The Old You Deserves To Be Honored, Too

The version of yourself that you’re ashamed of saved you in ways you don’t even remember. Honor her before you try to change her.

You keep trying to love yourself into someone new, but you’re doing it wrong.

You’re approaching healing like renovation—tear down the old, build something prettier. But what if the version of yourself you’re ashamed of isn’t the problem you need to solve? What if she’s the solution you’ve been overlooking?

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Why We Get Healing Wrong

We’ve been taught that growth means leaving parts of ourselves behind. The anxious version. The people-pleasing version. The version that made choices you can’t understand now. We treat these selves like mistakes to be corrected instead of teachers to be honored.

But here’s what therapy doesn’t tell you: the version of yourself you’re trying to outgrow saved your life in ways you don’t even remember. She learned to read micro-expressions because love was conditional. She learned to make herself small because big feelings weren’t safe. She learned to say yes when she meant no because no wasn’t an option.

Conventional healing approaches miss this completely. They want you to change the behavior without acknowledging the intelligence behind it. They want you to stop being anxious without recognizing that your anxiety has been your early warning system. They want you to set boundaries without honoring the version of yourself that learned survival meant having none.

What’s actually needed isn’t abandonment of who you were. It’s integration. It’s learning to honor the intelligence of your survival while choosing something different now.

Four Ways to Honor Your Past Selves