Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
Freedom through metaphor.
Questions of self-esteem strongly affect a person’s development and everyday choices. Lacking the right to judge your own successes and personal qualities holds a person back in their development for a long time and steers what they do away from the gifts nature gave them.
Perception becomes distorted, and over time the distortion feels normal.
When a young child is judged negatively, when their “inconvenient” qualities and ways of being are ignored or denied, the child may be pushed to block their “wrong” behaviour. To hide their real personality deep inside and grow a false one instead: convenient, fitting, rewarded by the environment they grow up in. To do this, the child somehow has to learn to suppress their true nature. To feel one thing and show quite the opposite. In order to earn the approval and attention of the people around them. And so to secure their support and their own survival.
This split closes off access to the natural riches of the Soul. It leads to blocks and detours in development.
How does this happen?
Let us turn to a metaphor:
Fish usually live under water. Their bodies have gills to breathe under water, scales that help them adapt to their habitat and fins that help them move through the water. Imagine that the parents of one little Fish spent their whole lives in a nest in a tree. That is what their parents taught them, and their parents before them. And so on without end. This is usually how family and ancestral scripts are passed down.
Can you picture it?
- How will our little Fish’s life turn out?
- Will she feel at ease and free?
- Does life in a tree help her develop, say, her ability to swim or breathe under water?
- Will there be comfort, pleasure and joy in her life?
Our little Fish’s life in these conditions looks hard and tense. And often hopeless. The Fish herself will most likely feel “wrong” and “bad” all her life and hide from others behind overgrown psychological defences.
Do you think she has any chance of ever reaching the water?
The environment where she could unfold as fully as possible what nature gave her?
Many people live like this today. They build “nests” instead of finding their natural inclinations and living in an environment that suits them.
People busy only with survival. They feel, vaguely or clearly, that the life they live is not quite their own, and they long for cloudless days, for a life without struggle and suffering, which they call “happiness”.
Notice that happiness here means the absence of suffering, not joy, success, pleasure or flourishing.
Their natural gifts, talents and abilities people often call “weaknesses”, “shortcomings”, “minuses”. They hide them deep inside and spend a great deal of effort concealing and suppressing the “imperfect” sides of themselves. They fight against themselves, losing energy and the precious time given to them for life and growth.
This is not rare, and the popular idea of “fighting your shortcomings” is a sure-fire theme for a great many personal development and growth projects.
Today many people hesitate in front of the sheer variety of tools for healing, help and change in life. Searching for guaranteed answers, they often waste precious time and energy.
Will it help?
There is no simple answer: it takes an individual approach, trial and error, your own experience.
- Are you tired of hiding your “true face”?
- Do you have to keep yourself within strict limits?
- Do you follow social norms to the letter?
- Are you upset that you cannot live up to generally accepted standards?
- Do you keep comparing yourself with others?
- Does your self-esteem swing from “plus” to “minus” depending on what others think of you?
- Do you judge yourself by what you have or do not have?
- Are joy and pleasure present only in your dreams of the future?
Perhaps it is time to look at life differently and broaden your idea of yourself!
To gain tools for working with yourself and others!
What you consider shortcomings and minuses, what you reject in yourself, may turn out to be your true nature!
How can you understand this, and what can you do?
One of the finest and most effective tools for development, psychological help and change in life is metaphorical associative cards (MAC).
MAC cards let you gently touch the deep layers of the psyche, which are often out of reach of the conscious mind because of blocking beliefs. Metaphorical reality opens up ways to gently get round blocking beliefs and touch lost facets and images of yourself.
That means showing even more compassion, helping abilities and talents to unfold, and learning to create a good atmosphere for growth.
The greatest advantage of MAC is that they can restore lost wholeness in a short time, let you live through “inconvenient” and rejected experiences and feelings, and give freedom to your natural ways of being.
The possibilities of metaphor are limitless! Want to see for yourself?
Curious about what MAC cards can do?
Our course “Metaphorical Universe” was devoted to working with metaphorical associative cards.
More about the course here
