Understanding the False Self

"When we are thinking - as opposed to listening to ourselves with less attachment and staying with each moment - we never go beyond ourselves and the familiar."  Ruth Zapora

Our Two Selves

Living in one's truth is rarely easy. We all have a "false self" which is really just a collection of thoughts and behaviors designed to protect us from our inner pains and fears. We actually - in our thinking minds - do not want to live in our truth as it requires that we go deeper than the judgements and stories that protect us from our unattended feelings inside. Moving into our authenticity often requires that we go beyond our comfortable ways of doing things and this take psychological strength.

 

There is a certain comfort in sitting in our problems and judgments about life in that it is easier to think about what is wrong with life on the outside than it is to face the inner stored pain that all the stories and problems are covering up. When we are strong enough to meet our pain the journey back home to the authenic self can begin. Often this passage happens in mid-life when our compensatory defenses and distracting behaviors do not work so well anymore.

 

There is a certain familiarity in choosing not to grow and so we can live in our compensatory or false self behaviors and often avoid looking and feeling our core pain.  We have a strong mental self in our problems. Listening inside for truth inside of our bodies for the truth brings up difficult feeling to face and move through and also the fear of emptiness - the fear of not having a self. Most people feel that if they do not have thoughts - they do not exist. It takes a while to make friends with the emptiness of silence.

 

Our Problems are the Architecture of our Personality

Our problems and discontents form our sense of false or compensatory self.  The whole process of inner growth is learning how to let go of the thoughts but before we become quiet inside we must meet the inner pain that drives out thoughts and behaviors.  All thoughts are concepts of limitation. For example one of my core values these days is unconditional love.

 

As I delve more deeply into this state I realize that I need to let go of my ongoing habit of judging life. When I stop judging life this brings up the inner pain that causes the judging. Feeling the pain all the way through until the end with a bodily honoring presence leaves me quiet inside. Continually evaluating things as good and bad gives our minds something to do - and it perpetuates our familiar sense of self in that we are continually thinking to avoid our more difficult feelings. Without our familiar judgments we may feel inner discomfort or we may feel empty at first - like a non-self.

 

Our higher self/my larger mind is ultimately silent but there is a passage to go through to get to inner peace and this requires courage. We must meet everything we are inside to get to the other side to silence. In that silence we can be continually listening for inner guidance as to where to put our love, attention and energy in each moment. Sometimes we can feel full and complete in the silence. Sometimes we can feel hollow and in emotional pain. Sometimes we go for long stretches of time with no profound inner guidance coming through. Often at these times we are meant to accept and experience life as it is.

 

The Creation of the False Self

When we are in our false self we are aways in some form of separation, fear or judgment. We are not in a loving state because we are trying to protect ourselves form our inner pain. We are in "me mind" - in survival psychology we are afraid of what we are inside and we often project our disowned inner material out into the world. We try to protect ourselves. We are trying to get "ahead". We are trying to defend our position. We are trying to win. Our false self is comprised of all the thoughts, fantasies and behaviors that try to protect us from our inner pain. The false self is forever frightened and contracted - it is endlessly trying to get it's needs met from the outside instead of meeting the truth of itself on the inside.

 

Psychologist Stephen Wolinsky has - in my mind - described the biological formation of the false self - in the most coherent way of anyone I have studied. To put it in a nutshell when we are born we are one with God. The "biological shock" of separation occurs before we can have words or stories for it at the age of 5-12 months of age.

 

The shock of separation happens when we find out that human beings are fallible. The moment that the mother turns her attention away and cannot meet the need of the infant - it is then that the child instead turns towards the mother and begins to perform and act and mirror the mother to get love - out of a fear of survival.

 

We are Forever Children in our False Selves

If the caretaker has not learned to meet their own psychological needs the child will reach out of her core authentic center even more to try to get her needs met. This is how the degrees of the false self is born. The child will try to meet the parent's unmet needs in order to get love. We can often have the gnawing feeling as we walk through our life that we are false - that we are acting or performing our way through our lives to get love and approval.

 

As we grow older, we find the words and the elaborate stories for why we feel deficient and in pain - we create reasons for why we feel lacking and thus deserve to be separated from God/Mom/Love/Oneness. This mistaken false core belief drives our entire personality/false self throughout our lives until we can see it and dismantle it. 

