The heroic leap of just being yourself: why being authentic feels so risky in relationships
Episode 6
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Story of Golden Buddha in the Telegraph India.
Trusting the Gold: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness by Tara Brach
Playing and Reality by D.W. Winnicott
Relationship Archetypes quiz: discover your relationship style
In 1955, an ancient statue of the Buddha was being moved from one temple in Bangkok to another. The enormous plaster and clay Buddha was very heavy, which necessitated a complicated set of ropes to hoist it into place in the new temple.
But, as the statue was being moved, a rope snapped and the Buddha crashed to the ground, breaking the very old plaster and clay. The edge of the statue cracked open … revealing that this 13th century statue was not in fact made of plaster and clay but rather was made of solid gold.
How did a 700 year old solid gold Buddha come to be covered over in plaster and clay, so that it was mistaken for something far less precious than it actually was? Thai historians suspect that the golden Buddha was hidden beneath clay and plaster in the mid 1700s when the Burmese army invaded Thailand as a way to protect the statue from being plundered when the Thai kingdom fell to the Burmese army.
The temple in which it was housed at the time was destroyed, and thus the story of the golden Buddha was lost to history, until 1955 … when it literally came to light again.
We first learned of this story in the book Trusting the Gold by psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach, who writes that, just as the golden Buddha was covered in mud to “protect it during dangerous times, we also cover our own purity and goodness as we encounter a challenging world.”
Here’s what she means by this. When we’ve experienced a difficult childhood, when we’ve lived through early trauma, we gather our own layers of protection to shield us and keep us safe, or as safe as possible, from the dangers of being exposed and vulnerable in situations that can feel scary. And then, over time, we start to forget what’s underneath, the parts of ourselves that we’ve covered up in an effort to protect them. We lose touch with our inner light, our inner gold, our most precious self, and we come to mistake what we see on the surface of ourselves for our true self.
In our last post we talked about authenticity and empathy as the two parts of our formula for connection in relationships and why being curious is such a crucial part of knowing yourself and another person. In this post, we discuss more about authenticity and why it can be so hard to be your full authentic self in relationships.
As humans, from our earliest relationships onward, we have two essential needs. We have a need for authenticity—to be our real self. And we have a need for belonging and connection.
In the best circumstances, ideally, we’re born into families in which these two needs— to be your true self and to feel a sense of belonging where your true self is recognized—go hand in hand. When this happens,, it’s pure magic. You grow up feeling known and loved for who you truly are.
But … for many of us, including the two of us, this is not what happens.
We aren’t born into families with parents who are able to welcome our authentic selves wholeheartedly. Instead of learning that we’re lovable just as we are, we learn something else. We learn that being exactly who we are, being authentically ourselves in every way, actually seems to risk our place of belonging and acceptance within our family.
Instead of authenticity and belonging going hand in hand in early life, we learn that we have to choose between these two vital needs of authenticity and belonging.
And when this happens, well … we do what any child in this situation is going to do. Because we cannot live without belonging, we sacrifice our authenticity in the hopes of securing a sense of belonging, love, and acceptance within our family. We internalize the rules of our particular family about who we need to be—and how we need to be—in order to be loved.
We learn which parts of ourselves seem to be undesirable, unacceptable, or even unlovable. We cover those parts of ourselves up. On top of our true self, we construct the clay-and-plaster version of ourselves. We construct a false self, a socially-acceptable self, to take the place of our real self. And most of the time, we do all this without even realizing that we’re doing it.
As children, we’re like sponges. We’re very good at learning exactly what’s expected of us. Whether or not the messages of how we’re supposed to be in order to be loved are ever spoken aloud, we hear them loud and clear.
We absorb these messages and we try to adapt ourselves. We internalize these messages about how we need to be in order to be accepted and, hopefully, loved in relationships. These messages form the foundation of our understanding of how relationships work. They become our working model of relationships that we bring into adulthood.
We apply this working model of relationships that we learned in our earliest relationships with caregivers to our adult relationships, to our friendships and to our romantic relationships.
