A few months ago, I wrote an introductory post about how to spot the signs of shapeshifting and what the cost of adapting to your environment can be. This post considers what happens when you’ve been shapeshifting for a long time and it’s become completely second nature. It explores how it becomes difficult to answer the question ‘who am I?’ and makes ease and joy hard to access.
What this looks like in practice
The shapeshifters I see in my counselling practice are far from lazy. It requires a lot of energy to be the consummate professional or the perfect partner, parent or friend. I hear a lot from my shapeshifting clients about what they do in service of others, or to ensure that everything is just as it should be.
They always operate with the best of intentions. They’re nice people who want to succeed and be good at what they do. But when asked what they want for themselves, they can be at a loss.
It’s common for them to answer these kinds of questions through the lens of striving to keep up their efforts and appearances. To keep on keeping on. It can be genuinely difficult for them to think of themselves first because they’ve spent so long putting others first.
Always looking outside yourself
The premise of shapeshifting is that it exists to fill a relational gap. This means that the challenge for shapeshifters becomes that their focus of attention is always on the external.
They are always on alert to what’s going on in their external environment. They are always second-guessing others’ needs, seeking the answer to ‘am I enough?’ and trying to improve who they are in order to perform better
Shapeshifting is not built on a solid sense of self-worth. It’s shored up at the mercy of others. And if this behaviour has continued for many years, it’s hard to separate whether the way you think and behave is the real you, or if you have actually travelled a long way from your true self.
Why ease and joy are specifically hard to reach
It’s not the case that shapeshifters don’t know how to enjoy themselves. It’s more that other things get in the way and block it.
Because they’re always on alert for signals in their environment, it’s hard for them to stop and sit still. Shapeshifting often gets enmeshed with anxiety and perfectionism. This can make it ever more difficult to relax and seek out pleasure.
To experience joy, you need to let your guard down. You need to get out of your own way and relax. That’s understandably a challenge when you’re always focused on the needs of others before your own.
Noticing is the starting point
Because shapeshifting is focused on constant adaptation to the external environment, over time it becomes harder to get a clear picture of what your needs are, and find a sense of ease and flow in your life.
Recognising that you shapeshift is the starting point. From there you can start to consider what the root causes of this behaviour are and if it has been doing you a disservice.
What sits underneath all of this, and what you do to create more supportive patterns of behaviour is for a later date. For now, simply noticing where and when you shapeshift and what it prevents you doing for yourself is enough.
You can read my previous introductory post about shapeshifting via the link below:
Shapeshifting – When the Person You’ve Become Isn’t Really You
If this post has resonated with you, you may also find the following posts interesting:
Fawning and Burnout – When Being Accommodating Backfires at Work
