There are many powerful forces at work in our lives in relation to our personal development, but some of the most significant ones are the desires to be loved, to be accepted, and to feel that we belong.
Take a moment to think about the importance of those desires in your current life. Can you feel their pull even now? Do you want someone to love you so much that you make changes to be lovable? Do you want others to accept you so much that you do things to “fit in”? Do you so desire to feel you belong to the world that you conform to expectations that feel uncomfortable? These three basic human needs are as important as the need for food, warmth, and shelter. If you have even a smidgen of self-awareness, you will see that even today you do many things in your life to satisfy these needs.
Children feel these needs even more intensely than we adults. Remember, they are much more vulnerable. They are small creatures living among giants! Unlike adults, children lack the awareness and coping skills to moderate the impact of these needs on their behavior. They feel the risk of not being lovable, acceptable, or belonging as an immediate threat to their survival, and they lack the psychic tools to separate that threat from who they are. The threat creates a basic anxiety at a vulnerable stage of personality development.
I cannot emphasize enough the power inherent in this anxiety. It becomes a central organizing force in our early development. You see, the anxiety that we won’t be loved, that we won’t be accepted, that we won’t belong is so disturbing and intolerable that we must find a solution to it. We have to resolve it to ensure our existence. Dr. Karen Horney called this drive to resolve our anxiety “the search for glory.” This basic anxiety was created by the erroneous belief that we needed to become someone else to be secure as a person. That is, we decided, somehow, that we weren’t “right” or deserving of love and acceptance unless we changed who we were. We imagined an idealized self, better than who we were, that would always feel secure, always be liked, always feel loved, and always feel welcomed. The process of adopting this idealized self resulted in us rejecting our true self, our real self. We actualized a concept of who we should be. This was the result of our search for glory: We identified a solution, a kind of blueprint for how we should look and act in the world, to relieve the anxiety we felt. We then began to construct a public personality based on that blueprint.
The idealized self is our blueprint of a personal fantasy of how we should be, how we should look, how we should behave, how we should think and feel. It also includes the various self-imposed rules and goals we believe we should live up to. These should demands take over our lives. (A should demand is any one of thousands of things we tell ourselves are necessary for us to do in order to be deserving of love, acceptance, and belonging.) Common should demands among American adults include the expectations that we should be desirable, married, productive, wealthy, smart, athletic, materially successful, conforming, popular, well-groomed, religious, respected, heterosexual, gender-conforming, etc. Look at your to-do list for the day. It likely involves a number of should demands!
Should demands become a tyranny. And as with any tyranny, opposition is silenced, put to sleep. We oppress any part of us that doesn’t fit with the design of our idealized self. We should on ourselves over and over again. We become directed by the should demands. The shoulds rule our lives, and over time we lose the capacity to be the determining force in our own lives. We live for what we imagine other people want of us rather than what we want. This is the origin of our sleepwalking. Here is where the real trouble began for us—a trouble that over time made our lives unmanageable. This trouble began when we were children. We grew a false self to ensure we were going to be loved, to be accepted, and to belong. We put all our energies into becoming someone we weren’t in order to feel secure. But this was like building a foundation for a house on someone else’s property. It’s not our own. It’s not who we really are.
Do you get a sense of who Harold had to become in order to be secure? It was clear to me in the first session that he had to be successful to be okay. He was driven to be the best, to be perfect, to win, to be superior.
The approach he adopted to soothing his basic anxiety was found in embracing what Horney called the expansive solution. This is one of three primary solutions people select when building a false self. (The other two, which I’ll discuss in a moment, are the self-effacing solution and the resignation solution.) The underlying assumption to the expansive solution is “I need to master everything and everyone to be okay. I must be top dog. I must be perfect. I must win all the time.” Horney described this person as “bent on self-glorification, on ambitious pursuits, on vindictive triumph, with the mastery of life through intelligence and will power as the means to actualize their idealized self”.
This is what created the dilemma Harold presented in our first session. He was struggling with facing who he was not—that is, he really wasn’t that victorious individual; there was something else inside. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t identify it.
Because his solution was based on self-glorification, it left no room for him to have self-doubts, insecurities, feelings of inadequacy, personal problems, or self-contempt. Harold had to disregard any desires or emotions that would threaten this solution. He had to be okay even when he wasn’t.
He desensitized himself to any feelings or parts of himself that did not fit with his solution. Another way of saying this is he had to put these genuine parts of himself to sleep in order to play a role that was not supported by, and also in conflict with, his genuine needs. He cut himself off from his true self.
Harold walked, talked, and dressed impeccably; he accomplished many things; and he was considered a success by many. And yet, it was as though he was occupied by someone else. Well—he was! He had put to sleep the other parts of Harold that were flawed, frightened, sloppy, sentimental, carefree, emotional, curious, and ultimately honest. So successfully had he tucked his “unfit parts” into bed that Harold couldn’t even remember what they were, let alone wake them up. He couldn’t even tell me what he was experiencing as he tried to figure out what he was doing in my office.
