To Claim Your True Self, Know and Let Go of Your False Self
Each of us is born with the potential to become our most authentic self, our true self: the person we are meant to be. But most of us hit roadblocks along the way that challenge us to cope with our life circumstances and require us to develop a persona or “false self.” The false helps us survive but cuts us off from our original potential.
In my case, I developed a deep unease while growing up, which turned into self-hatred, which led to a focus on gaining outside validation mainly in the form of romantic relationships.
The unease and self-hatred grew as my inner connection to my true self deteriorated. The connection to my innate knowledge of myself, something I was born with, was severed, and the gap between who I actually was, and who I had to become, became wider and wider, until it was a spiritual hole so deep, I turned to outside sources to fill it.
How did it happen? In my experience, this disconnection between potential true self and the necessary false self – the self that copes with circumstances and creates a persona to survive – happens to just about everyone. I’ve only met one person who never experienced disconnection. I hope there are more such lucky people out there.
But most of us have to disconnect from our true self, creating a false self who does the hard work of survival. There are as many reasons for it as individuals. Some people suffer physical trauma. Others experience mental or emotional abuse. In many cases, the causes are so subtle one would never even think to identify them as abuse.
The messages we internalize may sound like this:
- Don’t feel this, feel that (disconnects us from feelings)
- Don’t be this, be that (impacts identity)
- Don’t do that, do this (loss of integrity)
- Don’t do as I do, do as I say (leads to dishonesty)
- Don’t have that, have this (don’t trust yourself)
- Don’t like this, like that (dependency on others’ opinions)
- Don’t follow your instincts, please others
- Don’t learn this, learn that (ignore your passions, talents, potential skills)
- Don’t love that one, love this one
- Don’t take care of self first, take care of others (develops co-dependence)
The denial of our inner knowledge of our own truth leads to the severing from our true self. To survive we have to create a persona or false self that copes with the confusion, craziness, abuse, or trauma.
My particular circumstances involved a family inexperienced in emotional intelligence, unable to support me in identifying, processing, and managing my feelings.
To survive, I stuffed them, and became the “good child.” I lost the ability to trust my inner knowledge – because without connection to my feelings, I could not identify my inner “true north” and had to rely on outside guidance for direction.
It got worse as I grew older, turning into actual self-hatred. On one side I hated how I looked and who I was, and on the other side, I longed for a romantic relationship to change how I felt about myself. To validate my attractiveness, my personality, my worth.
Romantic relationships became my obsession. I focused on them to fill the inner spiritual hole. I didn’t realize it, but they were a distraction from that emptiness. A distraction from addressing the source of the pain and self-hatred.
Distractions can turn into addictions and mine was to finding someone who would see me, adore me, value me, and therefore make me feel better about myself. I focused on a relationship as a “fix” to solve my problems.
My distraction/obsession was romantic relationships. I basically became codependent with a romantic partner, needing their validation to feel good about myself. Of course, the irony is that even when I found a partner who idolized me, it didn’t help. I didn’t believe their assessment and still felt terrible about myself inside.
Eventually I got into a relationship so difficult and damaging that I had to change or go down in flames. I did the hard work of looking inside to see what had brought me to such an emotional bottom. And slowly I shed the old patterns and replaced them with healthier behaviors.
The only solution to disconnection from your inner knowledge, the only way to shed the false self, is to reconnect to your true self. It’s a process of uncovering layer upon layer of thinking, feeling, and behavior that served you well to survive your early years, but is no longer helping you.
Reconnection is a process. It starts with commitment to change, and takes you on a journey of self-exploration. You have to be willing to dig deep. It’s not easy, but you can do it with a lot of self-kindness and compassion. The only way to undo the learning of a lifetime is to re-teach yourself new paths and processes, try to re-wire your brain out of its old patterns and into new ones.
We’ll explore more about this path in future posts.
What do you know about your false self? Who do you suspect is your true self? When and where do you catch glimpses of who you are meant to be?
