I fixed my emotional issues by getting into therapy and sharing meetings where I gradually began to uncover the HUGE ocean of hidden, buried, bottled up and REPRESSED feelings I had been holding down since early childhood. My first breakthrough was to discover the lake of painful, sad and ANGRY feelings that i has successfully kept hidden within me and I went on a WEEPING jag for about a year straight! As the sea of stuck and withheld feelings began to break loose, I began to have genuine feelings of love, empathy, happiness, joy, self acceptance and a lot of other more abstract feelings and memories.
One of my first challenges was to learn how to manage those extremely powerful feelings that I had never really worked with in the past and I made a lot of mistakes bouncing back and forth between innocent love and hateful rage as the feeling came up to be Vented and released. I may have seemed a little INSANE to people who knew me before I began working on myself but I was on a roll so I made no apologies to anyone for finally having some feelings and Vented the best I could. I finally learned how to manage my feelings and have not gone back to stuffing them down just to please someone else. So all I can offer is that, my buried feelings were beginning to ruin my life at 49 and it was do or die when I went for help. It's a very thrilling thing to fine emotional freedom and live openly and honestly with genuine feelings about everything.
You may notice how many people are holding back and protecting their feelings like you were taught to do as a kid and also how many of them are MISERABLE without even knowing why!
IMO, it's a world wide tragedy!
good luck,
jim