Inside every person…

This is always a good reminder that each of us carries around a story that others do not see. This is true for all of us. So, I encourage you to not judge a book by its cover and remember that we each carry hurts and burdens that do not show.

For folks with trauma, the person they don’t know might be the one staring back at them in the mirror. Sometimes this is because they do not recognize the person they had to become to survive, and sometimes it is a more of a depersonalization experience of profound disconnection and disowning of themselves.  There are ways to learn to reconnect and return to a more authentic self. Often, this needs to happen in a therapeutic setting. Sometimes this can come from getting out of the situation and finding a new, loving and supportive environment to be in.

For those in the LGBTQIA community this carries a lot of different meanings. There might be a schism between the person the world sees and the person they know themselves to be. Sometimes it is about not really knowing who that authentic you is and about finding that out for yourself.

And in the vein of not judging a book by its cover, here is a friendly reminder that we make a lot of assumptions and do a lot of categorizing based on what we see and believe, but that doesn’t mean that we are right. Just because a person appears female, does not mean that this is how they identify and just because someone is partners with a person of the ‘opposite’ sex as them, does not mean that they are necessarily heterosexual.

We all carry multitudes and those multitudes and many ways of being deserve respect and acknowledgment.