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.

For detailed help in formulating and creating a personalized father figure and how to make use of him, a self-directed online course is available through www.fatherfigures.info.

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Work is the operative word, and we’ve all been told that relationships are work.  But often in relationships we neglect the work on ourselves that is necessary to keep our own mental health and happiness (which directly contributes to the quality of the relationship).  M. Scott Peck, in his wonderful 1978 bestseller The Road Less Traveled, speaks of each person being on an individual journey in life, and relationships serving to help us on that journey.  In a relationship, your work is doubled in that while you must tend to the relationship, you must also continue tending to yourself.

This double work is often what brings couples into my office.  Perhaps one person’s inner conflicts are creating problems for the relationship.  Or there are conflicts in the partners’ respective concepts of how the relationship should work.  Now we have two kinds of conflict affecting the relationship.  As the conflicts interact, so does each partner’s individual baggage have unforeseen effects and influences on the other.  Often it takes a third party to observe the interaction, to get to know the people, and to offer a diagnosis of what is really going on and offer suggestions for how things might be resolved.

Some things are givens: one partner is older, and one is younger; one has a high libido, the other’s is low; one is in recovery, the other drinks; one needs alone time, while the other hates being alone.  Any number of basic issues need negotiation if two people are to engage in a committed relationship.  And does each partner understand the rules and expectations of the relationship in the same way?  Probably not.  Avoiding talking about these things and not arriving at an understanding only adds to deep-seated resentments, self-delusion, and poisonous secrets.

When I work with couples, it takes some time to get to know them as people and time for the various conflicts in the relationship to be revealed.  Sometimes I must act as translator, or rewrite man, so that issues can be boiled down to their bare bones and that negotiating positions can be understood.  Often it takes time to realize what is negotiable and what is not, what is possible and what is not.  My hope is that you will give yourselves time for this process of revelation.  It will allow each of you to proceed in your own individual path, possibly together, but continuing to access and enhance the support and love for each other that first brought you together.

If you are ready to explore these or any other issues with a caring, experienced therapist, please call or email David Bowman to arrange for a free, 30-minute phone consultation. Your mental health is worth it. Call (323) 561-2361.

Photo credit: Stanley Dai UNSPLASH