The True Self, the False Self, and Finding Yourself Again | TCM #179 (Part 1)

[Music] Welcome to the Cosmic Makers Podcast. I'm Laura Matsu, here with my husband, Baronhard Gunther. For those who are new to this podcast, we explore the intersection of psychology, spirituality, esotericism, astrology, relationships, and the hidden forces shaping the collective events that we are living through in the world right now. Our intention with this podcast is to help you navigate these transformative times on a practical level, both psychologically and spiritually. We are both psychospiritual coaches and guides, writers, and I'm an evolutionary astrologer. Baronhard is a teacher and author who has been writing, exploring the unseen influences, affecting human consciousness on his website, veilofreality.com for over 20 years now. So whether you're just beginning your journey of awakening or you've been walking this path for years now, we're grateful to have you here. And with that being said, let's dive into today's episode. On this episode, we are going to be discussing the true self, the false self, and finding yourself again. So a lot of people tend to go through life with a strange feeling that the life they're living doesn't align with who they truly are. Maybe on the outside, their life looks completely normal. They have a great career, a relationship, maybe they even have children, and they appear very successful and responsible to outsiders. Yet inwardly, there's a nagging sense that something is missing. They may even begin to feel disconnected from their own life as this is just playing a role going through the motions rather than truly living. They may eventually even begin to notice certain patterns, how they carefully censor what they say because they're constantly worried what other people may think. Maybe they struggle to say no, maybe they always put other people's needs ahead of their own. And maybe it's at the point they have difficulty even knowing how they feel and what they truly want. They make shoes careers, relationships, or their entire life may be based on what will gain them approval instead of what really feels meaningful to them. They may also avoid conflict, struggle with boundaries, and often find themselves in relationships where they don't feel deeply seen. Because the issue is, as if you're always relating to others to a carefully constructed version of yourself, it's almost impossible to experience true intimacy because people can only connect with the mask that you're allowing them to see. So even though their life may look good to outsiders, deep down they are right, something is missing. And what is missing is their true self. So how did they lose the connection to who they really are? This pattern often begins so early that we've completely forget how it started. It begins when we gradually learn to put aside our own thoughts, our feelings, and needs in order to preserve our attachment relationship to the people that we depend on the most, most likely our parents. So faced with the choice between preserving attachment to the people we needed for survival and authenticity being true to ourselves, we almost always will choose attachment. So basically we learn that being ourselves, saying what we really thought, sharing how we really felt, threatened our safety. So what happens is we built a survival self, a false self, an inauthentic self. We learned to become who others needed us to be. And over time that adaptation becomes so automatic that we started believing the adaptation was who we really are. And we may have even constructed an entire life around that false self. It may be that the false self was what shows our career because our parents told us it was a respectable job that would gain us financial stability. It may be the false self that shows our partner because they fit the version of ourselves we believe would win us approval in the eyes of others. So you can see from the outside the life of the false self builds can look good. But inwardly the thing that's missing is a connection to our true self. And the good news is it's a true self can never be destroyed. It may be deeply buried beneath years of adaptive survival mechanisms, but it always remains alive underneath all of that, waiting for the conditions in which you can safely emerge again. And that's what this episode is going to be about. It's about understanding what the true self is, how the false self develops, why it was necessary, and how we can begin the journey of recovering who we were before we learned we had to be someone else. So in the first hour we're going to explore what the true self and false self are, how some of the most influential thinkers on trauma, attachment and human development, including Winnicott, RD Lang, Alice Miller, Gabber Matte, John Bradshaw, Charles Whitfield, they all spoke about the origins of the false self and we're going to share all those perspectives. We're also going to look about, we're going to talk about how it develops in childhood through this conflict between attachment and authenticity, how shame being compliant and being emotionally neglected shapes our personality, and why we gradually lose contact with our own feelings and identity and why so many people who've been successful on the outside can still feel disconnected and empty on the inside. And then in the second hour we're going to shift to healing. So we're going to explore how to acknowledge what happened to us without becoming trapped in blame, the importance of grieving what was lost, how to reconnect with our body and our emotions, and also most of all recognize these dysfunctional adaptations that keep the false self alive. We're going to speak about how boundaries, self compassion, our essential ingredients for allowing the true self to emerge again and how the path through the true self