Why We Hide Our True Selves Why We Hide Our True Selves Sometimes we luck out and find a friend or a partner that we can be totally open with, but those relationships can be rare. It’s more common to get close to someone, but keep parts of our true selves hidden away. Here are some of the reasons why we keep our true selves hidden in relationships: · Fear of being judged. We often pretend to be someone different than who we really are in order to avoid judgment. We are afraid that if we let our true personalities show, that we would be judged by our friends or partners. We sometimes start relationships by putting on a bit of an act to hide insecurities, and keep the act going as we think it’s what the other person has come to expect from us. We can feel afraid that they’ll be disappointed when they find out who we really are because we don’t think we are special enough, or interesting enough on our own. Or, we might think that they’ll judge us for not being cool enough or smart enough. · Fear of being hurt. One of the main reasons why people keep their true selves hidden in relationships is to create a protection mechanism that keeps them from getting hurt. We can be so fearful of getting hurt, or getting our hearts broken, that we are afraid to fully let someone get to know the real us. We justify this by thinking that if they don’t really know us, then they can’t really hurt us. · Still exploring. Sometimes we are willing to let someone in and know the real us, we just don’t know what that quite means yet. We are constantly in a state of growth and change, yet some people don’t feel like they truly know who they are or what they want, and therefore they are afraid of letting someone else in until they have it figured out. The problem here is that we never fully have it figured out, and if we wait until we are 100% sure of who we really are then we might be waiting a long time. It’s ok to let someone in to witness your journey in finding your true self because chances are they are on a similar journey themselves, · Our personality depends on theirs. When you’ve been in a relationship or a friendship for a long time you can often lose sight of who you are without the other person. We often end up feeling like we are one person rather than two distinct individuals. If the other person has a more dominant personality it’s easy to feel like you’ve been swallowed up by them. We can feel like without the other person we don’t know who we are. · Shame. Low self esteem often drives people to feel ashamed of who they really are, so they don’t let other people get to know their true selves. Maybe they are insecure about not having enough money or coming from a difficult family situation, and they try to cover this up to prevent letting someone else in to see who they really are. (Source: psych-quotes)
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 05:25:38 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015