness is an unresolved past.
Unfortunately, the landfill can't stay buried forever. Issues are inevitably going to start poking through the surface. Sometimes they're manageable-- something painful comes up, you trip over it, you cry, and then you cover it back up and move on with your life once again. But other times, the issues are poking through the surface too fast and too often for you to ignore them. The layer of grass- the protective wall, the happy face-- grows thin, and pretty soon the contents of the emotional landfill start busting out all over the place.
When that happens, you have two choices. You can either continue living your life on top of the emotional landfill, letting the issues and feelings dominate who you are. Or- you can peel back the layer of sod, the protective walls, and dive right into the emotional landfill. You can start analyzing how your past and the people in it have affected you, figure out why you are the way you are, and begin processing each pile of mental clutter until the landfill begins to shrink away, slowly but surely, bit by bit.
It's a hard road, but at the end of it is the promise of something better: that natural, untouched field that you started with. It's an opportunity to move past all the pain, all the issues of the past, and become the person that you were SUPPOSED to be from the start. No clutter. Just you.
As I said, the way to accomplish this involves a lot of analysis, so you may want to find someone who can help you with this. It's also a good idea to start journaling; some people aren't comfortable with this idea, but it can be very helpful in terms of having a place to vent, monitor progress, or work through old memories.
The other part of the equation is coping skills. Most people have *some* coping skills, although they may not be healthy-- for example, pushing unhappy memories and feelings to the back of their mind, binge drinking, promiscuity, getting into fights, criticizing other people, etc. The goal here is to replace those old, potentially unhealthy coping skills with new ones.
Some of these coping skills/ideas may seem a little strange. Just remember, an open mind goes a long way-- you may be surprised at how much of a difference a simple idea can make.
