Sometimes, it’s not the obvious things that hold us back. It’s the quiet emotional experiences we carry—the ones we haven’t fully seen, acknowledged, or healed. They don’t just live in the past; they quietly shape how we show up today. In our relationships. In our work. In the way we react. And often, we don’t even realize they’re still with us.
Before we can begin to change this, we need to understand what these unresolved emotional experiences truly are. Unresolved emotional experiences are emotionally charged events that occurred in the past, which were never fully processed or resolved, and now reside in the subconscious mind—vibrating at the frequency of the embedded emotion.
When you experience a highly emotional situation—like an unresolved argument—it creates a memory with emotion embedded in it. That memory becomes part of the subconscious, and because emotion is energy, it vibrates at a specific frequency. These unresolved experiences don’t fade with time. Unless actively worked on, they remain in the subconscious. And whenever a new situation arises that carries a similar emotional vibration, it triggers a reaction—often unconscious and automatic. These reactions are not caused by the present moment alone but by how current experiences resonate with unresolved emotional vibrations from the past.
The common phrase often heard is that “time heals everything.” I disagree. Time does not heal. Time gets us wrapped up in a lot more things—fills our subconscious with far more experiences, information, and patterns—until it becomes quite difficult, very difficult in fact, to be conscious of the unresolved emotional experiences in the subconscious.
Unless we’re able to focus well—and, as a by-product of that focus, develop the power of observation—we won’t be able to observe ourselves clearly enough to recognize whether our reactions are being shaped by what lies within our subconscious.
The first step to resolving the unresolved emotional experiences within our subconscious is to become conscious of these unresolved issues. We can only be observant of them if we can focus. Observation is the by-product of being able to focus.
Once we are conscious of these unresolved issues, the next step is to accept them as part of who we are at this present moment. Accepting does not mean approving. All it means is acknowledging that we are the sum total of all our experiences right this very moment—and some of those experiences that make us are positive, and others are not.
The subsequent step is to work on resolving them—one at a time, or a couple at a time. The worst thing we can do is say that time will heal these issues or that the universe will deal with them at the right time. We cannot hand off the work we have to do ourselves—there’s no outsourcing it. The burden of responsibility lies solely on us.
In order to progress, we must do the work. How do we know we’ve done the work and made progress? Our perspective changes. How we view things has changed. How we act and react to life’s experiences is different—different in a way that leads to more positive outcomes, not only for you, but for everyone.
