Member-only story
If You Really Want to Feel Loved, Show Them Your Shadow
Seven steps to being more “you” in your relationships.
We all want to be loved.
We all want to be seen and appreciated for who we truly are. We all have a desire for people to see beyond our façade and truly grasp our uniqueness. At the same time, we all make a concerted effort to hide our imperfections and present our best selves to the world.
We want people to see our “authentic” self, while at the same time, we are presenting a positive veneer of a successful, composed, emotionally regulated person. And because of this positive veneer, when people celebrate or compliment us, we often do not fully believe them, because “they don’t really know who I am… If they only knew my bad or sad or mad sides, they wouldn’t love me.”
I use the term shadow parts to refer to those parts (or self-states) that are denied, suppressed or hidden from ourselves and others: hostility, aggression, vulnerability, greed, sadism, dependency, helplessness, sexuality, vengefulness, and more.
Since such parts might also be socially, religiously, or culturally frowned upon, people dissociate these parts even from themselves. Yet within these forbidden parts exist many other “positive” resources that also get repressed, such as…
