Three months after entering treatment for postpartum depression, Hayden Panettiere is back on the Hollywood red carpet circuit and feeling in control.

The Nashville actress, who gave birth to daughter Kaya in 2014, spent subsequent months suffering through the condition. Fortunately she's emerged from treatment "feeling great," she told Access Hollywood at Sunday night's (January 19) Critics' Choice Awards.

"I feel like a different person walking on this red carpet...I feel like I don't have to hide myself as much anymore," she said. "And I can be true, and people will accept your scars and your bumps and your bruises and will relate to them, and I didn't really know that until everything happened over this past year or so."

The actress said healing is a "long process" that involves finding balance in her life. And though her Nashville character, Juliette Barnes, has similarly suffered through postpartum depression, Panettiere says she initially refused to link the two and thus admit her own condition.

"It's wild what the mind does. It kind of like puts up a block and you can't associate, and I was having a lot of trouble associating," she said. "I was suppressing, I backed away, I had to think of something else. It's crazy the blocks that your mind puts up just to protect you."

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