Intimacy with Self

“My expectation in life is to be invisible, and I’m good at it.” This phrase, spoken by a fictional character, Mia Thermopolis, in the movie Princess Diaries, always stood out to me and seeming to apply to my life. I couched it with Christian language, trying to convince myself that I was trying to be humble, but the underlying prevailing thought was rooted in self-hatred. While including my sexuality, these thoughts also came from a broader comprehensive picture of my experiences. I didn’t like myself, I thought I was no good and I did everything in power to not let anyone, including myself, acknowledge who I was. Yet today, I can relate to the chapter “Intimacy with Self” in The Intimacy Deficit where Ed Shaw describes delighting in yourself, knowing that you belong to God through creation and redemption. I cannot recount here all of the years of personal struggle or the boundless patience and grace that God showed me in this transformation, but one catalyst that God used in my life towards this growth was counselling. 

Initial counselling experience

I first saw a counsellor when I was 12 years old when a youth pastor insisted to my parents that I needed help. I did need help, but I was nowhere near ready to talk about things like how a learning difficulty, at that time still undiagnosed, had shattered my self-worth, or how my mind and body was reacting to other girls in a way that I didn’t understand and made me feel terrible about myself, or about how I always felt like love had to be earned and would only be expressed when certain expectations were met. At that time, I found going to counselling useless, and it probably was, I didn’t like myself, I thought I was no good. Shortly after that, I came to faith in Christ. I knew that God created me, knew me intimately, and loved me enough to send His son to die for me, but that knowledge of truth did not immediately impact how I internally saw myself. Over the next several years, I grew a lot in my faith, but while I rarely admitted it to others, I continued to carry guilt and shame when I thought about myself. 

Exploring my same-sex attraction

I next went to counselling when I was 18. I was dealing with acute grief after the loss of several friends and also talked of my foundational years, view of self and how that impacted my walk with God. Through this season, I became more honest about some of my struggles that were holding me back from intimacy with self, but did little to alleviate the underlying thoughts.When I was 25, I chose to pursue counselling again, because I saw how my view of self was negatively impacting my relationships and ministry, and influencing my use of pornography and sexual sin. I saw a lot of growth spiritually, emotionally and mentally, as I worked with my counsellor and opened up with a support group at my church. I began to process more of my experience with same-sex attraction and what it means for my identity to be in Christ. This growth was slow, but steady, through most of the next decade.

Breakthrough

Then in 2020, with the isolation of Covid lockdowns and some other situational conflict, I found myself riddled with anxiety and buried anew by old self-hatred I thought I had worked through. I ended up in a program of 6 weeks of intensive counselling including daily individual sessions, art therapy, pastoral support and group meetings. My primary counsellor there used a particular method of therapy that at first seemed ridiculous to me. But I kept going. After about 4 weeks, there was a moment that I cannot explain, but something in my brain felt different. I sat in my counsellor’s office metaphorically looking at a young version of myself, and for the first time in my life felt real love for myself and glimpses of delight as I thought of who I was. Everything after that seemed like I was seeing myself and imagining how God saw me, through a new lens. 

Renewal and restoration

I was shocked how different I felt and how that new view of self persisted. Years after that moment with my counsellor, something will come up that historically would have been a trigger sending my mind down a rabbit hole of self-hatred. But now those same triggers are met in my mind with the goodness of God and His work in my life. I’m finding the deepest delight in myself in the very things that used to create an immovable barrier to intimacy with self. This process of growing in delight in myself has been slow and arduous. I still need to take every thought captive and not allow temptation to draw be back to the negative view of self that was so prominent in my life for so long. But the intimacy with self that I have today, grounded in who I am in Christ, has led to deeper joy and freedom than I knew was possible.  

This article was originally published in the Winter 2025 edition of the TFT magazine, Ascend. Click the button below to download your copy.