Don't be you — and what it costs

In Transactional Analysis (TA), we talk about injunctions — the early messages we absorb, often wordlessly, about who it is safe or acceptable to be. One of the most common, and most quietly devastating, is: don't be you.

It doesn't arrive as a direct instruction. It comes through a raised eyebrow, a redirected ambition, a family system that needs you to be a particular shape. It comes through cultures that, fractured by colonisation, lost their original language for the full complexity of a human being. It comes through schools, workplaces, and relationships that reward performance over presence.

Many of the people who find their way to therapy are carrying this injunction — often without knowing it. They have become extraordinarily good at reading rooms, managing impressions, and making themselves legible to others. And they are exhausted.

The work of therapy — real therapy — is not to fix you. It is to return you to yourself. To distinguish what was always yours from what you learned to carry for others. To find out what don't be you cost — and what it might feel like to begin putting it down.