Hiding, Healing, & Allowing Yourself to Be Seen
Why we hide & how it hinders our healing
Vulnerability is scary, but hiding *hurts*.
Hiding hurts. So why do we do it?
You know the story: you’re living life when something happens. You get hurt. Then, you vow to never let yourself get hurt again.
So, you shut yourself down and beef up all the ways you protect yourself. In other words, you start to hide. You hide in hopes that it will keep you safe, but instead, it blocks you from all you need to actually heal.
Why We Hide
Hiding is when we put up walls to protect ourselves from being hurt, but in the process, we create barriers to getting our needs met. Walls might feel good because it can be effective against risks, but walls don’t have filters. When the “bad stuff” can’t be let in, neither can the “good stuff.”
The longer we hide, the more we feel disconnected from ourselves and others. And around the wrong people—even when we try to connect, to open up, to be visible—we end up feeling hurt, dismissed, and unseen, yet again. So, the hiding continues.
When You’ve Been Hiding, You May Notice:
You feel invisible
You feel stuck
You feel alone
You feel like no one gets you
You feel bad, but also feel guilty for feeling bad
You struggle with low self-esteem
You’re burned out or uninspired
You feel trapped in a life you don’t want
You feel incapable of living the life you do want
Still, it makes sense that we hide. It’s scary to balance protecting yourself from harm with allowing in connection. It’s hard to trade in the walls for boundaries, to actively participate in deciding what has access to you and taking on risks in the process.
Vulnerability is scary, but hiding *hurts*. It hurts to be cut off from the opportunity to get our needs met.
The shift comes when we realize that, yes, vulnerability is hard, but so is living behind walls. We get to choose our hard.
We get to choose the hard work of sitting with our feelings, of confronting our pasts, of grieving, of unravelling, of unlearning, of opening, of choosing ourselves, of practicing boundaries, and of letting love in.
We get to choose to let ourselves be seen.
That’s my hope for you. That after all you’ve been through, after all the ways you’ve survived, that you choose thriving, you choose healing, you choose to let yourself be seen.
