The power of being seen
Sometimes I feel like an actor playing multiple roles in one play. I have all these different faces that I let different people see – This group of people get this face, that group of people get that face. I’m not talking about my “I’m at my day job persona” V’s my “I’m not at my day job persona”, I’m taking more deeply.
For years I felt that if I showed someone all my faces, all the parts of me, that I would be too much for them and, at the same time, that they’d realised I wasn’t enough.
I felt that it wasn’t safe to be all of me, that I’d be judged, or just completely misunderstood. Like many people I’m pretty simple & straight forward and yet, at the same time, I’m a mass of contradictions (do you see what I did there?!) Honestly, I still feel like that sometimes: I genuinely like people and, at the same time, sometimes I have a really bad people allergy.
If I dig deeper in the into the shadows of this there’s another fear…
A fear that if I show people all of me, they’ll get too close and find a chink in my armour.
I felt safer letting people think they knew me while actually keeping parts of me hidden. I thought of it a bit like “If you can see all of me you can hurt me more; you can’t hurt me as much if you can’t see all of me” and “If you don’t know where all the parts of me are you can’t take or have power over them.”
In May ’19 I headed to New Mexico for Breathwork healer training and for the first time I started to let all the sides of me be seen: The long floaty bright orange skirted quietly reflective me; The cargo panted and muscle T-shirted overexcited me who waved her hands around a LOT when she talked; The hiking booted, many layered and woolly hatted me who got up before dawn to walk in the mountains and have big deep and meaningful conversations; The batman pyjama’ed me who quietly shared things she was scared of and felt safe enough to ask for help.
As I slowly showed more of myself I found I was still accepted, I was still liked. I wasn’t judged, I was still ‘good enough’… and people still wanted to be my friend.
I gradually felt safe to show more of myself, my soul and my shadow side, the bits I keep safely tucked away for fear of ridicule or rejection. I felt safe to show emotion, to show and receive affection and love, to speak my truth, to ask questions and to say when I felt uncertain or lost.
I started to feel safe to share deep and dark stories and in return I found that I was held gently with love and tenderness, literally and figuratively.
Oh, reading that back now, it sounds so wonderful… well, it was but it was also hard.
To let myself be seen and then, to realise people were actually seeing me… that was intense and, at times, a bit scary.
Sometimes it got a bit too much for someone who’d worked on the “Keep it secret, keep it safe” principle for so much of their life. At times I defaulted back to pulling away and got stuck in the middle of desperately wanting to connect and be seen but being scared to have that happen. A dear friend saw exactly what was happening and, after asking if I was open to hearing something she’d picked up on, shared this with me: She felt that I sometimes felt that I didn’t quite fit in, so I pulled back a bit and in doing so that put up a barrier and then that barrier made me feel like I didn’t quite fit in. Being seen that deeply was such a powerful experience. I am SO grateful to her for gifting me that observation and for sharing it with such love and tenderness. (Thank you so much Vic!)
That week in New Mexico helped me to see that it IS safe to let people see all sides of me, even the sides I think they won’t like or won’t understand and that showing people my whole self doesn’t mean that they can take my power away.
I am so grateful for that experience in New Mexico for so many reasons – the love and acceptance from so many people, the openness and the support, the willingness to listen and hear people. I am grateful for leaving with friends I’d known for only a few days but felt in my heart and soul that I’d known all my life. I’m grateful for having been shown how powerful it feels to truly be seen.