of emergence is through authenticity, embodiment, and safe relationships. So for those who are not members yet, you can become a member and receive access to every second hour to all of our podcasts. We have over 178 episodes now at veilofreality.com/membership. So I'm going to start with a quote which is a quote that I've read like this many years ago, probably over a decade ago. I remember highlighting it and it really just encompassed what happens and how the true self is lost and how the false self is created. So this is from Charles Whitfield healing the child within and he says quote, "When our alive true self goes into hiding in order to please its parent figure and survive, a false codependent self emerges to take its place. We thus lose our awareness of our true self to such an extent that we actually lose awareness of its existence. We lose contact with who we really are. Gradually, we begin to think that we are that false self so that it becomes a habit and finally an addiction." So first we're going to define the true self. This has many different names across many different traditions. So I'm going to throw out some and then also I want you to keep in mind that this is not the end all. These are not all the names that people refer to it as. It's almost like every single tradition has a different name for it. So some people call it the real self. You know, Charles Whitfield calls it the child within. A. H. Amas calls it our essence, our inner core, the deepest self. Some traditions, spiritual traditions call it the real eye. So whatever we call it, it basically refers to a part of us of who we actually are before we learned we had to be someone else. So the true self is naturally spontaneous, authentic, loving, accepting, creative. It's our true self that it will experience a full spectrum of human emotion so it can feel joy, grief, anger, fear, without believing that any of those feelings make us defective. So it doesn't suppress emotion. The true self allows feelings to move through us as a natural expression of being alive, of being a human being. And the true self is also capable of healthy assertiveness. So when you're in your true self, you allow yourself to speak up for what you feel, make boundaries, say what you think without excessive guilt. Your true self basically feels fundamentally worthy to express itself and also trusting that relationships can survive you being honest with them. So because the true self feels fundamentally safe to exist, the true self is playful, it enjoys laughing, creativity, it's affectionate, it's open to intimacy, it doesn't constantly monitor itself, question its actions, overthink things. It simply participates spontaneously, which is a key word in life. So it's a true self that's also open to intuition and the unconscious because ultimately when the true self is open rather than defended, it becomes our gateway to something larger than the ego. So you call that your higher self, spirit, God, a deeper level of consciousness. It's the true self that gets connected to something greater than itself. So reconnecting with our true self is not just a psychological process, it's essentially a spiritual journey. And young would call this building the eye self-access. So the eye being our personal self, the eye am, the true self connected with the higher capital S self, the higher self, God. Great. So let's talk or define now the about the false self. As the name implies, the false self is not who we truly are. It is the personality that we unconsciously construct it as a survival strategy. So inherently it's nothing bad. It's just what happened in order to survive. And if you want to use Jung's language, we can compare the false self to what he calls the persona, which is the social mask worn by the ego that little eye as it relates to the outside world, so to speak. Now the important point is that having a persona or a mask is not the problem, every healthy human being has one, we all have it. Society obviously requires a certain amount of persona. We put different mask on, we play a different roles, be it a teacher, a parent, a friend, therapist, husband, wife, whatever it may be, and there's nothing inherently unhealthy about that. However, the problem begins when the mask or the persona stops being something we wear and it becomes all we believe ourselves to be, when we become highly identified with that mask and persona, a mistake it for who we truly are. Another problem is when our persona develops in actually opposition to our authentic nature, to our essence and true self rather than being expression of it. We put a strong mask on to hide how we actually feel, for example, that's why we developed the false self. So instead of expressing our spontaneous thoughts, feelings and desires inherently in the true self, we begin expressing what we believe other people expect and want from us. For example, instead of asking, "Who am I, what do I want, what do I feel, or what do I think, we begin asking, who do I need to become, what do I need to say or think in order to be accepted, to be like, to be loved and all of this?" So the false self is fundamentally inauthentic and actually shame-based rather than growing from our true inner nature, it grows out of fear. So the false self tends to be compliant basically with what others expect of it or expect us to be. It tends to be fearful and distrustful of others as a baseline way of relating to the world. It's already fear-based and has an inherent mistrust in the world. It tends to be hypercritical of itself and by extension of others rather than accepting of self and others. It also tends to be envious and competitive and stuck in constant comparison rather than being appreciative of themselves and of others. And also, it tends to be very controlling and perfectionistic. So instead of expressing its