Being Truly Seen Is Worth More Than Being Liked

When two truths surfaced in one week, Erin Patten learned the difference between being liked and being truly seen, and why betrayal can be curriculum, not a verdict.

This past week handed me two truths in a matter of days, and both of them were teaching me the same thing.

They were about the difference between being liked and being truly seen. About the difference between keeping the peace and standing in what is real. For most of my life I chose being liked. I was the peacemaker. I avoided conflict like the plague. I would rather smooth a thing over than say the hard sentence out loud. This season did not let me stay there, and I am grateful now, though I was not grateful while it was happening.

When silence is the answer

The first truth came through a man I had been seeing. He had been breadcrumbing me for months. Watching every story I posted, telling me how much he liked me, making plans to meet, and then letting all of it quietly fall away. So I did the thing I used to be terrified of. I asked him directly. What are we doing here. Do you want to see me or not. You watch everything I post, but you do not follow through on anything we plan. And I got nothing back. No response at all.

Here is what I have come to understand, and I want to hand it to you, because I know how many of us have sat refreshing a thread waiting on a reply that is not coming. Sometimes silence is communication. When someone ghosts us, we tend to chase a reaction. We craft the perfect follow-up. We wait on a closure text that will never arrive. But the silence already told us everything we needed to know. The growth is not in getting them to explain themselves. It is in no longer needing the explanation. Stop chasing a reaction and start reading the one you already received.

A consistent nothing is an answer. When someone shows you a steady, repeated silence, believe it. That is not cruelty on my part and it is not bitterness. It is peace. It is what it looks like to stop auditioning for a person who has already decided.

For years I would have read that silence as a referendum on my worth. I would have decided that if he was not choosing me, something about me must be unchooseable. That is the trap so many of us fall into. We take another person’s inability to show up and we quietly turn it into a verdict about ourselves. But a man’s silence is a fact about the man. It is not a fact about you.

The weight I have been carrying

The second truth was heavier, and it has quite literally changed my life. It grew out of a season I am still walking through. I have been caring for my mother mostly on my own, while raising my son and running my business, and it has asked everything of me.

I moved from Detroit to Texas years ago to care for her, to tend my own grief after losing my father, and to build a life on new ground. Caring for her is not a small operation. There are functional doctors and traditional doctors, specialists, organic food, a cabinet full of herbs she takes every single day, and caregivers who have been in my home for many hours a day for years. Anyone who has ever set foot in this house knows how deeply she is loved and how well she is cared for. I have given up an enormous amount to make sure of it.

And in the very middle of all that devotion, I was betrayed by some of the people I had trusted with her care. I was wrongly accused of things that simply are not true. I was reported rather than spoken to. And when I reached out in good faith, wanting to understand, I was met with the same silence I had just finished learning how to read. The people who could have picked up the phone and talked to me chose not to. That is its own kind of answer.

And I want to name how I have come to hold it, because the frame is everything. This was never only happening to me. It was happening for me, and it was moving through something far bigger than me. A generational pattern, a generational grief, running through my line and asking to be met and healed in this lifetime, in this body. When you can see a hard season that way, as something ancestral moving through you rather than something random landing on you, it changes what you do with the pain. You stop asking why is this happening to me, and you start asking what is this here to heal.

It is not a verdict, it is a curriculum

I want to be clear about something, first with myself and then with you. I am not perfect. I have never pretended to be. But I know exactly who I am, and I am not the things I was accused of being. When people accuse you and then appoint themselves the judge of who you are, that is not a verdict. It is not the truth about you. It is a story they needed to tell, often to protect themselves.

I have chosen to hold all of it as curriculum. As part of my soul journey and my learning. Everything hard that has happened is here to teach me, to prune me, to strengthen me. It is not here to define me. I trust with my whole chest that my life is a co-creation with God, and that God would never hand me anything I could not carry. That trust is not a slogan. It is the thing that has kept me standing.

Coming in peace

Because I spent so many years keeping the peace, I had to learn a completely different way to move through conflict. Now, when something needs to be addressed, I come in peace. Not in war. Not in attack. I reach out honestly, wanting to understand the truth of what happened. I even told the people who hurt me that if I was wrong about them, I wanted to be corrected. Those were my actual words. That is not weakness. That is a woman who is no longer afraid of the truth, hers or anyone else’s.

And here is the quiet line that reorganized how I see people. Love does not throw you under the bus. Love does not accuse you and then disappear. So when someone treats you that way, believe them. Their actions are information too, and you are allowed to receive it and adjust accordingly.

Being liked versus being authentic

This is what I meant at the very beginning of the episode. Clearly the people who did this to me do not like me. They do not honor me or respect me. And for most of my life, that would have completely undone me, because being liked was how I measured my own worth. I would contort myself to stay palatable. I would swallow the truth to keep a seat at a table that was never really mine.

I know exactly where the people-pleasing came from. When being liked is how you learned to stay safe, saying the true thing feels like risking everything. You learn to read the room before you ever read yourself. You learn to manage how everyone else feels so that no one has a reason to leave. And it works, for a while, until you realize you have slowly disappeared inside all of that managing, and the people you were performing for still could not truly see you, because you never once let them see the real thing.