Every single human being on earth - saint, sinner, guru or street person - has a false core belief about themselves and an entire personality/false self system that is built on top of this feeling of lack, emptiness and fear of inner pain. This is our paradoxical human journey. We are separated from God/The Greater Life/our Spiritual Selves as children and then we must go through the dragons of our unmet inner pain and our fear of emptiness into the silence to find our way back to the Truth of our unique authentic selves. When we are pychologically strong enough to process our inner body pain we return to oneness and connection to life not as an undifferentiated baby but as a fully individualized, differntiated, unique human being. We become strong, compassionate more fully realized individuals capable of giving to life.

 

Even if you are beautifully creative you must ask yourself if you create to compensate for a feeling of lack, emptiness or fear inside when you create. We can have the most beautifully honed spiritual and creative personalities and still be falsely compensating in our creativity out of our core fear and inner pain. We can live our lives trying to prove ourselves in avoidance of that original feeling of lack and separation. The strangest passage in moving towards the True Self is a learning to withstand first the pain that guards the gate of the true self and then finally the original feeling of emptiness and separation which is our individual core pain. Feeling separate from our God, ourselves and others is the essence of our core pain. This is why many people do not ever travel the passage back to their True Selves. The fear of inner pain and the resulting silence on the other side of pain can bring up incessant fears, reactions and defenses.

 

In our True Self - we have as spiritual writer Guy Finley so aptly puts it, "a spiritual intolerance of fear." It is not that we do not feel fear - we do not react form it or indulge in it as much. We can learn to tremble and to trust and step forward anyways even when we feel uncomfortable inside. We step inside to the center of our pain, not becoming it, but becoming stronger than it so that we can move through to the other side of it. When we do this we are graced by inner quiet and a deeper connection to life.

 

In our judgment and separation we avoid facing our inner human pain and we cultivate a nearly continuous sense of self with our fearful, busy, compensatory thoughts. If you were to listen to your thoughts you would find that most of your thoughts are about trying to make yourself feel better because you are experiencing some form of inner discomfort.

 

We have to keep recreating our false self with constant thought processes to avoid our inner dilemmas. When we are living in our heads, our endless thought processes are often the only thing that makes us feel "real". It is in this continuous thought process of the false self that we try with all of our might to avoid and distract ourselves from the fiercer fears and the deeper enigmas of what life is calling us to.

 

The personality is the false self and it is in compensation for our deepest inner pain and our fears about ourselves. We are not who we think we are in all our false self behaviors, thoughts and motivations but we can go though our whole lives thinking we are our false self and living in our heads. We can try forever to heal our core fears in a myriad of ways - through our drives, behaviors - though our roles in life - or through our obsessive perfectionism - to name a few. We can also distract ourselves with all kinds of subtle thought processes, behaviors, compulsions that dance around delving deeply into our bodily fears and inner pain.

 

See if you can find the "flavor" of your false self in one or more of the fear based false self motivators below. See if you can find the unique tone of your feeling of separation from life. Keep in mind that as you recognize the truth of these false self motivations and the core fear and pain below them you can step inside of the pain that has been driving your behaviors, find the strength to feel what you have not been able to withsand until now and move through to the othe side of silence, intuition and oneness with life.

 

Some examples of common personality/false self systems (according to psychologist Stephen Wolinsky) are as follows:

False Core Driver - I am imperfect. There must be something wrong with me. False Self Compensator - I need to prove there is not something wrong with me by being perfect.

False Core Driver - I am worthless - I have no value. False Self Compensator - I must prove I am not worthless by proving I am worthy and by making a lot of money.

False Core Driver - I am not able to do - I am incompetent. False Self Compensator - If need to prove I can do anything by achieving and over-doing.

False Core Driver - I am inadequate. False Self Compensator - I need to prove I am not inadequate by proving adequacy.

False Core Driver - I am non-existent. I do not exist. False Self Compensator - I need to prove my existence.

False Core Driver - I am incomplete. False Self Compensator - I must be complete or be whole through experiences

False Core Driver - I am powerless. False Self Compensator - I must prove how powerful I am.

False Core Driver - I am loveless. False Self Compensator - II need to prove I am not loveless by being extra lovable and loving.

False Core Driver - I am alone. False Self Compensator - If need to try to connect at all times.