We’re not even aware that approaching relationships in this way assumes that everyone in the world operates the way our families did. What feels familiar is interpreted as natural. When our real needs for belonging and authenticity go unmet in our early relationships, we have no choice but to settle for whatever we can get. And this experience of sacrificing our authenticity in order to secure a sense of belonging is what becomes familiar to us. It forms the basis for what we expect in future relationships.
If you grow up in a family where individual differences between family members are frowned upon, where there’s one right way to think and one right way to be, learning how to get along with your family means learning how to play a role. You become able to appear to be the person that others expect you to be.
Learning how to play a role has upsides and it also has its downsides. And not all children are temperamentally suited to adapt themselves to others’ expectations. I (Daniel) would be one of these children. No matter how hard I tried to conform myself to my parents’ expectations, I seemed to always fail spectacularly at fitting in. I wanted to obey my parents, but I needed to understand the rules, so I asked a lot of questions. My parents interpreted this as questioning their authority, using it as evidence that I was a strong-willed, rebellious child. The more I attempted to understand, in order to follow the rules, the more trouble I got into …and the more I began to feel like something was wrong with me.
Those children who are better able to play the role of good child are more likely to receive some measure of approval, attention, and love as a result of playing this part in your family. But these rewards come with their own price, because the love you receive as part of this survival strategy always feels conditional. It’s dependent on you continuing to pretend to be someone different than you really are. You get belonging at the cost of authenticity.
What this means for many of us in this situation is that we lose contact with the parts of ourselves that didn’t fit in or weren’t accepted in our families. When this happens, The work of adulthood becomes the work of rediscovering and reconnecting with our authentic selves.
For others, it’s not exactly that we lose touch with our authentic selves. Some of us go inwards and create a rich inner world where we can be ourselves. But because we’ve internalized the message that who we really are isn’t okay or acceptable, even though we haven’t lost touch with ourselves, we still have to learn in adulthood how to show our true self in intimate relationships. We have to unlearn the pattern of hiding ourselves in order to gain acceptance.
This seems like a good moment to pause and reflect on a common mistake that happens whenever we talk about how childhood experiences affect adult relationships. And that mistake is to assume that acknowledging the impact of childhood experiences is equivalent to blaming our parents for our issues.
It’s our belief that the vast majority of parents are truly doing their best, no matter how far short they may fall from what could be considered “good” parenting.
We are both keenly aware, as parents ourselves, of all the ways we fell short of being the more perfect parents we wish we’d been. We’re not in the business of parent-blaming, as we know up-close-and-personal just how much pain and suffering many of our parents experienced when they were children.
However, just as we are not in the business of parent-blaming, we’re also not in the business of downplaying the impact of painful childhood experiences on our adult relationships.
After working with hundreds of individuals and couples to heal the childhood wounds that impact their intimate relationships, we’re keenly sensitive to both the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the messages we learn in childhood continue to guide our relationships in adulthood.
What we want you to hear is that healing does not come through blaming anyone for the pain that happened during childhood.
Healing comes from having compassion for everyone involved, knowing that many well-meaning parents cause pain to their children unknowingly and any parent who seems to cause intentional pain to their children is also in tremendous pain themselves.
This isn’t to excuse or diminish the impact that these kinds of experiences have on children … not at all … but simply to recognize that childhood trauma is something that travels down through the generations. Which is a large part of why we are here, doing the work we’re doing.
Healing the hurts of childhood means reconnecting with our innate wholeness, our innate goodness, and learning how to create adult relationships in which we can have both authenticity and belonging.
The challenge, of course, is that if you bring into adulthood a working model of relationships that says, “I have to choose between being myself and being in relationships,” it’s very hard to take the heroic leap of just being yourself. If you believe that being yourself means risking rejection … well, how do you know whether it’s safe to take that risk? After all, we have no guarantee that if we do take the risk of truly being ourselves that we will be seen, recognized, and adored for everything that makes us unique and special.
So it’s a leap of faith. It takes courage and a brave heart to be yourself in a relationship.
Instead of taking that heroic leap into authenticity, we often try to find workarounds. Some people who grow up in families where their whole self isn’t welcomed become exceptionally attuned to reading others.
