The Parts of You That You Hide

There's a version of you that's hidden from even yourself. Somewhere along the way, you learned that it was safer to leave it be.

Carl Jung called this the shadow self. The collection of traits, impulses, feelings, and desires that we decide; usually very early on in life, and rarely consciously, are too much, too messy, or too dangerous to show. So we tuck them away. We learn to perform the version of ourselves that everyone approves of and we get very good at it.

The problem is that the parts we bury don't disappear. They just start running things from the back room.

Treating the Smoke Alarm

Most people who come to work with me are high-functioning, self-aware, and by most external measures, very accomplished. But there's something that just isn't quite right; a pattern that keeps repeating, a feeling they can't quite name, a way of getting in their own way that they have tried and failed to logic their way out of.

They come to me with what they think is the problem. And almost always, that's not the problem, it's only the symptom of an underlying root cause.

Most people spend years treating the smoke alarm. Nobody thinks to look for the fire.

The fire or what we call the root cause, can be a single memory or series of them. Not necessarily a dramatic one. Often it's unassuming, a moment, a comment, a room that went silent at the wrong time. A moment where a younger you received a message about who they were, what they were worth, or what was and wasn't acceptable about them. And then you made assumptions and formed beliefs about yourself based on that.

The Filing System

Here is what I want you to understand about those memories: your mind didn't forget them. It filed them away somewhere safe because at the time, that was the only way to keep going.

Children don't suppress parts of themselves out of weakness. They do it because the environment around them could not hold all of who they were. The suppression was intelligent and adaptive and in the truest sense, survival.

The difficulty is that the strategies we develop to survive a particular environment don't automatically update when the environment changes. What protected you at seven can quietly undermine you at thirty-seven. The shadow doesn't know it's no longer necessary. It just keeps doing its job.

This is why self-awareness alone is rarely enough. You can know intellectually that you self-sabotage, that you over-explain, that you shrink in certain rooms or push people away before they can leave and still not be able to stop. Because the pattern is not running from your conscious mind. It is running from somewhere much older and much quieter.

What the Work Actually Is

In my sessions, we go back. Not to relive or to dwell, but to revisit with the perspective and the resources that a younger you did not yet have. Clients regularly surface memories they had not thought about in decades, moments that seemed minor at the time, but which the nervous system has been quietly organising around ever since.

The goal isn't to change or erase what happened. What happened in the past is fact. But the conclusions you drew from it, what you decided it meant about you, about what you deserve, about what is safe to want, those are still up for review.

The work is not about changing the memory. It's about changing who you become because of it.

A Question Worth Sitting With

Most of my clients don't come to me because something is wrong with them. They come because the same patterns keep showing up; in their relationships, their work, their decisions, and they're tired of getting in their own way. Smart enough to know that trying harder is not the answer.

If any of this resonates, I want to ask yourself this question and notice your response:

What is the part of you that never quite makes it into the room?

Not the answer you would give in a job interview, or to a friend over dinner. The honest one.

If you are ready to find out, I work with individuals and founders in private programmes and one-to-one sessions. You can find out more and get in touch at allgreatminds.co.