Do you believe that who you are right now is all that you can ever be?
Not unless it was a conscious choice you made to become this version.
Left unexamined, I can tell you that the identity that you have now as an adult is mostly compounded of what you were given permission to embody by your family/society as a child and what kept you belonging and safe in that environment.
Becoming this version of you served you back when you were too young to make sense of this world. And this is why this identity keeps you limited, small, unseen and miserable. As long as you don't question and don't allow yourself to become aware of the protective and adaptive strategies and styles of relating, I can safely say you are living your life unconsciously through the eyes of a child.
So what you love about yourself, what you show people about you and what is in your immediate awareness is not holding the core of your greatest potential. It's what society said was wrong, bad and shameful about you that does.
All I just said sounds outrageous to most of us.
Whenever I tell my clients this, they get very silent and look at me utterly confused.
Because indeed it feels backwards to a lot of people. It's so counterintuitive to everything we know to be true about us, that the knee jerk reaction to this is to go into denial of it.
But the truth is that what you are fine with showing the world about you, hence what you love about yourself is something you already, consciously or unconsciously, utilize the full potential of in your day to day life. There's probably little left unturned and uncovered around the traits and emotions that are safe to portray & embody.
Because what you love about yourself now as an adult is something that the world has labeled as acceptable for you as a child with a moldable and influenceable mind, to embody and show.
For example, if you grew up in a family that told you that you have to be generous to be seen as a good person, anything that falls short to that will be discarded in the unconscious as shadows, hence its considered unwanted and bad. If you see yourself as a generous person, you hate if you're perceived as stingy and you'll do whatever it takes to avoid feeling like you are selfish.
But what if being selfish doesn't have to be bad and wrong? What if there is something of value in selfishness that can be alchemized and integrated as an exalted version?
Think about it.
What if you allowed yourself to look at the things that you dislike within you as wells of untapped wisdom and potential that have the ability to support you to get the life you want? What if the things you let yourself embody are only half of the entirety of who you were meant to be? What if your qualities hold only a limited amount of life force energy within them?
I'm going to give you my own example. I always saw myself as a nice and agreable person. Everyone had mostly good things to say about me and that made me feel good about who I was and how I showed up in the world. I was always the go-to person, always saying YES to anything. My family was proud of me for being such a fine young woman who is well mannered and smiles all the time. The ego took on this trait because it ensured that I got belonging within my family and society, that I was seen as a good and valuable person and so to the ego it didn't matter that I was slowly dying inside from always putting my needs on the back burner, always being available, regardless of how bad I felt. The aspect of my consciousness that didn't want to please everyone was cast away in the shadows because my mom made sure, when I was young, to teach me that the only way to be appreciated was to renounce your own self, to sacrifice and to be the one everyone needs. And whenever I said no, as a child, I was severely punished, scolded for being selfish because I was putting myself first. Putting yourself first was the biggest sin in my family, so everyone sacrificed themselves for everyone else's sake. And everyone ended up secretly harboring resentment towards everyone else, but you couldn't say that and still be a good person in the eyes of others, could you? So this slowly and surely ate at my health, it was devouring my insides. People pleasing was one of toughest behaviours I had to unlearn and I am still catching myself fawning sometimes because it was so deeply embedded, that I barely had access to it. So what was on the other side of people pleasing? I guess I should say self pleasing. Like I said, this was severely punished and was frowned upon as a selfish behaviour. And so the greatest source of untapped potential I personally found was in the repressed part of me that lived in the shadows, wanting and waiting for me to choose me before anyone else's best interests. And so discovering this aspect in me was a total revelation for me because what this aspect taught me was NOT selfishness, it was the awareness that if I allow everyone to use me in the name of being seen as a good person, I will end up hating them eventually. Which is not something a good person does.... so if I cannot be a good person by defaulting into pleasing everyone, the only way I can be good is if I stay true to my values and my needs because once I take care of me, I have the energy and the mental capacity to take care of everyone else WITHOUT ending up resenting them. So this aspect in my shadows carried so much truth, so much wisdom and understanding that the aspect I chose to identify with couldn't fathom...
See? It's what you were told was wrong with you that holds the space for a better, more authentic you.
In the end, all I can say is that the amount of energy you spend repressing the aspects you don't like about yourself is the same amount of energy you could be spending harnessing and resourcing their unused strengths. The choice is yours.
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