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The Naked Truth | Accept your shadow self to keep the love alive in a relationship – don’t hide the dark parts of yourself from your partner
- Being invested in another person forces us to hold a mirror up to ourselves, but it can be challenging to accept or reveal our faults – or our ‘shadow self’
- More often than not, people try to mask who they truly are when in a relationship and they feel lonely as a result because they are abandoning their true selves
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
They say what you don’t know won’t hurt you. In my view, this is a cop-out that only promotes ignorance over confronting hard – but necessary – truths.
No relationship is perfect, but that doesn’t deter people from wanting to find their ideal partner. But when a relationship hits a rough patch, some people fall apart and choose to run away without finding out the cause of the problem.
So what you don’t want to know could kill your relationship.
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Relationships, which are about embracing both the good and the bad, are designed to help us see ourselves. Being invested in another person forces us to hold a mirror up to ourselves – it can be enlightening, but it can also be challenging to accept our faults – or our “shadow self”.
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Michelle Harris, a well-being counsellor and empowerment mentor for individuals, couples, and organisations, explains what the “shadow” of a relationship is and how it can affect us and our love life.
“At our core, we all desire to love and be loved, to be accepted and to fit in. We want to be appreciated for who we are, and for others to see our uniqueness and the ‘truth’ of who we are. Yet most people don’t allow themselves to be seen for who they truly are. They hide parts of themselves, which they don’t like, and they keep these parts in the dark.”
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