Are you living from your true self or false self? This is an important question as your peace, joy and freedom depends on the answer. Sadly, most of us are living from our false selves, and only start to realize this when we enter a crisis. But fortunately, there is a way to self-correct and ensure we aren’t stuck as many are, dying without having truly lived and loved. Now it’s not that we intentionally choose to live from our false selves, but due to the way life presents itself to us from a young age, we are often forced to fit in, or be rejected. So, we become classic people pleasers which is when the false self takes root. We behave according to other’s expectations instead of our own deep feelings. We become externally focused whilst internally we are more disconnected from our true selves.
The development of the false self originates in trauma and wounding, and as John Eldredge writes in Wild at Heart, ”to cope and secure our place in the world, we find a few gifts that work for us, and we try to live off them.” This is a perfectly normal and adaptive survival strategy, but it is also the narrowing down of our options, a psychological prison which we often spend the rest of our lives living in. No wonder we feel jaded and bored, not to mention boring, as our lives take on a treadmill quality. And our natural response to and from the false self is to seek more – more love, success, excitement, stimulation, validation and satisfaction. What a perfect recipe for insatiable consumerism. But alas, nothing works in the long run, because we are living a lie. We are pretending to be happy and alive, but we really aren’t.
The solution is to learn to nurture your nature, which is where your true self lies deeply buried under the rubble and layering of years of cultural conditioning. It’s like the unlearning for a grown elephant who can be contained with a string tied to its leg, because it was beaten mercilessly as a baby roped to a stake in the ground. By following daily practices that reconnect you to your true self, it’s just a matter of time before you shift from an outer focus and external locus of control, born of the false self, to an inner reality and an internal locus of control, connected to your true and authentic self. If you want to liberate yourself from the cage of your conditioning and evolve from your false to your true self, please contact me, psychologist in Fourways..