Life seems to get more complicated by the hour these days. Modern life, plugged as it is into a 24/7 news cycle, calls (more like demands) us to respond and in doing so to choose between one version of ourselves or another at a moment’s notice. Even in home life, we have multiple versions of ourselves. Sometimes we need to be strong and stoic, other times we need to be loving and demonstrative. By adulthood, we get to be good at choosing, but we usually also settle into one version that seems to predominate. By now, we have learned how to read a situation and provide a persona that will respond appropriately to that situation.
In 1960, British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott published a paper looking at these personas we make up as we grow up. He categorized them into two broad categories: the True Self and the False Self. The True Self is made of our authentic and spontaneous thoughts and feelings and gestures, allowing us to have a fundamental sense of being, a sense of who we are underneath it all. We start creating the False Self in infancy to please others, especially our caregivers. Later, there are friends, teachers, coworkers, and bosses who need to be pleased. The True Self may be effectively buried under a pile of actions and reactions meant to please others and maintain safety. The False Self is at base a defense mechanism, a protective front to show the world.
A psychological meltdown eventually comes when the False Self has become pathological over time and is now in control, leaving us feeling empty, numb, and disconnected. Many of us, however, have spent so much more time as our False Self than our True that we have come to believe the False Self is really who we are. People will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid looking at their True Self. When True Self is in control of False Self, however, the two balance each other in a much healthier way. We become surer of who we are because we are connecting to that primal place of ours.
The goal of psychotherapy is to bring us to greater connection with our True Self, so as to tap into a sense of aliveness and completeness, which the False Self can dominate. The way forward is to tell the truth, especially to ourselves, to call the False Self out for what it is—a phony. While it is not easy to step outside ourselves to see the totality of our self-defeating behaviors, it is the only way we can acknowledge what is authentic and act on it.
Dr. Scott Peck, who wrote The Road Less Traveled, has another way of looking at these parts of ourselves:
We all have a sick self and a healthy self. No matter how neurotic or even psychotic we may be, even if we seem to be totally fearful and completely rigid, there is still a part of us, however small, that wants us to grow, that likes change and development, that is attracted to the new and the unknown, and that is willing to do the work and take the risks involved in spiritual evolution. And no matter how seemingly healthy and spiritually evolved we are, there is still a part of us, however small, that does not want us to exert ourselves, that clings to the old and familiar, fearful of any change or effort, desiring comfort at any cost and absence of pain at any price, even if the penalty be ineffectiveness, stagnation, or regression. In some of us our healthy self seems pathetically small, wholly dominated by the laziness and fearfulness of our monumental sick self…. The healthy self, however, must always be vigilant against the laziness of the sick self and that still lurks within us.
M. Scott Peck: The Road Less Traveled, Touchstone Books, 1978; p. 276
If we take our True Self as our Healthy Self, then we can use it to recover the joys of childhood, of authenticity, spontaneity, and being who we want to really be. The True/Healthy Self awakens a capacity for adventure in us that calls for real self-actualization, for living life as our truth. The False/Sick self has convinced us that it is not worth striving for those things, that it is easier to just be lazy and stagnate. A former client of mine in her mid-thirties used to place “doing the easiest thing” as her sole criterion for weighing out a situation and planning out her actions. Her understanding of how to find the right answer was doing the easiest thing. It never seemed to occur to her that the path to the right answer might not be easy or comfortable, that she might have to make herself uncomfortable to get what she genuinely wanted.
I sometimes wonder if we all have made ourselves a little too comfortable. We are either caught up in the rat race of the 24/7 news cycle, or as a result of that life, lying on the couch like a slug, surfeited by microwave food and take-out. We are hypnotized by our screens, glued to devices that trap us in an unreal world, filled with drivel and grifters, and yet somehow, in spite of all that, we still feel entitled to everything we have ever seen in the movies, another unreal world! The hard work for all of us lies in untangling the False/Sick Self from the virtual world and the world of pleasing others and nurturing the True/Healthy Self. That is the Self we want in control. That is the Self we need to be willing to work for.
by David Bowman, LMFT
This article was first published on davidbowmanlmft.com. David is a licensed California Marriage and Family Counselor an the creator of Father Figures: Reparenting for Gay Men.
Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash