Becoming Our Authentic Selves — And Helping Our Kids Do the Same

Oct 16

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I see a reel on Instagram (where a lot of my inspiration comes from these days), and it just sticks.

Recently, I came across this reel of Dr. Gabor Maté talking about authenticity. I saved it on July 11th, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

Want to dive deeper?
Watch the full version of the conversation here:
🎥 YouTube: Dr. Gabor Maté on Authenticity

Why Is It So Hard to Be Ourselves?

What Dr. Maté says helped me understand why it can be so hard for us to truly know who we are—and who we were created to be.

It’s not just about us. It also speaks directly to what we can do as parents to help our children grow into their most authentic selves.

I say often:
“My job is not to fix anyone.”
Because I don’t believe anyone is more broken than anyone else.

But many of us—myself included—have learned to put up walls. We’ve built defenses to protect ourselves from potential abandonment by the people we depend on most.

The Cost of Hiding

As children, we pick up early on that our anger, fear, or sadness might create disconnection from caregivers who don’t know how to hold those emotions. So we hide them. We stuff them down. We fear that expressing certain parts of ourselves might make the love go away—or that the connection will break permanently.

And of course, this is rarely a conscious choice.

As Dr. Maté says, it’s not because our parents didn’t love us—or because we don’t love our kids—it’s because many of us were never taught how to handle big emotions. We’re scared of our own, so we’re scared of others’.

But Are Emotions Sinful?

I can already hear the pushback:
“But aren’t emotions sinful?”

Personally, I don’t think that’s true.

Our emotions are given to us by God—and He wants us to be who He created us to be.

For people like me—emotional people—that might sometimes look like “kind of a mess.” But that’s part of being human. We need our emotions to help us process the hard stuff we face every day.

What This Means for Me as a Parent

I’m learning to accept the parts of me that make me uncomfortable. And in doing so, I hope I’m becoming more of my authentic self.

My goal as a parent is to encourage my girls to do the same.

I want them to know:

You are loved.
You are safe.
You can bring every part of who you are to me.

Isn’t that what God asks of us, too?

What This Looks Like in Practice

So, practically, what do I do with all of this?

When I feel emotions I’d rather avoid, I try to:

Notice them
Acknowledge them
Stay with them, even when it’s uncomfortable

Sometimes I imagine the emotion in my body—what it looks like, where I feel it—and then release it, like letting go of a balloon.

When it’s my kids feeling something big, I try to do the same:

I let them know it’s OK to feel what they feel.
If they’re open (which isn’t always the case!), I walk them through what it means to actually feel the emotion.
If they’re not, I don’t push.

Instead, I: