VIDEO
AUDIO
When we betray ourselves, we abandon our values, needs, or truths to gain approval or avoid discomfort. This leaves us disconnected, fragmented, and unsure of who we really are. Self-betrayal often start in childhood, where conditional love or invalidation teaches us to hide our authentic selves to stay safe or gain acceptance. We see this in our daily lives—staying in unbalanced relationships, ignoring our emotions, overworking, or making choices that don’t align with who we are. We justify it, suppress what we feel, or take on others’ beliefs without realizing how much it costs us. Trauma can make this worse by teaching us to keep our needs small or invisible, while societal norms push us to conform and silence our inner voice. To heal, we need to reconnect with our true selves. That means facing the parts of us we’ve denied, listening to our intuition, setting boundaries, and taking small steps toward living in line with our values. This isn’t easy, but it’s how we find our way back to a life that feels whole, honest, and truly ours.
Prepare to discover what it means to act against your own values and needs, how emotional suppression, societal pressures, and unresolved trauma shape behaviors that disconnect you from your true self, which thought patterns, emotional habits, and external influences drive actions that compromise your integrity, whether internal conflicts and unmet needs can be transformed through self-reflection, why aligning with your authentic self is essential for psychological growth, meaningful relationships, and living a fulfilling life.
Here’s The Dream We Analyze:
I am congested, though I don’t feel sick, other than the sensation of needing to blow my nose. I anticipate that what will come out is mucus—not runny, but something ball-like and formed. I feel a tickle in my nasal cavity, but every time I try to blow, nothing comes out. Finally, I manage to get something out, but I’m immediately horrified to see it’s a living creature—a prehistoric bug that is rust-colored with six legs on either side and a flat, oval-shaped body. I immediately recognize it as a ‘troglodyte’ and feel disgusted. This experience continues over and over again: the feeling that there is something in my nose, difficulty getting it out, and then blowing out a ‘troglodyte.’ When the troglodyte comes out, it quickly scurries away, like a cockroach exposed to light. Each time this happens, I am convinced beforehand that this time it will just be mucus. In the dream, there is a sense that if I blow enough, I can ‘get to the bottom’ of the bugs, but this never happens. At one point, I wet one of the bugs with water from my faucet, though I don’t know why. It expands in size like a foamy mushroom bug, which horrifies me. I tell my mother about what I’m experiencing, and she says she had the same thing; I just need to get an antiviral from my doctor, and it will clear up. I’m immediately angry because I feel that she obviously gave me this ailment. She brushes off this accusation, and it seems that she either can’t hear me or doesn’t care. Then I wake up.
