Colloquially, “being authentic” usually describes someone sincerely speaking his deep inner thoughts, a supposedly honest monologue, one that is often critical about something emotionally stinging or at least sensitive, and marginally beyond the scope of what we consider to be normal, acceptable, or polite everyday conversation.
You would not say to someone: “I want to be authentic with you: I think it is going to rain.” Most often people say things such as: “I need to be authentic with you: this relationship is not working for me anymore.” Or: “Boss, I don’t feel that business is my true calling; it doesn’t feel authentic to me anymore. I quit this job to become a yoga teacher!”
In general, it seems as if “being authentic” frequently relates to saying something negative to someone else in an attempt to modify his or her behavior in some way.
False Self vs. Authentic Self
In the Hindu tradition of Vedanta, yoga and meditation were designed to help us transcend our minds so that we could realize our authentic selves. According to the Upanishads, it is the daily functioning of our minds — the thousands of redundant and mostly negative thoughts — that obfuscates the fact that we are essentially divine, whole, and interconnected with everyone and everything.
Let’s examine why most of our thoughts are redundant and negative, and what our culture regards psychologically as our “authentic selves.” To paraphrase psychologist D. W. Winnicott, children develop “false selves” — facades, personas — in order to survive and try to get their emotional and psychological needs meet.
I would argue that in Western civilization, most of children’s interactions with adults entail some form of behavior modification, with rewards and punishments. We could even say that we tame children in much the same way that we tame pets in our culture. Children want to sleep when they are tired, eat when they are hungry, defecate when they need to defecate, and play when they feel playful. But fairly soon after birth we put them on schedules with designated feeding times, sleep times, and play times; when they get to school there are even designated bathroom breaks.
The "Don't" Training
But that is not the bad part; the bad part is that we primarily train them to be productive members of society through negative languaging: “Don’t stick your tongue into the socket.” “Don’t eat with your hands.” “Don’t wake Mommy before six o’clock.” “Don’t run out into traffic.” “Don’t poop in your diapers anymore.” “Don’t get bad grades.” “Don’t do drugs.” “Don’t play with your genitals.” “Don’t...don’t...don’t...”
And then we wonder why there is an epidemic of “negative self-talk” and “low self-esteem” in our culture. Was any child born with a voice in her head that said, “I stink. I am no good at anything”? Or as Hamlet says, “I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.”
To make matters even worse, children assimilate anything that seems awry in their worlds by telling themselves: “There must be something wrong with me,” as in: “Mommy would not have a migraine if I were a good girl” or “My parents would not have gotten divorced if I were a good boy.”
Avoiding Negative Feedback
Children fall into line and develop false selves to avoid negative feedback from the authority figures in their lives and to gain acceptance, approval, and love from everyone with whom they interact. They learn that they are liked more when they smile. They learn that crying and screaming often disturb other people in their proximity. As a result, sometimes our facades are incongruent with what we are really feeling.
We all have a way of being in the world — the way we stand, the way we speak, the way we smile, the way we look concerned, the way we dress, the way we focus our eyes, the way we furrow our brows, the way we wring our hands, the way we wear our shoulders, the way we brag or are self-deprecating, the way we portray ourselves as heroes or victims, the way we think about mortality or do not, the subjects we discuss...All of these things we develop as we individuate from our caregivers and become independent.
Maybe sarcasm helped you survive your adolescence by diffusing tense situations or making people like you because you were humorous? Maybe crying made people feel sorry for you and forced them to stop criticizing you? People usually have very little insight into their own way of being.
Seeking Unconditional Love
As sentient beings, we wish to be loved unconditionally — that is what I believe our “authentic selves” seek. But fairly early in life, we learn that most “love” or positive feedback that we receive is contingent upon our behavior. Being quiet and smiling gets us rewarded with smiles and pats on the head. Screaming or emotional outbursts get us punished, sent to our rooms, and maybe even get our iPads taken away. Egads!
If we act in ways that displease our caregivers, then we are punished until we act in ways that please them. So we create false selves, or facades, in order to gain acceptance, to seduce people into liking us — because we are smart or talented or pretty or well-behaved or refined or accomplish certain things. However, this dynamic ultimately functions as a giant resentment factory, because we are constantly seducing people into liking or loving our outer selves, and then we eventually resent them for not loving our authentic selves, the “authentic selves” that we have never, or seldom, shown them.
Obviously our authentic selves (psychologically) are too unseemly for public display. In fact, our culture recognizes only a narrow bandwidth of acceptable emotions: we dislike angry women and we dislike sad men. Grieving the loss of his father, Hamlet is told by Claudius: “ ’Tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschooled.”
I believe that the tacit barometer for mental order in our culture is working, showing up for our jobs, and being productive. And if we are too sad or angry to work, then we must be truly unwell. But maybe our authentic selves are angry or sad for having to create false selves to seduce people into liking us? Maybe we get tired of jumping through hoops for other people?
The Seeds of Resentment
Is it possible that what we call “midlife crises” occur when there is a crack in consciousness and people realize that if they did not have such a glitzy facade, their family members and fair-weather friends would stop returning their text messages and phone calls? Nobody wants a spouse who is with him because he can afford expensive cars and vacations; and yet so many online dating profiles show people standing in front of their expensive cars or on expensive vacations. A conundrum.
Every time we are forced, as children, to jump through hoops in order to get love or positive feedback, this foments resentment. And even if there was no physical trauma during our childhoods, all of these resentments can add up to what is often called “a core wound.”
The Wounded Child Within
As adults, we have remnants of wounded children in us. These wounded children still imitate the traits of the adults we loved as children, and they do so in order to subconsciously gain acceptance, approval, and love from those we thought withheld acceptance, approval, and love from us; but we also rebelled and reacted against those same authorities as a way of individuating, or becoming our own selves. As a consequence, we experience tension resulting from the confluence of reinforcements we received from adults and peers while being raised in a highly competitive society.
In short, we emulate the characteristics of the caregivers we had when we were young in an attempt to retroactively subconsciously gain their approval and love; and we also subconsciously incarnate the opposite characteristics of the caregivers we had when we were young as a way of individuating from them.
Becoming something in order to gain approval is inauthentic; being reactive and rebelling against something is also inauthentic. How can we know what is authentic if there are wounded children in all of us seeking the approval of and individuating from people who may not even be a part of our lives anymore?
So if authentic, in its colloquial meaning, is really a justification for saying something negative to someone else, and the cultural meaning of authentic seems like an excuse to quit a job you hate and become a yoga teacher or life coach (or both), and the spiritual and philosophical meanings of the term are too esoteric and airy-fairy, and the psychological meanings make it seem impossible...then what is authenticity and how can we be authentic?
Maybe authenticity relates to being congruent, when our outsides match our insides, our intentions? Maybe authenticity really just means being present and as little prejudiced as possible within the confines of a culture and a language? Maybe it relates to our way of being in the world? Before we attempt to be authentic, we must examine how we became inauthentic.
©2017 by Ira Israel. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com.
Article Source
How to Survive Your Childhood Now That You're an Adult
by Ira Israel
In this provocative book, eclectic teacher and therapist Ira Israel offers a powerful, comprehensive, step-by-step path to recognizing the ways of being that we created as children and transcending them with compassion and acceptance. By doing so, we discover our true callings and cultivate the authentic love we were born deserving.
Click here for more info and/or to order this book.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1608685071/innerselfcom
About the Author
Ira Israel is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and Mindful Relationship Coach. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and has graduate degrees in Psychology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. Ira has taught mindfulness to thousands of physicians, psychologists, attorneys, engineers and creative professionals across America. For more information please visit www.IraIsrael.com
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