The Authentic Expression As you have learned by reading the introduction, authenticity can influence your life and your relationship with your partner in a deeply meaningful, positive and healthful way. Authenticity can introduce a new level of close connectedness and meaning to your relationship with your partner and help you to grow on a personal level. To maintain our path toward understanding how can you connect with your partner and with the other people in an authentic, intimate and sincere way by expressing your true self, we will start by looking into the process of authentic expression. The authentic expression includes accurate and genuine verbal or behavioral expression of how you feel, what you want or what you believe to your …show more content…
To express yourself sincerely and honestly entails you expressing your feelings, thoughts or needs to your partner without any conscious deceit or pretense. However, the process of genuine expression does not only heavily rely on sincerity, but it is also founded on expressing the genuine felt and accurately recognized emotion, thought or desire. This is the reason why the practice of authentic expression starts by accurately recognizing your genuine emotions, desires or thoughts and learning to become aware of the cognitive and emotional processes that can mislead you from your genuine inner experiences. Even though they function on the unconscious level, processes like cognitive distortions, judgmental thinking, rigid or fused internal boundaries, and intense negative emotional arousal can mislead you from communicating your genuine feelings or desires despite your conscious effort. Your feelings and thoughts can also be strongly shaped by emotionally important relationships from your past which affect both how secure you feel in your current relationship and how much anxiety or fear from rejection you might face when you try to unveil your most profound and genuine feelings, needs and thoughts to your partner. On the following pages, we will not only bring these processes into the light, but we will look into practical ways to heighten your awareness of their influence so you can authentically express who you really are to your