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How To Grow As A Person (No Matter What You're Going Through)

John Kim, LMFT
Author:
January 28, 2021
John Kim, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
By John Kim, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
John Kim, LMFT, is an author, speaker, and a licensed marriage and family therapist who goes by the moniker The Angry Therapist.
January 28, 2021

It doesn’t matter what you’re going through—a painful breakup, an addiction, or the stress of everyday life. Building yourself a safe container for your emotions, thoughts, and experiences will always allow you to go through them with a little more ease.

Here are the three steps to building yourself a brand new container, which will promote your growth no matter what you're going through:

Step 1: Realize that transparency is everything.

This is the foundation of everything. Practicing transparency means being vulnerable and honest, and accepting your story. You have to be honest, especially with yourself.

This leads to the second half of practicing transparency: accepting your story. Most people want to rip out chapters. They spend their days regretting and wishing things didn’t happen the way they did. But this keeps you stuck in what could have been instead of what can be.

The more you accept your story, the more transparent you will be. And the more you practice transparency, the richer your growth.

Step 2: Set boundaries.

Most people negotiate more than they realize. Then they wake up one day and wonder why they're so unhappy. You must have non-negotiables, boundaries, things you will not allow into your life.

So let’s do a quick experiment. Take out a piece of paper. Make columns for each part of your life: Friends, work, family, and your romantic relationship or your last romantic relationship. In the columns, write down all the things you have been negotiating. Really think about this. Your standards? Your passions? Your truth? Your voice? Your worth? And what were the consequences? How did these sacrifices impact the quality of your life and beliefs you have about yourself?

Sometimes, I think that growth is about "a reunion with your true self" more than anything else. You must reconnect with that part of you that you stuffed into a hope-chest and locked up when life happened. By "life," I mean death, divorce, a breakup, transition, anything that forced you to grow up fast, to put yourself aside to take care of someone else. These kinds of experiences can lead you to disconnect from your true self and never really get to know them. The action step here is to re-connect with yourself and allow this new relationship to guide your thinking and behavior.

Step 3: Build that container.

As we start practicing transparency and taking a stance, we start to build ourselves a brand new container. We start to pull from a different place. But we don’t just build our container once and it’s done. We must keep building and rebuilding it in continuous practice. As we do, we'll get stronger and more skillful over time.

John Kim, LMFT
John Kim, LMFT

John Kim, LMFT, is an author, speaker, and a licensed marriage and family therapist who goes by the moniker The Angry Therapist. He runs a practice that redefines “therapy” in the traditional sense. Kim became known as an unconventional therapist who worked out of the box by seeing clients at coffee shops, on hikes, in a CrossFit box. He also believes that the internet can act as a therapeutic tool with an online community as the main space for growth and healing. He lives in Los Angeles.

Meet him here and connect with him on Facebook.

Read More About John Kim, LMFT

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More from the author:

How To Attract Your Soul Mate And Discover Your Life's Purpose

Check out You Attract What You Put Out - Learn How To Be An Energetic Match For Your Soul Mate

Learn more
John Kim, LMFT
John Kim, LMFT

John Kim, LMFT, is an author, speaker, and a licensed marriage and family therapist who goes by the moniker The Angry Therapist. He runs a practice that redefines “therapy” in the traditional sense. Kim became known as an unconventional therapist who worked out of the box by seeing clients at coffee shops, on hikes, in a CrossFit box. He also believes that the internet can act as a therapeutic tool with an online community as the main space for growth and healing. He lives in Los Angeles.

Meet him here and connect with him on Facebook.

Read More About John Kim, LMFT

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