David Benner, professor of psychology and spirituality, powerfully named this temptation we all have to deny particular “parts” of our lives. In his book The Gift of Being Yourself, he described the challenge: Genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcomed parts of self. While we tend to think of ourselves as a single, unified self, what we call “I” is really a family of many part-selves. That in itself is not a particular problem. The problem lies in the fact that many of these part-selves are unknown to us. Even though they are
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