Once you’ve committed to focusing on a specific area of your life that you want to change, the key to moving forward will be taking this leap of faith: Accepting the idea that your problem hasn’t come out of the blue. It has roots from the past.

If you have been trying to muscle through your problems for some time, always making the resolution to just stop yelling at your kids, to just stop eating so much, or to just stop selling yourself short in relationships or in pursuing your dreams, you are probably ready accept that simply being tired of your tired of your behavior and wanting to change it does not necessarily lead to change. 

You have suspected there’s another way, and Step Two is about allowing the key to your future could lie in coming to grips with parts of your past that you have left unexplored.

 Imagine if someone were to ask you to start reading a novel beginning on page 125, to continue reading through page 225, and to then write an ending in which the lead character meets with tremendous success.  Chances are you’d feel anxious and unprepared. After all, you’d be coming to the story midstream, without knowing the character’s motivations, strengths and weaknesses.  “This isn’t my story,” your heart would tell you.  “How am I supposed to make it come out right?”

In order to write something credible and convincing, you’d want to know what happened to the main character in the first 124 pages. You’d want to know how he or she had responded to personal challenges, what life lessons he or she had taken away from their family of origin, whether they had suffered any significant losses, what their parents’ marriage was like, so forth.  You’d want to know all about the character’s back story (his or her earlier life history).

Without this information, you could not confidently move forward, the next chapters you wrote would make the story and the character seem false.

Likewise, when we try to move forward with our lives without a true understanding of its earlier chapters, we ask of ourselves something no less fraught with difficulty.

There’s a reason we turn blind eyes to our own life histories, our own back stories:  We are needlessly afraid that looking at the past, especially the parts of it that are unsettling, will somehow weaken us or take away our momentum in life.  

Step Two asks you to stop running, and to believe that there are great rewards in store for you if you do. The truth about your life history—including the strengths and the weaknesses in your family relationships, the successes and the failures you have encountered, the gifts you received and the losses you sustained—are not your enemies. They are buried treasures. They are meant to be uncovered, looked at honestly and learned from, because they hold the keys to who we are and ways we can change. They tell us what holds us back from being our best selves, having good relationships, and achieving our goals.

 Imagine a woman who is always picking the wrong men: Men who drink, men who don’t treat her well, men who force her again and again into a caretaking role, but don’t take care of her.

What she needs, is insight into why she is making choices that cause her so much suffering, so she can change her behavior patterns and find true love.

The insight such a woman needs is as close as her own past experiences in life, very possibly in her family of origin. Maybe the insight can be gleaned from examining how her father treated her or how he treated her mother. As she opens chapters of her life story that have remained closed for too long, she will begin to see why she pursues emotionally unavailable men and why she feels unworthy of real love.  She will understand that she hasn’t been the victim of bad luck in love, but locked in a pattern established long ago.

 Knowledge is power. Armed with the truth about her life story, this woman can put the past where it belongs—behind her.  She will no longer be forced into repeating the same mistakes.  She can begin to understand her behavior and choose a more equal relationship with the potential for real intimacy.

 Our problems aren’t accidents. Unsuitable partners don’t merely show up on our doorsteps; we choose them because of ill-formed ideas about what we deserve. We find ourselves in unsatisfying careers because something early on told us that we couldn’t enjoy work, or make money, or take leadership roles. Our frustration with our children doesn’t mean we simply are bad parents; it may well mean that our own upbringing contained messages that parenting was a battle of wills instead of an act of love. 

 These painful pages of our current and future life stories will continue to be written so long as we choose to ignore their origins in the earlier chapters of our lives. That’s why the greatest promise for personal growth is looking in the mirror, in order to see behind you.

So forget about just doing it better, or hoping that your luck improves, or, even worse, resigning yourself to the idea that “this is just the way things are.”  Whatever your problem is, it likely has roots in your past, in avoiding a healing and empowering reckoning with your earlier life experiences. Taking Step Two means turning in the direction of what you haven’t been willing to look at, and keeping your eyes wide open.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.

This step is about clarity.  You take this step because you want to be sure that you’re moving forward with a real, actionable goal. Maybe it’s to revitalize your marriage.  Maybe it’s to find work you really love.  Or, it could be to stop using food as a crutch.

 Many of us have multiple areas in our lives that could use some improvement.  But Living the Truth techniques work in part by acknowledging that problems in life are linked.  Often, they share root causes.  Identifying any area of your life that needs immediate attention and beginning to work on it will lead you naturally to related life issues that can also benefit from the insights you are achieving.

Having an initial goal starts the LTT process in earnest.  When we are dissatisfied, we can feel overwhelmed. There’s often a contagious nature to emotional distress from one problem that can color everything we see and feel.  And that can stop specific, liberating changes before they begin.  

 In what area of your life do you want to achieve positive change first?

If the answer doesn’t come to you immediately, that’s OK.  Find a quiet place to think for a little while.  Let your mind and heart focus.

 You might want to begin with a general statement like, “I don’t like my job. Half the time I don’t even feel like getting out of bed to go to work.”  Write down your statement, so you have a record of this very first sentence, the start of your journey toward insight and empowerment.

 Next, examine your statement.  Hone in on the specific aspect of the problem you’ve identified that troubles you most.  Is your boss someone who criticizes you in a way that is painful to you? Does work not leave you enough time for your family or for pursuing a goal you are tremendously passionate about?  Perhaps you feel that you have been assigned an impossible amount of work and can’t seem to set boundaries between your personal and professional lives.

 If you identified your marriage as the part of your life that troubles you, be specific. What is it about your marriage that is disappointing you?  Do you feel emotionally alone because there’s too little communication?  Is sex infrequent?  Is your spouse’s obsession with his or her own career mean you rarely spend time together?

Write down the most specific statement that describes what you’re struggling with.  Remember, writing a problem down makes it easier to focus on and should give you the sense that you are already committed to working to solve it.

  Don’t stop at just one attempt in making your statement specific.  Keep refining what you’ve written.  Add your emotional reactions to your statement.   If your problem is with an employer, you might ultimately write, “I feel as though I am assigned my boss’ work all the time and get no credit for doing it.  I end up being angry at myself for not setting boundaries.”

 As another example, if you identified your sex life with your partner as the issue you are focusing on, you might come up with something like: “Having to ask for sex makes me feel unattractive and unwanted.  So, I’ve stopped initiating romance between us. ” 

 Here are some other examples:

 – I want to end the co-dependent relationship I am in with a drug user, (in which I am valued mostly as a kind of nurse) and make myself available to someone who will nurture me, too. 

– I want to stop letting my mother tell me (and my husband) how to raise my children.  Her intrusiveness makes me feel like a child and disrupts my relationship with my new family.

– I want to quit smoking by understanding the underlying factors that make me feel stressed, so I can address them.

 – I want to create a marriage in which I feel understood and valued, and where my career goals are considered as important as my spouse’s. 

  It is important that you not rush this step.  Allow yourself the time and space to sit alone with your thoughts and hone in on the specific kind of growth you hope to achieve.  If you feel a little uncomfortable, that’s good.  As we peel away the layers of denial we have accumulated over the years and move toward the truth, we will inevitably experience some amount of discomfort. It’s like working out muscles that you haven’t used for a long time.  Your heart and soul feel you calling on them to do more.  But asking more of yourself is the way to become what you need to be.  

And you’re already on your way.

 Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.