The authentic Harold was asleep. The false Harold thought he was the real Harold. That is what we mean when we say, “We were asleep, thinking we were awake.” This is sleepwalking!
Themes Underlying the False Self
Like Harold, most of us have tucked our true self under a blanket. Perhaps we’re not as fast asleep as Harold, but still, every human on the planet experiences some true-self slumber. Earlier I mentioned Dr. Karen Horney, a brilliant psychotherapist who described the search for glory and Harold’s choice, the expansive solution. Horney dug deep into the nature of why and how we tuck away our true self.
Remember, the goal for our solution to our childhood anxiety was to ensure that we would be loved, be accepted, and belong. This meant we had to construct an idealized self with the qualities, traits, values, and characteristics that would support and bring to life our selected blueprint. Any part of our real self that would fit into this blueprint was welcomed and fostered. But there was a different fate for the parts of us that didn’t fit with the idealized self. The parts of us that were at odds with who we were supposed to be were rejected. Like a tyrant, we oppressed the parts that did not fit our design. We kept them locked up, hidden, and repressed and only let them emerge when we saw them, sometimes mistakenly, in others. (In fact, we often project our repressed parts on others. Projection occurs when we attribute unwanted traits of ourselves to another person. For example, a bully, having repressed any personal weakness, may see another person’s acts of compassion as weakness. A martyr, having repressed selfish feelings, may see another person’s self-interest as selfishness rather than self-assertion.)
This was an unconscious process. We weren’t aware that we were desensitizing ourselves. Our lack of awareness created this sleeplike state. Sleepwalking Harold was out of touch with his feelings of selfdoubt, unhappiness, failure, and helplessness. He feared being inadequate, incompetent, or unsuccessful. His natural self-confidence, on the other hand, was welcomed and integrated into his personality, as were his pride, intelligence, competence, and competitiveness. Any other trait was shunned, exiled, and disowned. Dr. Alexander Lowen, the father of bioenergetics, gave us a great insight into what happens when we don’t deal with our childhood experiences, including our traumas. He stated that when someone “has experienced a loss or trauma in childhood that undermines his feelings of security and self-acceptance, he would project into his image of the future the requirement that it reverse the experiences of his past”. I believe he is saying that we choose a solution or blueprint for our idealized self that will reverse the experiences of our past.
If we weren’t loved, we are going to choose the blueprint that will construct a false self that, we hope, will ensure we are loved. Thus, the engineered self is based on the appeal of love. How do we ensure we are going to be loved? We imagine someone will love us if we meet the person’s every need. This is what we wanted, so of course this is what someone else would value. And like us, if we got the love we wanted, we would be forever loyal and loving toward this person.
Hiding our true self to become the person we deem lovable is one solution to the anxiety we endured as children, but there are other ways of disowning the true self. Earlier I noted that Horney described three themes for the blueprints of the idealized self. She called this solution—erasing ourselves because the path to being loved is to be whatever the other person needs—the self-effacing solution. We believe that if we meet someone’s every need, that person will love us. But this also means we need to deny our own needs. We must erase ourselves to pull this off. Essentially, we are saying to the world, “Your needs are more important than mine, and I will do everything in my power to make you happy and to meet all of your needs. I will always subordinate my needs to yours.”
If, as children, we somehow perceived messages that our parents’ or caregivers’ love is conditioned on pleasing them, we are likely to adopt the self-effacing solution to ease our anxiety. We repress those parts of our true self that don’t conform to behaviors our caregivers reward with conditional love and approval, and we integrate those parts that do conform. We attempt to reverse the experience of our past (the withholding of unconditional love) by putting first the needs of whomever we select as a partner.
If the message we received was that we were stupid or that we were a loser, then the expansive solution would entice us. As I noted earlier, this is what happened to Harold. His father was both physically and verbally abusive. He would humiliate Harold in front of his father’s friends and announce to them how he couldn’t believe he had such a stupid kid.
When Harold made a mistake, his father reacted as though the mistake were catastrophic. He made Harold feel like he was not only stupid but incompetent. Harold longed for praise and love and believed the path to this was through mastery, through winning, by being better than everyone else. Thus, Harold wanted people to adore him, admire him, and respect him. He wanted to reverse the experience of his past. Harold had to succeed at everything, look and behave perfectly, and never act in any way that might risk humiliation, all to resolve the anxiety he felt: that belonging, being loved, and being accepted were conditioned on a kind of success that would satisfy his father.
If we were neglected, with some criticism sprinkled in periodically, then we would be enticed by feeling free from emotions. We don’t want to feel. To obtain freedom from our pain, from our inner conflicts, from our anxiety or depression, we give up. We resign. This is what Horney described as the resignation solution. Freedom in this context is created by throwing in the towel. We give up on life, on our self. We become the proverbial underachiever. We bury ambition, desire, and striving of any kind. We shut down our personal desires so we won’t come into conflict with our true self or with the world. We become needless and want-less.