true feelings, the false self learns to hide how it really feels. It tends to intellectualize its emotions, its or suppresses them, it tries to drown them also in addictions. Because authenticity feels somewhat dangerous to the false self, obviously, it then constantly feels at its half as it has to manage the impressions it makes on others. So it constantly becomes preoccupied with appearing a certain way, appearing successful or appearing spiritual, appearing smart, appearing like a good person that requires tremendous energy and life force to keep up the false self, by the way. So gradually, living up to an image, they want people to have of them, replaces them the authentic self-expression. The false self also tends to rely heavily on control. So deep down inside, the control strategies it develops are defense against anyone seeing who we really are or knowing our true feelings. But in trying to suppress these painful feelings that are often driving it, it doesn't simply block the painful experiences it's trying to avoid feeling, it actually blocks also creativity, intuition and the capacity for deeper relationships with others. So when we become disconnected from the unconscious, we also become disconnected from the deeper source of life itself. And as a result, the false self gradually loses contact with the very qualities that make us feel fully alive, including our spiritual connection with the higher power and the divine in God. Eventually, living as the false self, we begin to feel uncomfortable and numb as though we're living someone else's life. And we may become even so accustomed to living this way that whenever we do express our real self, we feel ashamed or guilty for doing so. And even worse, we then assume that this false self is our true self because the true self has pushed so much into the background on the layers and layers of conditioning, programming and defense mechanisms. Yeah, I think that's the issue is we happen so early on that we actually think the mask is who we are. And that's and that's why it can be so hard to uncover. So let's talk about our delanced concept of the false self. Now we're going to go into what various teachers and authors have said about the true and false self. And like, they're all going to agree basically and they're going to say it in different words. So let's cover what Lang said in his work, the divided self. So again, the false self develops when we feel our spontaneous subjective existence is not safe to be expressed in relationship with others. And then what he says is we become divided into two parts, an inner or true self which is experience as private, vulnerable and often hidden and an outer false self system which speaks, behaves and performs the role expect of it. It interacts with the world. And this division is meant to protect that inner self, that true self and being exposed. But the protection eventually becomes a prison because a true self remains unexpressed. And therefore, we never really embody or develop our true self. Well, the false self increasingly appears to take over as the entire identity. So the false self begins with a failure of recognition basically. So it's not that just our mother or caregivers failed to notice us, to praise us, to take care of us. It's that they did not recognize us as a separate center of consciousness and will. So in his book, he uses this example of a man named James who says, "His mother never recognized his freedom and right to have a subjective life of his own." And he felt he was not permitted to possess an inner reality from which his actions could emerge. Instead, he existed as an object within his mother's psychological world, "I was simply a symbol of her reality." So be, to be recognized as a person who has its own soul, who has its own consciousness, who has its own will, is more than just being physically cared for, spoken to. It means that another person experienced someone who has feelings that are your own desires that don't match theirs, a right to perceive reality differently, and an existence that is not reducible to the role you play for them. So when a parent repeatedly dismisses the child's feelings, punishes them for how they feel. They treat the child as an extension of themselves, then the child will learn that openly existing as a separate person threatens a relationship. And the only way to maintain that relationship is by pretending to be someone else or who the parent wants them to be. They develop a false self while the real thoughts and feelings retreat inward. So now I'm going to quote Charles Whitfield and he says, "Many mothers, fathers, or other parent figures are mentally and emotionally impoverished. A likely reason is that their needs were not met as infants, children, and/or adults. They are thus so in need that they tend to use others in an unhealthy and inappropriate way to get these needs met. Anyone in their immediate environment, anyone close to or near them, including infants and children, will be unconsciously used in order to survive the child who cannot develop a strong true self compensates by developing an exaggerated false or codependent self." So the mental and emotional impoverishment of the parents then turns into them getting their needs met through the children. It's automatic. So, and this is actually very confronting because it's basically saying that parents who don't know their own selves who aren't healthily connected with their own thoughts and feelings will automatically try and get those needs met through the children and thus denying them to have those thoughts and feelings too. Yeah, so what happens and that happens very early on is that the true self retreats inward, right? The essence being pushed in all the conditioning programming, compensation, layers come over and then the false self is being built on top of it, meaning