I wholeheartedly agree that any “helper” who wants to sanitize who you are doesn’t have your actual best interests at heart. We cannot escape our shadow, our wounds or our pasts, and it wouldn’t be healthy to, even if we could. Learning to recognize, embrace and weave those parts into the fabric of our lives gives us access to a richer, more nuanced self who can operate more from a place of choice, rather than a place of reflexive response to stimuli.

I have no desire to be smooth and plastic, but I also want to have enough self-awareness around what is driving me to be able to notice when it’s old monster’s stories and not actually me — all of me that has the wheel.