The Paradox of Becoming More Human

Sometimes the qualities we try hardest to embody

are the ones we are unconsciously defending against.

For most of my adult life, I tried very hard to become a better person.

More loving.

More compassionate.

More understanding.

More patient.

Safer. Stronger. Kinder.

It turns out that effort was part of the problem.

What I didn’t realize was that many of those efforts weren’t coming from wisdom.

They were coming from emotional repression.

From hurt I had buried.

From fear I could not feel.

From anger I had learned to swallow.

And the traits I had pushed out of awareness in myself,

I unconsciously projected onto others.

Because I repressed my own anger, I wasn’t even aware that my perception of someone else’s anger became unconsciously amplified.

In this work we see it all the time:

Whatever I am not allowed to feel, you are not allowed to feel either.

And slowly, through deep emotional repression reversal work, I began to discover something paradoxical.

The qualities I had spent years trying to cultivate did not grow through effort.

They appeared when something else began to dissolve.

To become safer as a human being

I had to let go of my unconscious need to be safe.

And meet the buried hurt, anger, and fear that had been driving that need.

To become more loving

I had to stop holding on to the expectation of being loving all the time.

And process the shame, hurt, fear, and anger hiding underneath that unconscious need.

To become kinder

I had to give up the belief that I had to be a good human.

And meet the repressed rage, fear, and hurt that had silently shaped my life.

At some point, I realized something unsettling.

Many of the qualities I had been trying hardest to cultivate
were actually unconscious defences.

Attempts to stay safe.
Attempts to be loved.
Attempts to avoid emotions I had learned not to feel or express.

To access a deeper compassion than I ever felt before

I had to let go of the unconscious demand to be compassionate.

And process the shame, hurt, fear, and anger driving that identification.

To become more vulnerable

I had to bring into consciousness the invisible commands running my system.

Not allowed to feel that.
Don’t be too sensitive.
Don’t be too much.

Underneath those commands lived deeply repressed fear and hurt.

To feel more connected with other humans

I had to question an unconscious rule I had lived by for years:

I have to be alone to be safe.

And process the fear, hurt, and anger I had disconnected from through the mechanism of emotional repression.

To feel more love

I had to stop organizing my life around safety.

And risk allowing people to come close.

Which meant learning to access and meet the terror I had avoided all my life.

To allow life to move through me

I choose to inquire into every bit of suffering in my life.

And process the fear of being myself — unravelling the conditioning I had created to unconsciously stay safe or to get love.

To fully be myself,

I had to take ownership of all my suffering.

Not as blame.
Not as punishment.

But as the doorway through which emotional repression dissolves.

And when repression dissolves, something surprising happens.

The very qualities we spent years trying to become
begin to appear on their own.

The paradox is simple:

The more we bring into awareness the programming that demands we hold back our core emotions — and meet that resistance — the more human we become.