Loving the Parts of Yourself You Were Taught to Reject

In the last two blogs, I shared about my free-spirit nature and my complicated relationship with the holidays. These are two of my shadow parts — the places where I once felt defective.

One of them, the free spirit, I now truly love. The other — my resistance to the material side of the holidays — is still a work in progress.

And that’s okay.

Learning to love our shadow parts isn’t about becoming perfect for others. It’s about having compassion for ourselves as human beings. Perfection is an impossible standard, yet somehow we still measure our worth against it.

Self-worth is not built through perfection. It is built through compassion.

Our shadows often form around expectations — expectations others placed on us or ones we silently placed on ourselves.

I recently spoke with a client who shared that every relationship seems to fizzle out around the three-month mark. She explained that she tries to help men “understand women better.” What she really meant was that she tries to fix them — to shape them into what she believes they should be.

And when they don’t meet her expectations, or don’t want to become who she wants them to be, the relationship ends. Each ending chips away at her self-worth.

The pattern is clear: seeking perfection while withholding compassion leads us back to the same heartbreak again and again.

Maybe part of her doesn’t even want a relationship, but the pressure of comparison keeps her chasing one. Maybe she doesn’t yet see her own role in the cycle. Maybe she’s afraid to be anything but perfect.

And that’s the shadow.

When we ask ourselves which parts of us are hardest to love, we are really asking:

Where am I still measuring my worth by expectations rather than compassion?

How would your life change if you stopped trying to reach perfection and simply loved yourself right here — imperfect, unfinished, human?

For me, I’ve learned to fully love the free-spirit part of who I am. And I’m learning — slowly, gently — to love the part of me that doesn’t want to conform to how the world says I should celebrate.

This is what compassion looks like:

Not fixing.

Not forcing.

Just allowing ourselves to be.

Self-worth grows when shame loses its job.

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