There is a question underneath so much of the work we do in therapy:

Who am I underneath everything I learned I needed to be?

Underneath the roles. The coping mechanisms. The expectations. The diagnoses. The versions of ourselves we created to be loved, accepted, safe, successful, or needed.

I believe there is something deeply healing about truly knowing yourself.

Not just knowing that you are anxious, that you tend to people-please, or that you have a certain attachment style. I mean developing a deeper understanding of why you move through the world the way you do. What drives you. What scares you. What you protect. What you value. What you have learned to hide. And what parts of yourself may have been sitting just beneath the surface, waiting to be recognized

This is one of the driving approaches behind the work I do at Roots Healing Alliance.

Over and over, I have watched clients gain an incredible amount of clarity when they begin to understand themselves at this level. And perhaps even more importantly, that clarity can create a different kind of connection to self.

When we don’t know ourselves well, we often look outward for answers.

Am I making the right decision?

Was I wrong for feeling that way?

Do they still love me?

Am I a good person?

What should I do?

Who am I supposed to be?

There is nothing wrong with wanting connection or reassurance from other people. We are relational beings. But there is a difference between being connected to others and needing other people to continually tell us who we are.

The more we know ourselves, the less foreign our own internal world becomes.

And sometimes the answers we have spent years looking for outside of ourselves were already there, just under the surface.

Creating a Map of the Self

One way I begin this process with clients is through psychodynamic exploration of personality development.

I often use the Enneagram as one framework for understanding these developmental pathways. I am less interested in using it as a personality quiz that tells someone “what type they are” and much more interested in what it can reveal about how a person learned to navigate themselves, other people, and the world around them.

When explored therapeutically, personality can give us a map.

We can begin asking:

What qualities did you learn were acceptable?
What parts of yourself did you disown or deny?
What role do you automatically take in relationships?
What are you protecting yourself from?
What do you believe you need from other people in order to feel okay?
How do you interpret the world around you?
What might growth look like if you no longer had to organize your life around the same old protective patterns?

This can be especially powerful for clients who have spent years saying, “I don’t know why I do this.”

Sometimes people cannot immediately identify their deepest fear, motivation, or emotional wound. Having language for their experience can create an almost immediate sense of resonance.

Oh. That’s me.

Other people experience this too.

There is actually a reason I do this.

That recognition can reduce shame and give us somewhere to begin.

The goal isn’t to place someone into another box. The goal is actually the opposite.

It is to understand the box you may have unknowingly been living inside so that you have the freedom to step outside of it.

Meeting the Parts of Yourself You Learned to Hide

Another major part of my work is shadow work.

Our “shadow” is not simply the dark or bad parts of ourselves. It can include anything we learned was unacceptable, unsafe, shameful, inconvenient, or incompatible with the person we believed we needed to become.

Anger.

Neediness.

Confidence.

Assertiveness.

Sensitivity.

Ambition.

Vulnerability.

Power.

Even joy.

When certain qualities do not feel safe to express, we may push them away. But disowning something does not necessarily make it disappear.

Instead, it can begin influencing us from outside of our awareness.

This is why I spend time helping clients uncover their shame stories: the beliefs they have developed about what certain feelings, needs, traits, or behaviors supposedly mean about them.

Those stories can drive protective behaviors and the masks we wear.

Maybe being needed became safer than having needs.

Maybe being agreeable became safer than risking conflict.

Maybe achievement became proof of worth.

Maybe independence became protection from disappointment.

Maybe being “the strong one” meant never allowing anyone to see how much you were actually carrying.

Rather than immediately trying to get rid of these patterns, I want to understand them.

What did this once protect you from?

And then:

Do you still need it to protect you in the same way today?

Your Triggers Can Tell Us Something

I also love exploring projections with clients. My clients may not always love where this conversation takes us, but their ‘wait… don’t make this about me’ moment is usually where things start getting interesting.

