Who do you think you are?
What turning up on Instagram reminded me about protector parts.
This week, I started showing up on Instagram. Properly showing up. My face, my voice, talking about shadow work.
It doesn’t sound like much. People post on Instagram every second of every day.
For me, it took months of telling myself I’d start, and then about a week of false starts when I actually did. I would record something, watch it back, and delete it. I would write a caption, read it again an hour later and hate it.
For years, the public version of me that existed online was the financial modelling guy. Spreadsheets, project finance, debt structures, the occasional strong opinion about a circular reference. That persona was safe. It was competent, it was useful, and crucially, it didn’t require any vulnerability from me.
Now I was about to show up as someone else entirely. A person in their fifties who has trained as a depth psychotherapist, who came out later in life, who talks about grief and the body and the parts of us we learned to hide. Talking about feelings. On camera.
And the voices in my head had a great deal to say about that.
Who do you think you are?
People know you as the financial modelling guy. This is embarrassing.
You are 54. This is a young person’s game. You will look ridiculous.
What will the modelling crowd think when this shows up in their feed?
The old advice would tell me to push past it:
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Fake it till you make it.
Silence your inner critic.
But this doesn’t work.
Those voices are not enemies to be defeated. They are a part of me. And like every part, they are not trying to hurt me.
They are trying to protect me.
So before I deleted another video, I did something different. I stopped, and I turned towards it.
What are you afraid will happen if I post this?
And the fears were clear.
Fear of being humiliated.
Fear it would be too much, too visible.
Fear that people would look, and laugh, and turn away.
In other words, all the same fears I’ve carried from childhood.
All the fears that kept my queerness hidden for so long.
And so turning up on Instagram as therapy Kenny was another coming out of sorts, and came with all the same anxieties.
Jung described the shadow as everything we learned, early on, to keep out of sight. The parts of us that, at some point, it felt unsafe to show.
For a lot of us, being seen was one of those things.
Putting my hand up in class, getting the wrong answer, and being laughed at.
Singing a song in the living room with my whole heart and being told I’m showing off.
Being confident and loud, and being told I’m too big for my boots.
As children, we learn.
We take the part of ourselves that wanted to be seen, and we fold it down small and put it away.
We build a self that stays safe instead. Competent, contained, useful.
A protector part emerges to make sure bad things don’t happen again.
Once established, that part can keep doing its job for decades, long after the danger has passed. That part is still 8 years old; it does not know we are now 54.
It does not know we are safe now.
And it certainly does not want us making a giant arse of ourselves on Instagram and ruining my career and my life. (It can be a bit dramatic sometimes.)
Who do you think you are is a question about safety. The part is not making an accurate assessment of whether I am allowed to do this or whether it’s actually a good idea. It is reaching for the most powerful thing it knows to stop me from walking towards exposure.
And shame is powerful. Shame has stopped more people from showing up as themselves than fear of failure ever has.
It was shame that kept me pretending to be straight for so long.
So the work was not to argue with the part, or to drown it out with affirmations, or to grit my teeth and override it. The work was to let it know I had heard it and that I understood what it was afraid of.
That is a very different thing from pushing past it. Turning towards it and bringing it with me is how it slowly learns that the world has changed.
I posted the video.
You probably have your own version of this.
And you will have a voice that tells you exactly who you think you are, and is very sure you are not allowed to become anyone else.
The next time you hear it, do not push past it, and do not obey it.
Try turning towards it, allowing it, and asking it what it is afraid of.
It might have been waiting a long time for someone to ask.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Instagram. Please?