that also then our thoughts and feelings retreat inward and we don't dare allow them out expression anymore because it doesn't feel safe or it is not accepted. Our true self then goes into hiding and beings to exist largely in secrecy and then it becomes so hidden by the time we reach adulthood that we forget that this self exists and then as we mentioned before we identify with the false self believing this is who we truly are and then we live begins of trying to fill a bottom of this hole, right, because we are so disconnected from essence. Now, another result is then our outer behavior now gets taken over by the false self and what laying calls an alien will is being established, meaning the internalized expectations of our mother now operate from inside of us and is mostly on an unconscious level so we're not even aware of that. But it means that the other person's will has become psychologically installed within us. Even after then the parent is absent, the individual may automatically respond in such a way that they're responding to what their parent would want them to feel, what their parent would want them to say and they may begin to live a life that their parent would most find acceptable. And again, this happens mostly on an unconscious level, we're not even aware of that. And we may be also overly concerned about who we are in other's eyes and when in reality we're actually looking unconsciously into our parents' eyes, so to speak. So the individual might therefore experience their own behavior as a strangely impersonal, as though someone someone else is living through them. That's the experience of the false self. And this false self is also based on compliance, meaning it initially forms through compliance with the other person's intentions or expectations. The false self conforms to what or who the parent imagines us to be so to speak. And it's not that we're just creating a false self from direct commands giving to us by the parent, right? This is very important to understand. It's instead we become more hyper attuned even to nonverbal facial expressions, moments when our parents go silent, their moods and unspoken expectations. That's why it happens very subtle ways and then creeps up on us when we were very young. Now the false self may take then the form of a child who is quote unquote good, never doing anything else than what one is told. Never being a troubled child, never being a bad boy or a bad girl so to speak. It's important to know that this is not a criticism of being a kind and cooperative child. The question is where it originates. Authentic goodness arises from the person's own values and desire to do so. But false self goodness is performed because the person is afraid of what will happen if they don't. Meaning the person is not freely choosing goodness. They are performing it to what of rejection, punishment, abandonment or negative responses from others. Alice Miller also spoke about how the child becomes gifted at sensing their parents. She talks about how some children become exceptionally skilled at reading the emotional needs of their parents. In her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, gifted refers to a gift in sensing the parents moods, emotional wounds, their need for admiration and attention, their need for reassurance and a whole host of unspoken expectations. So the child learns which qualities receive love and which feelings threaten the bond. They become helpful, emotionally perceptive or high achieving because these qualities secure parental approval. Now the child's adaptations to the parent can be mistaken for exceptional maturity and reality. It was formed by suppressing their own feelings and needs and any parts of them that the parent could not tolerate. So the child then may also become a source of emotional regulation for the parent, meaning rather than the parent recognizing the child's needs as it's supposed to be, the child learns to cater to the emotions of the parent. And thus as a result, then creates a form of conditional self-worth. For example, I'm lovable when I meet others needs. I am safe when I'm useful. My value depends on what I provide to others. So many of us can have those beliefs. Now the compliance-based self-worth tends to alternate between states of grand deocity and depression. Conduosity depends on how much they are achieving and securing admiration in the eyes of others. But then depression emerges when the person can no longer maintain their idealized performance and receive the recognition on which their self-esteem depends on getting. So which means that the person may therefore appear confident while having little stable sense of worth independent of when they're getting approval. And that is the cycle that primes them to chase the next achievement, the next source of validation, the same compulsive way, and addiction is chased. Yeah, so the false self is both a betrayal and a survival strategy. So it initially helps us survive and emotionally, but it betrays our real inner life. And it prevents us from becoming who we really are. So we sacrifice authenticity for safety. So we suppress our real thoughts and feelings in order to meet other people's expectations and maintain their relationship. So the issue is the true self is protected, but it doesn't become expressed. So it remains alive internally, but we are not developing it through real life and relationships that can actually become very unsipilized, because it hasn't had a chance to interact in the world. Because we unconsciously begin to believe, if I don't reveal my real self, no one can reject me, no one can destroy it. But that defense eventually becomes a prison. So we created it to protect the true self, but it also keeps it hidden and isolated, eventually even from ourselves. So it prevents it from being truly lived. And that