Pain makes us keep ourselves at distance from ourselves, which only feeds it. For years, I lived on the outside of who I was. There was a part of me that I’d shut down and shun away from. It was the most vulnerable and scared part of me, an aspect of my inner child, perhaps most of my inner child that I isolated in my early years as a coping mechanism for the pain I experienced.
I was a sensitive child, open and curious, energetic, attuned to life and others. But I felt misunderstood by my parents. They were treating me differently than they were treating my brother. And there was a part of me, perhaps the most central part of me, that they weren’t seeing and getting. To protect myself from the loneliness and sadness I felt, I consciously decided to hide my sensitivity and vulnerability. At the time that made sense. I didn’t want to show how much they hurt me—which, ironically, was most likely a precursor to experiencing even more pain.
While isolating our sensitivity and vulnerability may make sense in the context of a child that’s dependent on their parents for care and protection, these patterns of disownment persist, often unbeknownst to us, and create a sense of fragmentation and isolation that remains.
Pain pushes away. It makes us distance ourselves from it because we believe that the proximity will exacerbate it. In fact, the opposite is true. We weaken and disarm what we bring into conscious awareness. Fears, false ideas, illusions, suffering all collapse under the light of consciousness. Their very existence is contingent on them being in charge of us and running our life. When we misidentify from them by observing them rather than being them, they wither.
The parts we’ve kept locked in are often the ones most integral to our growth, peace and happiness. Our worst fear is our biggest opportunity. Our biggest weakness—our biggest strength.
In my own case, I lived at a distance from myself for years. This played out in different ways, but one significant impact was that I’d rely primarily on my mind than my heart to navigate life. I was led by the masculine in me, which the mind and the intellect are facets of, rather than the feminine where our intuition and gut-feeling reside.
As such, I’d integrate information and knowledge about myself and the world on the mind level, but not on the heart level. This was like living on the surface of life, rather than being fully immersed in life.
To be full, we need to connect with both mind and gut-intelligence. Disowning aspects of ourselves, whether they’re feminine or masculine, and over-reliance on either intellectualising or on sensing through life, is to live in disconnection from our full self, which also deprives us from a deep sense of peace, love and joy that are only accessible to the heart.