True self - false self - multiples

True Self is my authentic self.  A long journey to find me.

One of the hardest sessions I had was the day KavinCoach asked me which one was my real self.  I went postal.  I was so furious that he implied that part of my selves were false.  This inspired me to search for a visual to help him understand that all of my selves were real. 

In the park, close to where I grew up there was a small tree planted.  It was short enough that children could climb into the tree.  One day there were a bunch of kids in the tree.  Way more that what the poor little tree could cope with.  A terrible thing happened.  The trunk split toppling all the children out.  I was one of those children and felt devastated that we hurt the tree.  I thought it would die.  For years I forgot about the tree.  I moved away.  Then returned.  There was the tree still alive and thriving.  It was still an amazing climbing tree for kids.  The split trunk formed massive branches close to the ground where children could play endless hours.  The tree would become a pirates hideout, a fairy castle, a hide away, home base for tag, endless hours of children's imagination were created in that tree.  All the branches were part of the tree but each one was split off from the other parts of the tree.  I used that tree to illustrate what happened to me.  I was young and too much happened and I split yet survived.  Unlike a tree, I could grow back together.  I could take all the parts of me and fuse myself back to one self.  It was not easy.  I had to remove all the wedges of hurt, bitterness, fear, anger, disillusionment, and face the pain from my past.  It was not an over night change.  It took facing myself at my worse.  Accepting my past as existing.  After integration, I continued my research on healthy authentic living.  I once again encountered a reference to false selves but it had nothing to do with being a multiple.  This time I understood that the intent of the author was to describe their own split.  She told how her 'real' self was traumatized so badly that she died and the shell lived on as a false self.  She described becoming a multiple in terms that I never applied to myself.  Then I came across more information on a false self referring to the masks that many people put on to protect their more vulnerable inner self.  A mask hiding their authentic selves from the harsh world.  Some use the mask to deceive people to believe they are something that they are not.  The theory of "Fake it until you make it" is one of these.  Feel afraid, whistle a happy tune until you are no longer scared.  Seems like a brilliant plan to create self fulfilling prophecy....but the object of fear is hidden instead of addressed.  A false bravado used frequently takes on a life of its own until the user of the false bravado no longer knows who they are, the coward inside or the false front.  But if they created the false front doesn't that make themselves the mask?

Lost yet?

I carved a mask in my college wood class.  The mask represented me but was not me.  It took on layers of meaning...it became an outward representation of my inward self.  I realized in my work I recognized that the mask we wear is any time we do not reflect how we actually feel.  I also learned that this is part of maturing.  A toddler is truly what-you-see-is-what-you-get.  If they are angry, they express it.  If they are happy, it is with their whole self.  If they think something is funny or sad, you are not left in any doubt of their opinion.  Sometimes embarrassingly so when they blurt out something said in private in a public setting.  I finally realized that all of my personalities had a true/false self combination.  Part of untangling all my thoughts and connecting them to the appropriate feelings was this complex structure that I tried to protect myself from me.  I was afraid of myself.  Part of the process that KavinCoach taught me was to love myself.  In loving myself, I no longer needed to be afraid of me.  Lowering the masks allowed me to get to know myself and embrace all of my selves...true and false....brave and cowardly....believing and cynical...happy and sad.....a whole mishmash of emotions, experiences, beliefs, and confusion.  Everything within myself belonged to me.