Having lived through a period of lockdown we now have some awareness of how difficult and even detrimental it can be for our overall health and well-being. The reality is that all too many live in a permanent state of emotional lockdown.. Perhaps we grew up in a home where it was unsafe to express how we were feeling and so we outlawed our emotions. An event may have happened that was too painful to face and so we shut down on how we were feeling. With Christmas trees of an earlier era if one light went they all went out and the same is true for our emotions; to shut down on one is to switch off on all. A state of permanent emotional lockdown finds expression in such phrases as; 'don't go there', 'we don't talk about such things'; 'don't be raking up the past'; 'let sleeping dogs lie'. The real problem is that if we ‘don't go there’ emotionally we will be there, but in a different form, for the rest of our lives.