They’re highly skilled at understanding another person’s preferences and desires, and they use that information to adapt themselves to accommodate the other person, to fulfill the role of the partner, or friend, they imagine the other person wants. Of course, this strategy was adaptive in childhood, because it worked as a way to secure a sense of belonging and survive emotionally, but it has serious consequences for adult relationships.
The first consequence of adapting yourself to accommodate others is the risk of getting into adult relationships that aren’t actually a good fit.
If you have to adapt yourself to fit the role of who you think your partner wants you to be, that’s a lot of effort. It’s a lot of work, especially if a relationship continues long-term. This kind of bargain means that you can never truly relax into the relationship because you’re always attuned to the other person’s desires and oriented toward the other person’s expectations and preferences. The longer you do this, the scarier it can feel to stop doing it … to just be yourself.
Because the core fear here is the fear of rejection, it’s important to first acknowledge that nobody enjoys being rejected. In fact, most of us try to avoid it whenever possible, because it’s painful. It hurts.
But the interesting thing is what happens when our working model of relationships is oriented around avoiding rejection. It turns out that while rejection stings, especially in the short term, in the long term, rejection in a relationship can actually be a blessing in disguise. That said, it is of course very hard to see this truth initially, when you’re on the receiving end of the experience of rejection.
When we’re too focused on avoiding rejection, and when we’re skilled at attuning to another person’s expectations, needs, and desires, we risk getting into a relationship that’s just not a good fit for us at all.
This is the kind of relationship that’s not suited to meet our needs, our desires, our expectations. But as long as we’re hiding our true self, especially when we’ve lost touch with it ourselves, or wrongly believe that it is bad, it’s not apparent that the relationship isn’t a good fit.
Over the course of my years as a therapist, I (Angela) have had the privilege to work with many people who were in the process of coming to terms with a lifelong pattern of trying to adapt themselves to another person’s expectations in relationships.
I remember one day sitting across from a man who’d done this in his marriage for years and years, who was feeling the growing pressure of trying to continue to be the person he thought his partner wanted him to be, who was terribly afraid of letting her see his true self. He was very aware of his fear that if he let her see him, she wouldn’t love him anymore.
As he sat there, struggling with this impossible-seeming dilemma, he suddenly realized something. He looked at me and said, “You know what? No matter how many times she tells me she loves me, I don’t ever believe it. The only thought I always have is, “but what if you really knew me?”
And that’s it. “Would you love me, if you really knew me?” A feeling of being loved for who we truly are—that’s what we sacrifice in our relationships when we hide our authentic selves, when we try to accommodate ourselves to what we think the other person wants.
We miss out on the chance of feeling seen, known, and loved for our authentic self. We miss out on having the experience of knowing that we are lovable and that we are loved for who we really are.
Because as much as part of us is completely terrified of being seen by another person, another part of us longs for it … longs for the experience of sloughing off that false self, that persona that we developed earlier in life to protect ourselves. We yearn for the freedom to stand naked and exposed before another person, confident in knowing that we are seen, we are recognized, and we are loved. In our fear of being rejected, we choose instead to the safety of clinging to the clay that covers our inner gold.
Another way that some of us try to hold off the potential for rejection in a primary relationship is to keep our partner at arms length, avoiding intimacy and emotional connection.
This is something that you might recognize in yourself, or you may recognize it in a former or current partner. It’s often labeled as having an avoidant attachment style. Angela’s background is in attachment trauma and the ways that relational trauma guides the development of our attachment style. I have lots to say about attachment styles but for this episode we’ll stick with one particular manifestation of avoidant attachment as a strategy for trying to stay safe in a relationship by avoiding intimacy and closeness.
So here’s our take on one particular way avoidant attachment can show up in a relationship. It’s when someone grows up receiving the message that who I am, at my very core, is not okay. I need to be different in order to be lovable. And I learn how to do that. I learn how to hide the parts of myself that might not be acceptable.
