I took this class in college called Interpersonal Effectiveness. For the record- before you start jumping to conclusions about me- it was a required course for Communications. It ended up consisting mostly of ongoing excuses to shoot the shit with other people in the class, disguised as interactive exercises. I didn’t hate it.
There was one particular lesson I learned that I took with me and find myself referring to on a regular basis in my social life. That is the peeling of the onion theory. The concept used the layers of an onion as an analogy for the layers of our social selves. The innermost core of the onion is like the deepest roots of our self. It is where our strongest emotions and beliefs reside, where the dreams we feel most passionately about hide out. And just as in the case of an onion, we too have more shallow layers that must be peeled in order to get to our core selves.
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