The Parts of Ourselves We Learn Not to Value

For a long time, when I looked in the mirror, I searched for my father, and his way of moving through the world.

I wanted to mirror him. And professionally, it served me well.

My mother was different.

She was intuitive, emotional, and deeply relational. And for years, if I am honest, I saw those qualities as somehow lesser. To me, my father represented strength in the way the world seemed to reward it. My mother embodied another kind of intelligence and strength that I simply did not yet value.

It took me years, and many miles lived abroad, to understand how incomplete my perception was.

And perhaps even more confronting: how much of myself I had spent overlooking because of it.

My mother saw me when I didn’t want to see myself.

While I was busy building a career and proving myself professionally, she loved me for who I already was, not for who I should become. She rooted for me when I could not root for myself. She cared for me when I neglected myself.

Then somewhere along the way, I began to realise something painful: many times, I was absent even when present.

I remember moments where she was speaking to me and I was physically there, yet emotionally elsewhere. Not truly listening. Distracted by work, pressure, ambition, or my own inner noise. Sometimes I even had to ask her to repeat what she had said.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening. Now I do.

I had learned to live almost entirely from my mind. From performance, analysis, striving, proving. And in doing so, I had disconnected from softer parts of myself: emotion, intuition, tenderness, presence.

The irony is that these were precisely the qualities my mother embodied naturally.

And perhaps that is why I struggled to fully value them in her too.

Because often, the qualities we diminish in others are the very qualities we have rejected in ourselves.

Over time, something began to shift.

I started listening more carefully. Not only to others, but to myself. To my emotions. To what my body was trying to tell me long before my mind caught up. I became softer. Kinder. Especially toward my mother, but also toward myself.

And slowly, my definition of strength began to change. And with it, my definition of success.

I realised I didn’t just inherit my father’s fire. I inherited my mother’s way of being too: her optimism, her softness, her steady strength, her energy, her joy for life. Ánd her capacity to keep growing, learning and evolving, even now at 82.

For years, I couldn’t see these qualities for what they were.
I confused softness with weakness, emotionality with fragility, and a different kind of intelligence with something lesser.

Only later did I begin to understand how much strength and wisdom these qualities carry.

And maybe this is part of becoming whole:
recognising that the parts of ourselves we once dismissed are often the parts we need most.

More than anything, I feel gratitude.

For the woman who saw me before I could see myself. Who loved me before I learned to love myself.
And who, without ever trying to shape me into someone else, shaped me more profoundly than she´ll ever realise.

Warmly,
Christel