To stand in my authenticity now is to stop accepting that kind of treatment, and to stop shrinking myself for people who were never going to truly see me anyway. Being liked will keep you decoding mixed signals and performing for approval for years. Being truly seen begins the moment you stop auditioning for people who have already shown you exactly who they are. One of those is exhausting. The other one is free.

Why speaking your truth is not weakness

So many of us have been programmed to believe that staying silent is safer than speaking, or somehow more honorable. I want to gently challenge that. For me, saying out loud what happened, naming the betrayal instead of swallowing it, has been freeing and healing. Recently I watched a documentary about a man who stayed silent for twenty years to protect a reputation and a code, and who is only now, decades later, getting to tell his truth. I kept wondering how his whole life might have unfolded if he had been able to speak it back then, while it was happening.

There is no victimhood in telling the truth. I am not a victim of anyone’s actions. I am simply a woman telling the truth about what happened to me, for me, and through me. That is exactly what being truly seen requires. The willingness to be known in your truth, for who you are and for everything you have walked through, without waiting for permission and without needing the room to approve.

The reset I did not know I needed

When it all became too heavy, I stepped back. I got off social media for a while, because carrying it in public was more than I had in me. And for the first time in six years, I had no caregivers moving in and out of my home. It was just me and my mother. A complete energetic reset. The hermit time I did not know I needed and would not have chosen for myself.

On the other side of that stillness, things are beautiful again. We have in-home nurses now. We have a wonderful caregiver a few hours a week. We have speech therapy and physical therapy, and soon my mother will be back in the pool once this Texas heat finally breaks. Her healing is happening right alongside mine. I can see now, with clear eyes, that the controversy came to prune me, to train me, to strengthen me. Not to end me.

Betrayal, Yeshua, and the spiritual muscle

No one has taught me more about betrayal than Yeshua Ben Joseph. He was handed over in front of his own friends and family. I was not harmed the way he was, but I understand that particular grief now, the reputational and emotional kind, far more intimately than I ever wanted to. And here is what I know for certain. It did not touch me spiritually. If anything, it grew my spiritual muscle. It strengthened the part of me that knows there is nothing I cannot walk through with God beside me. My faith, my prayer, my yoga and tai chi, my movement, my oracle and tarot, all of it held me. But the foundation under all of it was God.

Surrender was the assignment

There were nights I imagined the worst. I let my mind travel all the way to the most frightening version of the story, the one where everything I had been accused of somehow stuck. And still, underneath the fear, I could feel that these chaotic, irrational, unexplainable events I could not control were designed to do one thing. To make me surrender. The deepest surrender I have ever been asked for.

When you cannot fix a thing, cannot argue it away, cannot control a single part of the outcome, all that is left is to trust. And trust, it turns out, was the whole assignment. Not winning. Not being understood. Not being liked. Just surrendering into the truth that I am held, and that the story is not finished, and that it is not mine to force.

I want to be careful with that word, because surrender is not giving up. Giving up is passive and it is hopeless. Surrender is active and it is full of faith. It is the decision to stop negotiating with God about the timeline, to stop bargaining for a faster exit, and to keep walking anyway, trusting that the ground will rise to meet your foot. The moment I stopped clenching, something in my body finally softened, and that softening was where the healing actually began.

No one decides my verdict

If you really want to understand what happened, I kept saying, let us go to court. Let us look at the evidence and the facts and let it be seen clearly. But that is so often not how it goes. So often it is trial by the accusers. People say terrible things about you and then hand themselves the gavel and decide the verdict too. That has been the experience of so many people, especially people who look like me, and for a while it was mine.

But hear me on this one, because it is the truest thing I know. No one decides my verdict. What was done to me is not a ruling on who I am. It is a curriculum. It is a set of lessons on how I upgrade and how I live, in God’s truth and in my own. The accusation was never the truth about me, and I am done letting anyone hand me a verdict I never agreed to.

Remember who you are

So whatever you are walking through right now, this is what I most want to leave you with. Remember who you are. Remember how you are connected to God. Ask what promise God has made to you, and if you cannot hear it yet, keep asking. Wake up asking. This walk is a self-study. You can have mentors, you can lean on people like me, and I would be honored to walk beside you. But at the end of the day it is your journey to walk, to learn from, and to grow inside of.

This is your walk, and it is a self-study. So ask your questions out loud. Ask in prayer. Ask in your journal. Ask your spirit guides, ask your cards, ask God plainly, why am I experiencing this, and what is it here to grow in me. The answers come when you keep asking. No mentor and no teacher, myself included, can walk it for you. We can hold the lamp. You still have to take the steps.

No matter what accusations get thrown at you, no matter how heavy this season feels, you are pure and you are loved. And all of it, every hard and holy piece of it, is your curriculum.

This is the work I hold inside the Divine Alignment Mentorship. A space to come back to yourself and stand in your own truth when the world is trying to tell you who you are. If this met something in you, the door is open.

Book a consultation with me at erinpatten.com. I will be on the other side of it.

Find every episode of The MetaBusiness Millennial on YouTube at @iamerinpatten, and the Hibiscus Petal Oil I use every day at rabeauty.co, the plant-based hair & body oil that started on my kitchen counter.