“The problem is that most of us try to resist our difficult emotions — or, to continue the metaphor, to ignore the dogs growling in the cellar. That only makes the situation worse.”
“She didn't tell anyone about these feelings, of course, and she told Brach that ‘trying to keep her fears at bay felt like locking a pack of wild dogs down in the cellar. The longer they were trapped there, the hungrier they got. Inevitably they would break down the door and invade the house.’
‘What we really need to do, Brach suggests, is lean into the discomfort — open the cellar door.’”
This article provides a great description of how psychological struggles are formed in relationships, especially past relationships. I do not believe we actually see someone today as our mothers or fathers, causing us to react based on this time or that time with them. Instead, I think these past interactions have led us to look for clues in others and the situations that we are in that a similar interaction is occurring, one that says the same things we came to believe based on the original situations, such as "when such and such occur, I will be powerless" or "I will be humiliated." These interactions also lead to certain prevailing conscious or unconscious beliefs about the self and others. In the case of humiliation, for example, one might come to believe "If I am this way, then I will be humiliated" and come to spend their lives unconsciously avoiding being "this way." Which, if "this way" included qualities like sensitivity, caring, authenticity, intelligence (to name a few), you can see how this can lead to problems in the future. For example, if one is not allowed to be sensitive, they could grow up to be a bully, or they could become depressed, anxious or self-loathing whenever they begin having sensitive feelings, which, when this process is unconscious, can also lead to symptomatic coping strategies, such as compulsions, self-harm, dissociation, fixation on eating, mania and etc. In short, we don't always know the feelings that we are locking away and they are not necessarily locked away; hints of these feelings show up haphazardly and hazy in interactions and as symptoms that we have not yet been able to understand.