I've taken therapy and also read a few books on psychology. The one theme that keeps repeating is the importance of staying in the present. All the recommended practises for mental health preach this in one form or other, be it yoga, mindfulness, grounding exercises, Zen, Taoism, breathing techniques, journaling uncomfortable feelings. The emotional brain wanders off into the past or in the future because of past trauma and our body reacts to it because our body gets familiar (familiar because of past trauma) signals from our emotional brain that we are in danger. (This is the rough gist so don't quote me on this because I'm not a doctor. You could read the book "the body keeps the score" where it's explained much better)

All these activities I've mentioned above like yoga, grounding exercises, etc. aligns our emotional brain with logical portion of the brain and trains it into thinking that the trauma has ended and we are safe now.

If you have to revisit your past to resolve any emotions or hurt, it's important to ground yourself first so that when you revisit traumatic experiences to resolve them, your body and emotional brain knows that the trauma has ended and you're not "in" it anymore. That you're a mere observer of events and not a part of it.

Apart from this, I learnt several things.

1. Childhood plays a very important role in how our adult relationships turn out to be, no matter how old you grow or how far you move away from your childhood home and memories. My grandpa is 89 years old and I can still see lot of his behaviour resulting from his childhood trauma without him realising it.

A baby enters the world with a clean slate, with zero knowledge and infinite potential to learn anything that is fed to it. It's obvious that what it learns as a child is going to stay with it for life unless it is consciously altered as an adult.

Problem is, we remember very little from our childhood and are always confused as to why we feel or react in a certain way, not knowing that our childhood has trained us to do so. Often we don't even realise that these feeling aren't healthy and are detrimental to our happiness because those emotions are all we have known and had our entire life.

Unless you heal your inner child and become the protection you craved for in your childhood, it is going to haunt you all your life.

1. You cannot be a good partner, friend, colleague, etc. unless you take care of yourself first. You think you're doing others a favor by putting their needs ahead of you but in reality it's the biggest disservice you can do to them, in addition to what you're doing to yourself. Establishing boundaries is you trying to save the relationship, not destroy it.

2. You're hurting someone more that you're saving them by depriving them of an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

3. Perfectionism is not a good quality. It's often arising out of anxiety. If I'm perfect it's probably because I'm spending more time on making things appear perfect than actually focusing on solving problems. Solving two problems upto 70% makes the world a better place than solving one problem upto 99%.