Meanwhile, because it’s impossible to simultaneously hide myself and be close, I’ve learned to associate closeness and intimacy with danger—the potential for rejection and hurt. So instead of having emotional closeness with one other person, in order to try to prevent the crushing blow of that relationship ending, I spread myself out among many different relationships, sharing different parts of myself in different relationships.
It’s a way of getting a small measure of authenticity, while also protecting myself. It’s like not putting all your eggs in one basket. It’s a hedge against the pain of rejection.
What this means though, when I hold my partner at arms length, is that my own yearning to be known … to be seen and recognized and accepted and loved for who I am, for my whole self … continues to be unmet. This isn’t because my partner isn’t a safe person with whom I could be myself. It is because it feels so threatening that I don’t even let myself dare try to do this.
It’s interesting, and this is a bit of an aside, but so often in the literature on attachment styles, the fact that people with avoidant attachment are even more anxious than those with anxious attachment gets totally overlooked. In a way this makes sense, because even the avoidant person doesn’t generally recognize their own anxiety, because it’s suppressed and, well, avoided.
But from our perspective, it leads to a very negative way of framing avoidant attachment because we mistake the front, the cover of “This relationship … I could take it or leave it…” as being the truth, rather than a protective strategy designed to avoid abandonment … even as it so often brings on just the thing it’s designed to prevent, which is the loss of an intimate relationship. And so, there’s often a loss of empathy and compassion for the struggles that underlie avoidant attachment styles.
Learning how to take the heroic leap of just being yourself in a relationship can feel a bit like being stuck in a catch 22.
If you’ve never had the experience of being loved, adored, and appreciated for exactly who you are, it can seem wildly risky to take it on faith that you could be 100% real, fully yourself, in your relationships.
On the other hand, not being yourself only continues to confirm the belief that you have to be someone else, some lesser version of yourself in order to be accepted in relationships.
Having an intimate, connected relationship relies on each person being real, being authentically themselves. It’s the only way to connect with each other, really.
We will never feel genuinely connected with another person’s persona, a word which comes, by the way, from the Latin for the clay mask that actors used. Today of course, the word persona has become shorthand for a false, socially-acceptable self. In relationships where partners cannot find a way to drop their personas in favor of being real, the relationship will always end up falling flat. This is because without the vitality of the true self, the relationship will always seem constrained and limited, even lifeless.
One way to begin the process of bringing your full self into relationships is to actively make a decision that you’re no longer going to hide yourself.
In a way, no matter what happens with the relationship, taking this step is asserting your belongingness, in the sense that by claiming your true self, you are asserting your right to be here, on earth, exactly as you are, in all your beauty and complexity and uniqueness.
When you accept yourself, when you claim yourself in this way, rejection takes on another meaning. It stops being a judgment of being lacking, of not being worthy of loved, which repeats the story you may have heard since you were young.
When you stop pretending to be someone you’re not and start celebrating the person you really are. Once you do this, rejection in a relationship becomes a matter of recognizing a poor fit.
The truth is that you deserve to have relationships that not only accept you for who you are, but actually value and appreciate everything that makes you you.
One of our favorite child psychologists, D.W. Winnicott, noted the ways that children develop a false self in order to comply with others’ expectations. He also recognized that even though the child’s true self was hidden away, like buried treasure or the golden Buddha, the true self was still there, patiently awaiting what he called the warm touch of loving recognition.
“It is a joy to be hidden,” Winnicott wrote, “and disaster not to be found.”
As adults, we sometimes play this game of hide and seek with partners, allowing no more than the briefest glimpse of our true selves. But if we find ourselves hiding in our adult relationships, it starts feeling less like a joy of waiting to be discovered, and more an experience of feeling trapped.
As Winnicott recognizes, the only thing riskier than showing who we are is staying forever hidden and never found.
Your authenticity is your greatest treasure.
And while, in the past, you may have needed to bury your inner light in order to keep yourself safe … now, as an adult, you get to choose your relationships. And the good news is that all the parts of yourself that you maybe lost touch with—they’re all still there, waiting for you to experience the joy of rediscovering them, bringing them into the light, and welcoming them back into your wholeness … and letting yourself shine with the particular quality of inner light that only you possess.
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
