Do You Need to See Yourself First to Have Satisfying Relationships?
It can feel shaming when someone tells us “see yourself first, if you want someone else to make you feel seen”. Not only that this is a false idea, sometimes we don’t know how to see ourselves and it doesn’t mean that we’re doomed to feeling unseen in relationships. If you want to know if you need to see yourself first to have satisfying relationships, read this blog post and you’ll get the answer that will take away shaming and give you clarity and hope for healing the mother wound and feeling see, heard and understood in relationships.
Before I get into it i want to let you know that I'm holding a workshop on Saturday, October 5th, 10.00-13:30 in Biel on Feeling Seen in Relationships for women who want to heal teh mother wound and feel seen, heard and understood in their personal or professional relationships
The most common thing to say about having fulfilling and satisfying relationships is: see yourself first and then another can see you.
To me this often lands as shaming.
What if I don’t like what I see in myself? Am I doomed to feel unseen forever???
What if I don’t know how to see myself?
What if seeing myself is scary or complex?
"Seeing ourselves results in feeling seen, heard and understood by others" is too linear an equation.
And this is why I do the work I do—we can’t always show/see ourselves, yet it’s still possible to feel seen.
In a skilful, therapeutic setting, with someone who has the knowledge about attachment trauma and healing the mother wound, you can come as you are and be deeply seen, heard and understood.
This new experience changes everything in your system, from the way you understand what it means to be in relationship with yourself to the ways you conceive of fulfilling and satisfying relationships.
The secret keys to a fulfilling and satisfying relationship
The secret to successful relationships, where you can feel seen, heard and understood, does not depend on your capacity to have all your wounds resolved before you enter a relationship, be it a personal or a professional relationship.
You don’t have to see yourself first.
Having a complex or painful relationship with your mother is instinctively interpreted by our system as "I’m not seen". When we’re not seen by our mother, we get so busy with trying to figure out what’s wrong. We learn about seeing the other and what they need more than seeing ourselves.
This tendency to see others more than we can see ourselves leads to beliefs such as:
“It’s risky to share my needs”
“My need for validation destroys relationships”
“I’m good at manifesting abandonment”
“I have to give (and a lot) to receive appreciation/love”
But we’re not aware of these beliefs. Just like we can’t see the blood flow within ourselves, beliefs flow in our emotional body, delivering messages from outdated impressions about the ways we need to show up in relationships.
The secret to satisfying and fulfilling relationships are:
Having an internal sense of safety
Being vulnerable
Breaking free from limiting beliefs
Hakomi is a therapeutic system that has magnificent somatic practices leading directly to our core beliefs. This allows us to cut through the chatter and see clearly which beliefs keep us from the experience of being seen.
I will use these practices in the upcoming workshop in Biel.
This workshop will help you notice or discover:
Where it is that you feel or can feel seen and where you don’t
Which beliefs stand in the way of your feeling seen, heard and understood
What changes or actions you can incorporate in your life in order to feel satisfied in your relationships
What previous participants of this workshop said:
“It was my first workshop of this kind and it was a valuable experience. Your calm and gentle presence was wonderful and the exercises we did were very powerful. I felt uplifted and lighter after the workshop and will continue to work on some of the things that came up for me.”
“It was a brilliant workshop. Two different times what came up in my body was unexpected and perhaps off-topic but handled in a way that led to deep processing and integration. Shelly’s identification of what was happening was razor-sharp and with minimum, precise intervention she was able to bring my process to its momentary completion.”
You don't need to see yourself first because sometimes we learn to see ourselves through the loving and safe gaze of a trusted other. This often happens in a therapeutic setting where what we haven't recived from our mother is offered to us, not as a replacement but as a fulfilling experience that offers us teh guidacne we need to create relationshipd where we can feel seen, heard and understood.
Not living in Switzerland?
I'll talk about this more soon but we've already started with pre-registration to our healing the mother wound summit in November.
Register for FREE or purchase your discounted ticket now by clicking on the image below:
Not sure yet? No problem!
Here are a couple of ways to learn about healing the mother wound:
Sign up to my Museletter for regular, useful content on healing the mother wound
Take my video training on breaking free from mother wound limiting beliefs
Shelly's helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother and want to release any negative impact to become unlimited in their personal or professional life
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