I always considered myself a down to earth person. Yet I now see I spent most of my adulthood living through a facade, trying to uphold a false self-image.
In dating and romance, that self-image was confident and successful, wise and mature, a spiritually advanced rescuer.
He was excellent at attracting dating partners and dazzling them with wit and humor and gestures of generosity and warmth.
He was not so great, however, at sticking around when things got uncomfortable. Which, of course, was always.
What was this seemingly confident, successful, charismatic guy running from?
Origins of the False Self
A couple of years ago, I read a book by psychoanalyst Alexander Lowen that explained how young children respond to the experience of emotional neglect.
When children are not deeply seen and felt and cherished, they blame themselves and feel that something is wrong with them, that they are at fault and unworthy.
Since they can’t escape from the source of this shame, they adapt by disassociating from the body and its emotions and escaping into thoughts and ideas, concepts and images, imagination and intellect.
Reading that, I understood that’s what happened to me.
Disconnected from my emotional life, disassociated from my body, I lost contact with simple okayness of being myself, the okayness of my feelings and thoughts, the okayness of me. Instead of living naturally and at-ease, I learned to do what I thought I needed to do or should do in order to be seen in a certain light or not seen in another light.
I lived not through my body and its feelings and instincts – but through my head, where emotional pain and vulnerability could not reach, and where I could derive solace and comfort from my intellect, my rational mind, my ideas and images.
In this way, my false self was born – as a mask and shield against shame.
As such, my false self included the image of me as successful, independent, mature and wise: easy images uphold so long as I kept the messiness and complexity of reality at bay.
How to keep reality at bay? Disassociating and disconnecting from self and others, and retreating back into my own space and world, over and over again.
Needless to say, the false self did not allow for the reality of my deep insecurity, the reality that I was constantly trying to prove myself and measure up, the reality that I always felt ashamed, like I’d done something wrong, like I couldn’t do enough or be enough, ever.
Unmasking the False Self and Finding Authenticity
I only began to feel those feelings and confront my pain when the desire for intimacy, vulnerability and belonging became stronger than the impulse to protect and defend and hide behind my false self.
Being close to people is simply not possible when wearing a mask. You can seduce them, and argue with them, and persuade them, and lead them on. But you cannot love or be loved through armor.
Today, I can appreciate that my false self was likely necessary as a psychic coping mechanism. It helped me to survive and in some ways thrive as competent, self-sufficient and productive adult.
But in the end, it stood in the way of my healing and deep joy. It prevented me from experiencing the safety and sense of belonging I longed for.
That safety and belonging arrived only when I began to reconnect to the emotions that were too painful for me as a child: the grief of not being cherished or understood; the rage of being silenced and violated; the longing to be cherished and felt and understood.
Healing avoidance, I have learned, requires us to drop the armor of false self in favor of a much more beautiful truth: that we are human, wounded, frail and vulnerable, with the deep need for belonging and connection and caring and love, no different than any other human, with all the same feelings and all the same struggles.
All that lies beneath our self-sufficiency and independence, beneath our stoicism and hyper-competence, beneath our rage and stonewalling and ghosting and defensiveness is what’s most precious in us: the grief of not being cherished and loved when we should have been, the shame of feeling we don’t belong, the lost hope of ever being loved, known, understood; the deep need to be hugged.
That is our true self, and it is beautiful.