Unveiling the true self: the journey of self-discovery

No road in my life was as long as the one that would take me to myself".

(Alice Miller)

Discovering yourself is a journey through layers of outdated versions of yourself, full of old emotions, regrets, or repressed feelings. These and other overlays create an image that you sometimes identify with, while it is the cover of a book that no one reads anymore. The real you is the seed that lies inside all these layers. It is there that the pearl of truth about you resides. And in those depths are your passions, desires, and potentials. How to take off those outer layers, built of fear and illusions about yourself, to get to the true essence of yourself?

Taking off the top layers requires a lot of patience. There are no shortcuts here. Peeling away the layers with which we no longer identify is a process and does not happen overnight. It is not something that can be learnt and thus 'done' and decided that there is nothing more to be done. The journey to self is a lifelong journey. And in this journey, the most important principle is to be the greatest support for yourself.

Access to true self

Peeling away layers of illusion touches the most sensitive and often-repressed parts of the self. These can be frozen or trampled feelings, fears, regrets, buried dreams or undermined self-confidence. This is where deep loneliness lived with its feelings that no one acknowledged or, moreover, questioned their validity. Removing these painful fragments from oneself requires the process of seeing that feeling again. Perhaps experiencing it one more time in some form of interaction with a difficult memory. Sometimes we can do this through art, listening to a song, or experiencing something through a performance, a film, or a sentence in a book. Creative writing can also be beneficial here, when we can write a letter to an old version of ourselves, for example, from our childhood years.

Therapy, meditation, and ritual work can also be helpful. Somatic work is equally useful, as the body also remembers and has a whole range of experiences stored cellularly. Often, many of these techniques, both conventional and unconventional, use a method of visualisation, which helps one to enter a given emotion once again. And it is only after a particular emotion has been dismantled in this way that it can be peeled away with recognition, creating a new record of the story in question. Our ancestors did this ritualistically, preparing a ritual of passage for a particular stage of life.

Do we today possess the readiness for such a regression, to face the most sensitive parts of ourselves? And finally, from where to begin?

Escape from oneself

Arthur C. Brooks, a Harvard professor, mentioned in his book written with Oprah Winfrey that adults who come from a home where feelings were not talked about, suppressed, or where you simply could not be yourself because of the pressure of different beliefs have problems finding their identity later in their lives. If, for example, your feelings were not understood, diminished, or undermined, this could lead to the belief that, unfortunately, you are not worth trusting. And in this paradigm, you can't really build anything. Because how can you build a life from the position of a person who cannot be trusted with anything? And this is the kind of signal you subconsciously send to others, not trusting your potential or positions.

Meanwhile, everyone is entitled to their own perspective on everything. A person perceives a personal story in their own way, and that is right. And even when we live under the same roof, we can take completely different perspectives on the householders because each of us represents a different role, is conditioned differently, and triggers variousbuttons' in the other person. In such an arrangement, there is no reason to invalidate or diminish someone’s feelings. Each has its own validity and history of being. In view of this, is it not lethal for the regulation of the nervous system to give up on ourselves as early as childhood, i.e., to deny our feelings and succumb to the pressure of saying, "The past is gone!"

This certainly has the effect of weakening the capacity for resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with problems or challenges in the future. This skill to face difficulties requires being equipped with a certain perseverance and efficiency, which needs some kind of training in childhood. The lack of this tool is another layer to work on internally.

Transition process

Standing up to your feelings takes courage. We can already approach this from the perspective of an adult who knows what to stand up to and does not make excuses. There is no room for escape or dissociation from the problem. Facing our greatest fear obliges us to be fully prepared to enter into the difficulty, through which we arrive at the main goal of experiencing relief and reclaiming ourselves.

Some people use hypnosis to make a new record from a subconscious position. However, science today has a whole range of options to help us get through difficult moments with the help of a professional. The easiest way to start is by exploring a particular topic that is your problem area in life. Sometimes this can be complex; others call it a looping set of failures. This kind of loop can be called stuckness. There, you look for a main aspect in this 'grey area', such as self-acceptance. And for this, you select materials. The first inspiration can be very simple: buying a book, listening to a podcast, or interviewing someone who has gone through something similar. Then you can take it a step further by watching a film on the topic or going to a workshop about it. If you feel the topic needs deeper work, you can write a letter to the version of yourself from the past or get professional help from a psychologist or a specialist in somatic work at the level of trauma release.

Most often, we stay at the level of working with inspiration. We look for a given aspect in images from the world of culture and literature and stop there. This is also okay. However, if we don't see enough results in terms of changing our lives for the better, i.e., the topic hasn't been fully worked through, it's worth going a step further to seek inspiration from other people. If you are not ready to work with a specialist, it may be better to take advantage of workshops or lectures led by mentors, coaches, or teachers who share their experiences in recognising a problem and healing it.

The overriding strategy in this process is to allow yourself to be emotional. Don't be afraid to cry. Allow yourself to walk through the most sensitive parts of yourself without any judgement.

Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself.

(Miles Davis)

Patience

Working on yourself takes time and patience. It is a task for a long-distance runner, not a sprinter. Usually, when you get down to one aspect of yourself internally, another comes up, and another and another... Launching the process of your own healing triggers a kind of avalanche where you start to see and feel more. Suddenly, you learn more and more about yourself as you begin to allow your inner voice, which you have silenced for years. No longer do you run away from emotions or difficult topics, and no longer do you escape into work or other activities just to push your problem under the carpet.

Getting to know the real you comes gradually, along with peeling off those artificial layers of yourself. And this is the pearl that is the reward for your patience. You begin to dig out your own dreams and potential and regain your sense of worth. From this position, you can step out and live to your full potential.

Embracing the perspective of working on yourself to return to your true self gives you room for wide exploration. It is a journey of a lifetime where the win is your happy life, in truth. It's a life you won't get bored with because it's about you, not the roles you've played. Will you go out to meet your life?