Shedding the layers of the false self

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”
-D.W. Winnicott

In Jungian psychology, we call it persona.

In my somatic therapy tradition of SomaSoul, we call it role.

In Alchemical Spirituality, we speak about the masks we wear to hide our essence.

Dr Winnicott, an influential pediatrician and psychoanalyst, created the term false self back in 1960 to describe the more compliant, diluted expression we develop unconsciously to earn love and connection from our caregivers, when our true self, in its full, wide (and wild) range of needs and emotions, does not get adequately met.

Different terms, with slightly different meanings, dancing around the same core theme; that of authenticity and what prevents us from truly embodying it.

Rumi said:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

I think of authenticity in the same way; what remains when we remove the barriers -the masks- we have built to protect the tender core of ourselves from hurt and rejection.

"The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
-Michelangelo

…or, as what gets revealed, when life and our own conscious work chisels away what is not needed, what is in excess.

The Layers of Life from the SomaSoul somatic expressive tradition

Shedding a layer of our identity that we have carried for a long time is for sure scary.

And -for as long as we resist this part of the death/rebirth cycle, we hold onto a self that we know well, but which is not really, truly alive anymore.

If you have worked with me in any capacity before, you will be familiar with the image above. It is an illustration of the ‘Life Layers’ model from my somatic therapy tradition of SomaSoul, which is one of the essential frameworks I use in all my work.

What I want you to notice in this illustration is that the Role layer (the personas and identities we ‘wear’ to mask our true selves) is the furthest removed from LIFE; Life being our aliveness, our flow, our essence, our true expression.
 
The more identified we are with that external, wrapping layer, the less (avail)able we become to show up in life in our fullness and authenticity.

If this has been a theme in your life, like it has been in mine, and you are longing for more aliveness and truth, I would love to invite you to ‘Shedding the Layers of the False Self’; a recorded, deep-dive class on the topic, which you can access at any time.

In the class, we explore the experience of masking our true expression from all the above angles, discover how it develops and what the unique masks that each of us carries are.

We don’t leave it at that though -because it’s one thing to intellectually understand the roles we play in life, and a whole different thing to bring them into the body.

In the second half of the class, we do just that; identify how we specifically “wear” those parts, and how we can gently start to take them off, from the inside out, one layer at a time, through the body and the expressive arts.

Whether it is the ‘good girl’, the ‘rebel’ or the ‘trouble-maker’, the ‘care-taker’ or the ‘eternal child’, the ‘strong one’ or the ‘nice one’…

…if you have felt limited by the roles you have been conditioned to play in life, and desire more authenticity and intimacy, I invite you to find out more about this offering here.

May it serve you well.