by Dr. Rachel

The veils of illusion can sometimes be an effective strategy to get through life. Usually, avoiding the truth of how we feel and what we’ve been through is a way to self-protect. We are scared to feel.

When we avoid our hurt parts we become our own worst enemies because we are keeping ourselves unnecessarily distant from what we say we want the most.

Want everything you want in life?

Do you want the relationship you’ve been dreaming of? The money flowing into the bank account? The community and sense of belonging? The whatever it is.

The answer lies in your own split off parts. The demons you fear and avoid.

My path is always opening me up to new potent learning. In my work as a psychologist, what I’m observing is that the people who call in and create what they want in life work every day to know, love, embrace and put to rest their false selves. They’re constantly doing the work to develop and decondition.

Want everything you want? Consider embracing your demons. Make friends. Invite them in for some tea. Be willing to say, “Hey, let’s have a chat, dear one.”

That is to say, in order to heal, awaken and transform, inner work is a given.

It’s a requirement.

It IS the numinous path home.

It’s where the unmanifest becomes manifest.

Those who want what they want work to uncover and dislodge everything within themselves that keeps them from experiencing it. The outcome? The work works. They end up getting it.

What are the false selves that the demons portray?

I define false self as a subconscious and unconscious program operating behind the scenes of awareness. The false self serves as a way to protect itself from rejection, annihilation, and is ultimately a strategy to be accepted and loved.

For example, family systems, trauma, societal expectations, cultural influences (e.g. belief systems), systemic structures (e.g. academia), institutions (e.g. based in patriarchy, racism, classism), and peers, all contribute to the development of the psyche.

In other words, they are all elements of formative experience that develop our sense of identity because they provide the mirrors we seek to make sense of who we are and how we fit into the larger systems in which we grow.

Self-betrayal and self-avoidance are strategies the false self uses to protect itself.

The false self comes to life through its own denial of itself, and through its projection onto others. If you felt shame, or any sense of inadequacy when you were younger, the false self emerged if there was an inability to embrace, know, tolerate and nurture these earlier wounded parts of your experience.

They then became part of your hidden identity, shut off and thriving in the shadows. When these parts are split off, they end up sabotaging relationships, jobs, health, and wealth. At the core though, they keep us disconnected from our own authentic, soul-based knowing. The inner sense that is certain, clear, and knows exactly who is it, what it’s here for, what it wants, and what it needs.

What do we really want?

We all really want at a rudimentary and fundamental level a general, reliable feeling of resilience, joy, agency, empowerment, freedom, and deep connection to life itself.

Embracing our demons, getting to know their voices, and compassionately understanding their origins can help us decondition ourselves from their grip. This is healing; the birthplace for transformation, and the portal for manifestation of authentic desire.

Consider the example of Ish. The youngest of 3 in an Latin-American family, she grew up surrounded by strong and robust opinions, personalities, and energies. There was little tolerance or space for her to not know or be in a place of exploration; she just wasn’t given any air time to work through her own learning.

Meanwhile, the American school system also imposed its rigid standards on Ish and, as a result, she came to believe that learning should happen fast, and if she doesn’t understand something it means she’s not smart.

This plus the patriarchal systems and institutions conditioning all of the men she encountered to be the leaders, the loudest voices, the interrupters and the authorities, significant aspects of her false self emerged.

False selves are based in beliefs.

Most importantly, beliefs are formed during a time when the mind is a sponge for learning, not for independent or critical thinking. For Ish, her false self-belief, distilled in its deepest form was, “I don’t exist” with tentacles of “I don’t deserve to be heard,” “I have nothing valuable to say,” and “I’m dumb.”

Stemming from the universal need to be love and belonged, Ish cleverly used her innate empathic skills to cultivate a false self whose sole inter-relational quality was one who intently listened and took care of the other. Her false self found worthiness through being able to soak in what others had to say, and to be the one who could was valuable enough to be called upon for others in need. 

The false self found worth in itself in that role. The true self was lost in the dynamic, never feeling safe enough to share its actual authentic voice, let alone believe that it could be celebrated, received, given curiosity, and held in care by the other.

In her adults years, Ish found her worth through relentless efforts to “save” her husbands, or to always “be there” for her friends, seeming to always be in some sort of emotional crisis. In other words, her approach to relationships wasn’t working. because it was both compelled by AND helped quell the false self’s core belief.

Its subconscious story was, “If other people come to me for help and I can offer them space and empathy, and they like me for that, so then I must exist. So then I do matter. Then I am worthy of love.”

And, hey, of course, sure, it’s crucial to show up for the people in our lives we love, but her false self kept her authentic self hidden.

Her authentic self had needs that really wanted to be met. The actual need for closeness, reciprocity, mutuality and being seen, known, and heard in intimately enriching connections.

We all have false selves that have been protective for a long time.

In our early years, many of us learned that it wasn’t safe for us to be authentic selves. To survive, receive care, love and approval, we HAD to stifle some part of us.

The inner work is to heal and integrate those split off, stifled parts.

The answers to creating what you want is known by the demons that you’ve tried to hide from. It is there that we can befriend our scared, split off parts and take the courageous steps to live our lives fully awake and aware, brave and embodied in an implicit worthiness to have what our souls are asking us to call in.

And it turns out those demons are not so scary.

Actually, they’re the sweetest and most sincere parts of you that have felt hurt, scared, and in need of protection. And they need only your gentle presence and attention to listen and hear, and to nurture and soothe.

You can’t do it alone. If you’re ready to join me along The Numinous Path, find booking for sessions here.