protection carries a profound cost, because we never express our true selves, we never bring it into our relationships. We may have these little moments in isolation where we can express that true self. We feel special, powerful, creative. But on the outside, we become increasingly incapable of acting anything out that comes from our true self in concrete life. So this is when people would withdraw into what young would call the provisional life, a fantasy life. So they always imagine what they'll do and who they'll be and how powerful they'll be. What's possible for them, but they'll never act on it. So one of my favorite analogies at Gabar Mate spoke of was this is conflict between attachment and authenticity. So he talks that we have this underlying survival logic when we have two basic human needs, which are attachment and authenticity. So attachment is our need for a relationship, for being seen, attuned to, for feeling safe. The reality is, is that human beings as mammals are wired for closeness and wired to being connection with others, not just physical closeness, but emotional as well. So without safe, attuned, nurturing relationships that we've seen in the studies in attachment, babies get sick and they die. So we have this intense need linked to our very own survival to attachment. But the thing is, our need for attachment, for closeness in relationships, does not just go away as we get older, but the quality of those early relationships with our parents will show up in the coping styles that we have in relationships as adults and how we maintain those relationships. So we carry out the attachment pattern from our child in our interactions with everyone else we meet in life, from partners, co-workers, friends, like even this kind of self-isolating thing that we have going on, it's very rampant, especially since COVID, this is like an avoid an attachment. It's like, I'm going to shut down relationship from other people because I don't trust them because I don't feel safe. So basically, attachment is a fundamental human need based on survival. And then Gabermate also talks about how we have another need, which is authenticity. And he describes it as being, quote, the quality of being true to oneself and the capacity to shape one's own's life from knowledge of that self. So it basically means knowing who you are, knowing your gut feelings, being able to read your bodily single but bodily signals, your needs to have boundaries, to have thoughts of your own. And then he proposes the question, what happens if our needs for attachment is it odds with our need for authenticity? So what happens if our parents will punish us for expressing how we really feel for being who we really are? Or if they project onto us an idea of who they want us to be. So a young child who depends on their parents for survival, they can't safely sacrifice attachment because they physically depend on the caregivers. Therefore, when their authenticity threatens the attachment, the child will almost always give up authenticity. So they learn not to feel what causes discomfort or disapproval from their parents. They learn not to express their needs. They learn not to say no. They learn not to stay trust bodily signals and feelings at conflict with the family. And this adaptation over time causes a person to lose contact with their own bodily signals completely. So this creates adults who don't know how to tell when they're stressed, dysregulated, angry, tired, because they've gotten used to repeatedly overriding their bodies, physical and emotional signals to the point they can't even feel their bodies or sense their feelings. So the issue is, is we don't know that this coping mechanism is in place. It just becomes normal to us. It gets wired into our nervous system. And then later in life, when we're asked to share our true feelings or thoughts about something, we freeze because our nervous system is wired to remember that doing so in the past would have threatened our survival. So as an adult, we may be continued to place attachment and harmony above our own needs because our nervous system still associates authenticity with danger. It's linked to survival. That's why it's so hard to see and give up. So we won't speak up for ourselves. We don't make boundaries. We don't share our real feelings with people because we learned that keeping an attachment relationship depends on us hiding how we feel. And that false self will persist long after the original that is gone, long after it's sometimes even our parents pass away. So we may intellectually know it's safe to share our feelings, disagree, set a boundary. But the issue is, is the body still react as if doing so could lead to abandonment. And then Mate also connect chronic emotional suppression directly to vulnerability to illness. So when someone repeatedly ignores their own bodily signals in order to maintain relationships, that chronic suppression and stress state is what causes all the major illnesses. So what also happens is that the person then becomes the response to what other people say I am, so to speak. Meaning rather than acting from an internally felt sense of self, their own gut feelings, their own emotions and bodily responses, the person actually becomes in Lang's words, quote, "acting according to other people's definitions of what one is." So this creates a very intense form of alienation. Meaning the person may know themselves mainly through the roles they picked up from childhood. Meaning the difficult child or the smart man, the responsible one, the caretaker. These are very common roles we take on in childhood. and then even rebellion may become a false self behavior. The false self does not always have to be conventionally good. This is also very important to understand. We can also learn to respond to other expectations by becoming exactly the