Most of us have experienced someone who seems to get under our skin in a way that feels completely disproportionate.

Sometimes there is a perfectly valid reason for that reaction. But other times, the intensity itself becomes interesting.

Why this person?

Why this trait?

Why does their confidence feel arrogant to me?

Why does their emotionality make me so uncomfortable?

Why does their need for attention make me irrationally angry?

Why am I fascinated by someone who seems completely unlike me?

Instead of stopping at “they trigger me,” we can become curious about what the trigger reveals.

Sometimes the traits we react most strongly to in other people are connected to qualities we have complicated relationships with inside ourselves.

A person who was taught never to be “selfish” may become intensely reactive to someone who takes up space without apologizing.

Someone who learned to stay small may feel both irritated by and fascinated with confidence.

Someone who survived by being controlled may have strong reactions to emotional unpredictability.

Projection work isn’t about blaming ourselves for other people’s behavior. It is about becoming curious about why certain experiences activate something so powerful within us.

And sometimes, through that exploration, we reclaim qualities we didn’t even realize belonged to us.

What Is Sacred to You?

One of my favorite parts of this work is core value clarification.

And I don’t mean choosing five appealing words from a list.

I typically spend around two sessions exploring values with a client because I want us to take our time discovering what actually feels defining.

What anchors you when everything else feels uncertain?
What feels sacred to you?
What would you refuse to abandon, even during the hardest seasons of your life?
What makes you feel most like yourself?

We work toward identifying two central values.

I think of one as being rooted in the heart: the value that emotionally grounds you and connects you back to yourself.

The other is rooted in the mind: the value that helps guide your choices and behavior.

When people know what they stand for, decision-making can begin to change.

Instead of only asking:

“What will make everyone else happy?”

we can begin asking:

“What choice allows me to remain aligned with who I know myself to be?”

That does not make every decision easy.

But it gives us an internal compass.

Knowledge Is Power. Even When the Thing You’re Learning About Is Your Own Mind

I also believe strongly in psychoeducation.

Sometimes people have spent years fighting themselves because nobody ever explained what was actually happening inside of them.

Understanding your brain systems, nervous system, protective responses, emotional patterns, or the mechanisms behind a diagnosis can fundamentally change your relationship with your symptoms.

There is a difference between:

“What is wrong with me?”

and:

“I know what my brain is doing right now.”

There is a difference between experiencing a symptom as something mysterious and uncontrollable and being able to recognize:

I know this pattern. I understand what is happening. And I know how I want to respond to it.

Knowledge does not mean we can simply think our way out of every emotional experience.

But understanding creates options.

And options create agency.

The Goal Is Integration, Not Perfection

Ultimately, the goal of this work is not to create a “better” version of yourself.

It is to become a more whole version of yourself.

To know the parts of you that feel easy to love and the parts you would rather nobody see.
To understand your patterns without allowing them to define you.
To recognize the masks that once protected you and decide when you no longer need to wear them.
To understand what triggers you without immediately becoming consumed by the reaction.
To know what you value deeply enough that it can guide you when life becomes loud.
To understand your own mind well enough that you can work with it instead of constantly fighting against it.

And eventually, something begins to shift.

You don’t need someone else to explain every feeling back to you.
You don’t need as much external permission to trust what you know.
You don’t have to search endlessly for the person who will finally give you the answer that makes everything click.

Because therapy has helped you build a relationship with the person who will be with you through every relationship, transition, loss, achievement, mistake, and version of your life:

yourself.

That is why knowing yourself is not just an interesting part of therapy to me.

It is part of the healing.

At Roots Healing Alliance, my goal is not to tell you who you are.

It is to help you become curious enough, compassionate enough, and connected enough to yourself that you can discover that answer for yourself.

Because so often, what we are searching for isn’t missing.

It’s just waiting beneath the surface to be known.

The Healing Power of Knowing Yourself: Why Self-Knowledge Is at the Heart of My Approach