
Our emotional health represents the internal landscape of our emotions, feelings and impulses. Along with the behavior that we choose to act upon towards ourselves and others. It is also our self-esteem, self-worthiness and how we perceive and accept ourselves. Knowing yourself, trusting your internal guidance, your intuition and accepting yourself is the most empowering and liberating experience of personal growth!
Your self-esteem and self-worth represent your internal experience of how you perceive and feel about yourself. How we perceive ourselves, good or bad, determines how we value ourselves. Meaning, your perception of your self-worth, is your internal experience of accepting or rejecting yourself. How much do we care, how do we feel and sense our internal and external world justifies our behavior, emotional intelligence and maturity.
Our intuition makes up part of our inner authority and personal power. Our intuition consists of our internal knowing, or internal guidance system that gives us direction, meaning and purpose to what’s important to us. When developed, this internal guidance system provides an internal alarm in the form of a voice, hunch or gut feeling when both threats, dangerous scenarios and opportunities are detected.
One of the most serious challenges we face in our lives today is the fact that people do not know who they are and are afraid to know themselves! If we never had the opportunity to learn how to connect with, and organize our internal house, we easily get trapped into emotional outbursts, unhealthy relationship dynamics and poor boundaries.
Did you know the result of all your life experiences since birth, outlines the way you perceive, feel and accept yourself today?
Self-esteem is not to be misunderstood with self-confidence. As mentioned above, self-esteem is your internal experience of how you feel about yourself and whether or not you accept yourself as you are. Self-confidence is based upon an external measure of success, related to a task or project for example, rather than an internal measure or satisfaction of ourselves.
The relationship that you stablish with yourself, and how you manage your emotions and impulses, determines how you are treating yourself, others around you and how you allow others to treat you. When people have little control towards their emotions, they easily swing back and forward between two extreme behaviors; passive or aggressive. These are two major thought behavioral patterns very common and normalized inside of our homes and offices! One being people pleasing, passive and submissive. That is the victim archetype. The other opposite extreme is the aggressive, controlling and manipulative. That is the abuser archetype.
The Transactional Analysis model by the Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Eric Berne’s that refers to the ‘parent-adult-child’ theory does explain well the common counterproductive social interactions. Dr. Berne observed how individuals interact with one another and how the ego can influence that interaction. For example, if someone is being overtly parental (harsh, critical, authoritarian, etc.) or overtly childlike (emotional, submissive, impulsive) in communication dynamic as opposed to remaining in adult ego state (neutral, observer, reflective, empathic).
Such social interactions reveal the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like, outlining the relationship dynamic. Dr. Berne explained in his work, unhealthy childhood experiences, later in life can lead to an adult being pathologically fixated in the Child and Parent ego states when interacting with other adults.
Did you know, the importance of the first five years of childhood development as the foundation for life, is a major contributor as to how self-esteem is formed?
In the early years of an infant life, parents are the major influencers upon the development of their child’s self-esteem and self-worth. Parents can be considered the main source of positive or negative influence towards their child development. The parents’ mindfulness affection, emotional bond and availability are crucial to the development of the child’s self-esteem and self-worth.  The reality is, many of us didn’t grow up in safe and loving homes.
You may feel within yourself something is not right and deep down you may feel angry, powerless, ashamed or ugly, not knowing how precious, powerful and wonderful you are!
If you fear to know who you truly are, you won’t be able to own your true self and build a strong Inner Foundation. If you cannot trust yourself and your decisions, if you do not truly accept yourself fully, including accepting your physical body, you won’t be able to develop a conscious authentic relationship with yourself.
Did you know wherever there is an internal crisis, there is an opportunity for increased self-awareness and personal growth?
If you believe your happiness is only possible as a result of your parent’s agreement towards your life decisions and or saying sorry, then they still have power over you! You do not need their consent or an apology to heal and re-write your story. Taking what happened to you in the past and transforming it into learning’s, growth, strength and wisdom.

About The Writer
Susana Hancock is the author of the book The Inner Foundation- How Society impacts our Inner foundation. She has a global professional experience of over twenty years, working in Europe and Asia in areas of leadership, staff training and personal development. Since 2016 Susana has been delivering professional training and coaching programs to individuals, schools, business and governmental organizations.