Video Exploration · Inside the Tango Laboratory · 1 min
You’re More Than You Think
with Valeria Zolotco
Psychoanalyst & Founder of Psychology of Movement
About
“That’s just who I am.” It can sound like self-knowledge. Sometimes it is where we stop looking.
We may think of ourselves as capable, dependable or reserved. We know how to get things done, keep the peace or hold everything together. Yet the identity we recognise is also shaped by what once felt safe to express. Other parts of us never had much room to develop.
Perhaps decisiveness felt dangerous because disagreement threatened a relationship. Perhaps tenderness had no place in a life built around responsibility. Perhaps you learned to be sensible long before you had the freedom to be playful.
Through a Jungian lens, the shadow includes qualities we have never allowed ourselves to develop. What remains outside our familiar identity may include vitality, ambition, sensuality or the capacity to say no.
This is one of the questions running through my book, The Energy of Change: The Whole Path in Every Step. What happens when another person awakens a possibility we have not yet claimed as our own? The story invites us to look beyond fascination with the other and ask what is seeking expression within us.
Its archetypal images invite us to recognise something of ourselves through feelings and associations. A character may irritate us, attract us or stay in our thoughts long before we understand why. That response can become the beginning of an inner conversation.