failure that the family unconsciously expects us to be. - Yeah, so that happened to me actually, because I was always told that I was the bad child, the problem child or whatever, and then I became excessively bad because it matched what my parents were telling me I was since I was a child. - Interesting. - And that's very common, by the way, at least it was, I don't know how it is these days with parenting, but telling children they're bad, right? And punishing them for being bad. Then the child internalizes, "I'm bad" because my parents were telling me I'm bad and then they get involved in all sorts of dangerous stuff later on. - Yeah, here's also something Lang wrote in his book. Quote, "There's a tendency for the false self "to assume more and more of the characteristics of the person "or persons upon whom its compliance is based." So that means that first the child merely adopts to the parent, but later they begin actually to reproduce the parent, to really imitate it. Using the same phrases, repeating the same emotional patterns, developing even the same physical gestures, tone, or mannerisms, and then essentially treating themselves and others as the parent treated them. This is really fascinating. So we really take on the persona of the parent. Lang says that that can result in, quote, "an almost total impersonation of the other." The individual may not be aware of the extent to which his actions constitute an impersonation of someone else, end quote. So this resembles what later psychological traditions often call identification with their aggressor, interjection, or the transmission of relational patterns across generations. Lang also observed a case where the child had a parent lived in nearly total conformity with parental vicious, saying, quote, "He was a perfect model child "who was never a trouble." End quote. So Lang comments that such accounts can be quote, "especially ominous when the parent sends nothing "amiss in it at all, but on the contrary, "I'm mentioned with evident pride." End quote. So he's not claiming that every calm or cooperative child is psychological and healthy. He is warning about total compliance without a visible counter will. Health development normally includes healthy disagreement, actually, the ability to express one's own preferences, and the capacity, disappoint, or upset the parent without fearing punishment or withdrawal of the relationship. That's the key point. In other words, it means the absence of conflict in relationships is not necessarily evidence of harmony. It may mean that one person's desires, wants and needs have completely disappeared and are not being expressed in the relationship at all. - Yeah, that excessive compliance, and later on, shows up in life and like just saying yes to people, not learning how to say no, how to making boundaries. So this defense ultimately ends up defeating itself because at first the false self was created to preserve the true self, but over time, the arrangement reverses, and it's the outer false self personality that participates in reality. It receives recognition. It develops a biography across time. And the true self does none of these things. It remains uncommitted to life, unlived, and disembodied. So the issue is as the false self will become increasingly important in the eyes of the others, while the true self feels increasingly unknown, unseen, and not real. And being recognized by others, as the false self tends to provide little comfort to people. So this is gonna result in a person who no matter how much success, how much money or whatever, outer accolades they reach, they will feel like empty because they'll feel that the person only knows the fake me. And then from here intimacy becomes basically impossible because we're only used to relating to others from this mask. And then they use the words mechanical to describe the false self repeatedly. I noticed from RD Lang to other people, that's the false self system. It becomes a mechanical. So although we feel very disconnected from life, we forget what we're missing. And the misconception here is that we're not saying all social selves are false. Everyone has to adapt to different social contacts. I have a different way of speaking to Bernhard that I do maybe a client or a friend or a stranger. So we need to be flexible to different contexts. That's like a normal level of social adjustment, right? But the social role becomes part of the false self systems when it is radically disconnected from our own true and spontaneous feelings. It's maintained primarily through fear. It prevents intimacy and relationship because we are not capable of being honest and authentic. And it's based on compliance, remember to the other rather than our own personal desires and choices. And also it is based on a sense that revealing ourselves when we really think would be dangerous. So the issue is, is not that we have a social mask, a persona, it's that we cannot inhabit those roles while feeling, thinking, and acting in accordance with our own feelings, thoughts, and desires. So feelings are the most direct link we have with ourselves, others in the world. So joyful feelings, carry information, painful feelings, carry information. And we need to see those painful feelings as signals needing attention, not something, not evidence that something is wrong with us. So it's also very, very important to understand that the false self is shame-based. And that happens for the most part on an unconscious level. So when the false self is born, when the child comes to a conclusion without ever putting it even into words, who I really am, isn't acceptable, or something is fundamentally wrong with me. Now, John Bradshaw calls this toxic shame, meaning a saying shame that is so pervasive, that it seizes to be feeling and it becomes actually an identity. By the way, it's funny