All humans deserve to be healthy, fulfilled, and safe with their needs fully met. 

Learning to use your emotions as tools to increase your safety leads to a deeper and more authentic connection with yourself and others, a life connected to purpose, and the realization of your full potential as a human being.

So many of us are born into families where caregivers lack complete development. We may end up traumatized or abused. The various ways that we learn to keep ourselves safe get repeated until they become unconscious, automatic, and out of our awareness. These automatic patterns often become a source of sabotage as we age and may have disastrous effects on our lives.

We call these protectors.

Emotional Hygiene includes cleaning house by getting our protectors to retire themselves or be repurposed to work for our benefit and revisiting critical developmental events so that our emotional tools (fear, anger, sadness, joy) can work properly.

Emotional Hygiene provides a way of looking at our human experience a little differently than what you may typically find in psychology and mental health spheres. 

Like other hygiene practices, Emotional Hygiene has a personal as well as social component. For instance, in the case of oral hygiene, what happens if you stop brushing your teeth for a long stretch of time? Your teeth decay or they fall out. You’d become sick or have an overtaxed immune response from all the oral infections.

We can safely say oral hygiene is an expectation in today’s world. Furthermore, it’s not optional because failure to do so has wide-ranging effects not only on our health, but also our social environment.  

Perhaps all types of hygiene have this characteristic.

They are not optional. The impact on our lives of not practicing them is great.

Anyone can choose not to keep themselves hygienic in the various ways that humans do, and some make that choice, but there is always a cost, both to individuals and to those in their social environments.

We propose there are particular ideas, awareness skills, actions, and habits of responding that we all can develop in order to manage our emotional selves, which amounts to a practice of Emotional Hygiene.

Just as all people alive benefit from brushing their teeth, these ideas and actions regarding Emotional Hygiene apply to everyone, everywhere, regardless of culture or geography.

“Emotional Hygiene is about allowing our emotions and learning to use them as tools to increase our safety.”

— Tim Westfeldt, Founder of Westfeldt Institute for Emotional Hygiene