In the language of psychology, a person needs two things in order to be emotionally healthy: A sense of presence and a sense of well-being. The first seems obvious at first. We look at ourselves and say: “Well, of course, here I am my true self.” But if it were that simple, we wouldn’t have the identity crisis, both personally and in the church, that we currently have. The struggle with one’s identity is a battle for a sense of existence, and it is reductive to demand an easy or guaranteed path to success in this endeavor.
This search for who he is and what he represents begins in childhood with a constant affection for things. When the baby cries and the mother always comes, the feeling of presence is gradually instilled in the baby. At birth, the baby cannot easily separate himself from his mother. how to? He lived inside it for nine months. But the concept here is that when the mother leaves and returns according to the child’s need, he establishes an understanding of me and not me. When the mother is attentive, he begins to develop a sense of well-being as well as the knowledge that he exists apart from her.
As any woman with children knows, it’s all downhill from there, as childhood and adolescence are the gradual training and weaning of a person into adulthood. I always say that being a mother means learning how to get fired a thousand times.
But pitfalls fill our lives, and early on we begin to develop our false selves in order to protect or hide our true selves.
The quickest way to develop a false self is to reject the true self.
When I talk about the true self, I am referring to the pure, authentic human being with flaws and talents. Talking about his true identity refers to a person whose thoughts and emotions are not being fed through the mill of false selves, where those holograms are projected to reflect the approval of others. Neglect, even if minor, and abuse, even if minor, can lead to a conviction of lack of merit. If the people in our lives see our true selves as unworthy, the natural tendency is to create another, better, more fulfilling self.
Sometimes it happens that parents and children are simply not compatible emotionally or intellectually. Any lack of sense of belonging can lead to rejection of the true self. Manufacturing false selves is not the domain of narcissists only.
When we face pain and loss throughout our lives, our true selves become too painful to live with.
I believe that addiction is a form of rejection of the true self, an escape from the horrors we really feel or the actions we cannot believe we have done.
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For me, severe emotional abuse separated me from myself. To survive an abusive marriage, one learns to lie to the world, presenting a false image of well-being to the world. In order to survive an abusive marriage, I turned my true self away from myself as one might turn away from witnessing a beating. I distanced myself to protect myself from what was happening to me. Complex logic? You must develop a sense of comfort with the cognitive dissonance to stay in an abusive relationship.
How can these masks be removed?
When I realized that every mask represented a form of idolatry, repentance became a way of life.
I mean repentance in the sense of changing one’s mind, not sinful manipulation that involves self-punishment, guilt, and mortification of the body. I encountered each of the false selves for what they were; The cult of consent. The first idol that went away was the idol of self-reliance. Being a single mother of four means sacrificing any cult of independence. God has provided me with amazing friends, and without them, some nights my children would go hungry.
Teaching children to accept themselves is, of course, difficult. My children have to overcome absolute rejection from their father, which is a real blight on self-acceptance. I adopted a policy of non-punishment for honesty during my teenage years, which I think helped me. Some might find this controversial, but I thought that if teens shed the false selves that teens have so much experience creating, and admitted their transgressions, I would need to reward honesty more than I need to punish wrongdoing.
But in the end, the best way to teach your children authenticity is authenticity. Living transparently sometimes bothers those around me.
Like Frodo after the destruction of the Ring, I don’t know how to pretend that I haven’t been to Mount Doom.
I think I’m annoying some of my family members, but I don’t know how to go back to easy masks without hurting myself.
One of the most important prayers in the Bible to me is the prayer that Jesus prays over his disciples. He says in John 17:11, “Holy Father, preserve them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.” We are all familiar with the verse that talks about a house divided cannot stand. A person so divided cannot stand either. False selves lead to a routine life where roles are strictly followed, and the true self is discarded for the sake of the group. We must be one in ourselves before we can be one with the other.
This is the fundamental truth beneath all other truths.
We cannot submit ourselves to God if we do not own ourselves first.
We complain about the hypocrites in the church without realizing their false reality; An armor is in place to protect the hurt, rejected, or condemned true self that is cowering somewhere deep in the soul. I want to say to all the real people buried under the years of pain: “Come out! The kingdom is here! You are invited to the wedding feast!”
The transformation of oneself into the identity of a son or daughter of God only begins with accepting the invitation. To be accepted into the beloved means to allow one’s true self to be loved, desired, and joyful in singing.
It is your true self, with its warts and wounds, its gifts and its revelations, that God sings about and loves as much as He can.