because this something is fundamentally wrong with me, is I used to actually think this as a child all the time. I realized I had this conscious thought. My inner critic would tell me something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with me over and over and over again, because of the conditions of my child. It's very explicit, but sometimes it can be implicit. You can just have a feeling of badness, of shame, like putting your head down, not looking at people on the eye, not smiling, wanting to hide, it shows up in body language a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we also need to differentiate between guilt and shame. So there's even such thing as healthy guilt. Healthy guilt says, I did something wrong, right? My behavior violated my values. So there's something, oh, admitted, I did something wrong. I need to make amends, I need to correct that, all of this. So there's some healthy guilt as well. But toxic shame says, I am wrong, your whole being, you are a mistake or like you just said, right? There's something fundamentally wrong with you, not your behavior. So shame then becomes the core identity of the person, rather than occasionally feeling ashamed, which is normal, healthy behavior, the person becomes shame based and then organized the entire personality around hiding this imagined effect. Now children are biologically wired to preserve attachment with caregivers. We know that. So when faced with the choice between losing the attachment or losing themselves, the child almost always sacrifices themselves. Instead of questioning the parent, the child questions themselves, kind of like exactly what you were doing, right? Instead of concluding my parents cannot love me as I am, they conclude that there must be something wrong with me. Yeah, it's happened, it's pervasive. Yeah. So the false self becomes the personality that develops around this conclusion. And then over time, the voice of the parents or teachers or religious authorities and cultures become internalized. The child no longer needs someone else to criticize then they begin to do it to themselves. And that's the birth of the intense inner critic, which is based on internalized shame. Yeah, so the external critic becomes the internal critic. You internalize basically the voice of your father or your mother who was criticizing, who didn't accept you. And then it turns into self criticism way into adulthood. Exactly. So the inner critic is actually a way that we try to keep ourselves safe, right? The inner critic, police is us, tells us, all you shouldn't have said that, you shouldn't have said this. This is what you need to do. It's again linked to survival. So it says, basically, your survival is linked with you being perfect, which is impossible, by the way, meeting other people's expectations, right? And then we internalize this voice of our parents. So one of the most powerful things you can do when you have an inner critic is number one, observe that voice and then also ask yourself, whose voice is that? Is that the real me? And just learn, I know it's easier said than done, but meditation can help you with it. But a lot of people who have this kind of developmental trauma go on shame spirals, right? They're like, maybe you like finally post something online or share how you feel with someone, and then you go into this spiral of shame after. And it's really important to maintain some distance from that voice and realize that's not my true voice, that's a survival pattern, learn from childhood. And even that alone, even that witnessing can dissolve it. But the moment we start to believe it and to go on that storyline is a moment we get caught up in toxic shame. That's the issue with identifying with thoughts and beliefs. That's why for indifference, we need to ask where this voice or this or this belief is coming from, because a shame-based personality is always monitoring itself. Why did it continuously ask internally? Am I good enough? Am I too much? Am I enough? Do they approve of me? So many people do this at all times. So life becomes then less about authentic expression, more about impression management, actually. And obviously shame then also destroys spontaneity, spontaneity. And one of Bradshaw's central insights is that toxic shame destroys spontaneity completely, because the playful, curious, and creative child gradually disappears into the background, into the unconscious. And instead of expressing ourselves truthfully, authentically, we actually start to edit ourselves. And ultimately shame disconnects us from ourselves, because the false self grows stronger. We lose more contact with our inner experience, our essence. We stop trusting our feelings. We don't even know our needs anymore. What our needs are. We doubt our perceptions. We suppress our gifts. We trust ourselves less and less. And as an extension, we trust life less and less in other people, right? Yeah. And then we also need other people to tell us what to do, what to think. We rely on the approval of other people and the external world. We go looking externally for the inner guidance that's supposed to come internally. Listen to and be like, yeah, of course, you know, a lot of us deal with shame. But to recognize my favorite term is actually terabrak, where she talks about she's a meditation teacher, that shame is like a trance that we're under. We're in a trance of unworthiness, meaning it's like a filter that we see everything in reality. We interact with people from that trance of unworthiness. We hear what other people are saying through that trance of unworthiness. It's literally like a fog over our experience of reality, right? So and since we're in a trance and we've been in a trance for decades, we don't even know we're in a trance until we actually have a moment where we wake up to our true nature. So that can be through and far between. Right? We're going to go more into the second hour on practical ways to do that. But I think the thing to really understand is it's so deeply embedded into who we are. It's hard to even realize that we're in it. Yeah, that also reminds you about this famous and very true saying we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. And that reminds me now looking back, looking a little bit into the bigger picture, the truth of movement, some conspiracy people, the black build idea is based on this false self-same based identity. Because if you cannot trust yourself, you don't trust life. You start to see siaops everywhere and all of this, right? You project your own internal unconscious shame onto the world so everything is dark. Everything becomes just fake because you're living a fake life. Everything is assimilation. Everything is a sia. We're being controlled everywhere. You cannot trust anyone. Why? Because you cannot trust yourself. Yes. Yes. To see everything is fake actually is almost the symptom of the false self. And you know what? There is truth to it. Because when you go to the world, you will interact with a lot of people who are in the false self, like Ethan Charles Whitfield, I think said like 85% of people are like liwing as his false self, who have some degree of, you know, childhood developmental issues. And I'm not talking to a major trauma by the way. I'm going to talk about more in the second hour is like a lot of people think, "Oh, childhood trauma, like you were abused, you were neglected or whatever, you know, some big thing happened to you." And sometimes it's just not repeatedly not having your emotional needs met for years. Like that creates a trauma in itself. So yeah, basically if you recognize yourself and what we've talked about today, I really don't want to leave you, leave this conversation what you're thinking. Okay, great. Now I know I'm living from a false self. We want to leave you with a different question. So the very fact that you recognize these patterns means that your true self is already beginning to wake up because a false self is actually defensive. It doesn't question itself. And it's certain that this is who I am. Right. So there's a part of you listening to this episode that thinks that sounds like me, the part of you that's longing for more authentic relationships to be more authentic with yourself, that isn't the false self speaking. That is actually the beginning of your true self beneath the clouds of these layers. So here's something I'm going to invite you to do before we move on to the second hour. So for the rest of the day, just simply notice. Notice how many times you stop yourself from saying what you really think you edit what you're going to say before you think it, even when like people ask you like, how are you? I'm fine. Like that's just a mechanical false self thing. We don't actually, we don't actually share like, oh, tune into our bodies like, how am I actually feeling? And then responding from there, maybe try doing that with one safe person today. Like, and I'm going to talk more about that because it's really important. We have to have people who we share our true self with in order to get practice with. Because remember, the true self is like not living a life. It's actually hidden while our false self creates the biography in our lives. You can also notice when do you say yes, even though something in your body is contracts or says no, how do you know what a true yes or no feels like in your body? Notice also when you're more concerned about how you're being perceived than communicating how you're actually thinking and feeling. Notice maybe when you're trying to gain approval in a conversation or just create harmony instead of just simply expressing yourself spontaneously in the moment. You don't have to change any of it. I just want you to start to notice that because awareness is really 80% of the work and you can't change the pattern that you're not conscious of. And so, once you begin seeing these adaptations that you created that are not alignment with who you really are, you can see this is something I learned to do to stay safe. And in that way, you can actually gradually unlearn it because the beautiful thing about recovering the true self is it's not like you're building a new identity. You're just releasing the clouds that are in the way of the true self that's been there all along. So we're just creating the safety for it to emerge. And we can give ourselves that safety by becoming safe people, by becoming attuned to us, by being the ideal parent we never had by paying attention to our body and feelings and giving that nurturing validation that we may not have received. So to continue in the second hour, we're going to move from understanding to recovery. So we're going to talk in depth about how to begin reconnecting with your true self. We're going to explore how to acknowledge what happened that causes adaptations. We're going to talk about how to recognize the dysfunctional adaptations that keep the self false self alive and how to work with them. And we're also going to talk about how to begin trusting yourself again and gradually allowing your authentic self to emerge in relationships that are safe enough to receive it. And to understand that healing isn't just about getting rid of this false self overnight, it's about creating the conditions where you no longer need it to survive. And realizing beneath these adaptations, there's a true authentic version of you you've been searching for that's been waiting for you the entire time. Thank you for listening and we'll see you on the second part. And again, for anyone who is not a member yet, go to veilofreality.com/membership and you can sign up for the membership to have access to all the second hour podcasts. Thank you. [Music]