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So, we have three basic blueprints or solutions for our childhood anxiety: the self-effacing solution (behave like a martyr), the expansive solution (behave like a victor), and the resignation solution (behave like nothing’s important and nothing bothers you).
Think for a moment about these blueprints. Do you see how they are like the common stereotypes we have for people—saints, winners, and losers? Mother Teresas, James Bonds, and drunken bums/class clowns? In life, very few people fit just one of these blueprints. Most of us have a dominant solution (like Harold), but other solutions emerge at times too. Can you see how people you know live out shades of these solutions—perhaps not as black and white as these but nevertheless with some variation? What solution do you favor?
Remember, in embracing these blueprints we are trying to reverse the experiences we had in our past. Needless to say, this process generates a ton of expectations regarding other people, ourselves, and even life itself.
World-renowned psychotherapist Dr. Frederick (Fritz) Perls summarized the effects of adopting one of these three solutions: “When the individual attempts to live according to preconceived ideas of what the world ‘should’ be like, he brackets off his own feelings and needs. The result of this alienation from one’s senses is the blocking off of his potential and the distortion of his perspective”.
Each of these three solutions is a form of sleepwalking. Inside that saint is a person who wants to be loved exactly as he or she is, not because of what he or she gives up to be loved. Inside the perfect saleswoman is a person who is terrified she will not belong if she doesn’t constantly prove herself to be the very best. Inside that meek staffer cracking bad jokes all day at the water cooler and offloading his work to others is a person who decided that feeling his real feelings of fear, anger, unworthiness, loneliness, or failure was not worth the risk, that he simply was unlovable no matter what.
The true person inside each of these individuals is in such deep slumber that the false person assumes it is the only show in town. Our false self may be completely unaware of the deep needs of the sleeping true self.
Who sleeps inside you? How have these internal forces shaped your recovery?
Realizing We Are Asleep, Beginning to Wake
Perls understood that the process of waking up is not easy. He wrote, “To suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy” (1969, epigraph). Whatever form of sleep we’ve chosen, we’ve relied on this blueprint for our security, even though it came at a huge price. We lost our true self and we lost self-awareness. To achieve emotional sobriety, we need to shatter our reliance on our false self.
The consciousness that flows from our false self cannot help us create emotional sobriety. How can it? The false self seeks only to soothe our anxiety. We will continue to follow the same blueprints. We cannot solve our problems by repeating the same attempts that failed in the past. Painful as it is, we need to begin addressing the real needs of our true self. (This, by the way, is probably what the final part of Gurdjieff’s quote meant: “It is absurd to think that this [waking up] can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.”)
As we progressed in recovery from addiction, a curiosity emerged. We began to pay attention to ourselves instead of avoiding ourselves. We practiced self-examination through personal inventories and began to get honest with ourselves. Self-honesty is the cornerstone of emotional sobriety. As Bill Wilson stated when discussing Step Ten, “It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us” (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services 1981, 90). We become curious to discover what is wrong with us. We engage ourselves in the all-important journey of self-discovery.
“I like to say, “Only the best in us can see the worst in us.” Let me break that down for you in this context. Only the best in us (the consciousness that flows from our true self) can see the worst in us (the tragedy of our sleeping state). When this happens, then the best in us begins to run the rest of us in recovery. Self-awareness is curative. It helps us recover our lost true self and helps us begin the forever journey of becoming what we can be. As Harold’s self-awareness was recovered in therapy and through working his program, he began to stir. He began to see the prison he had constructed for himself. Instead of being in control, as he had deluded himself into believing, he realized that he was controlled by his idealized robotic self and its demands. He discovered he was not the determining force in his life, and as he started to see this, he began to wake up. He started owning the feelings and thoughts that had been taboo. He was taking steps to awaken his true self, and this meant he was grappling with the reality that he had been sleepwalking for much of his life.
Harold’s awakening created conflict between his idealized self and his real self. For example, he began to see that his need to win, look great, and be perfect was not authentic. He saw that he’d devoted huge amounts of energy to doing things that satisfied his blueprint as a winner, but they didn’t satisfy the desires of (in fact, were often at odds with) the “real Harold.” As we worked on the issues that created these conflicts, his potential self began to be revealed. He began to integrate the parts of his idealized self that were useful to who he wanted to be and to let go of the other parts of himself that weren’t working in his life, parts like, for example, needing to win and be right all the time.
He became less perfectionistic and began to rigorously and authentically work Step Ten—to take an on-the-spot personal inventory and when he was wrong to promptly admit it. This was a huge shift in the way Harold functioned. Remember, Harold’s false self could never be wrong. To be wrong was a real danger, since it meant he would not be loved, be accepted, or belong. Step Ten was a therapeutic response to the problem created by his false self. As he practiced it, he became more fulfilled and alive. He achieved emotional sobriety. His relationships improved, including his marriage, which had been on the rocks.
I saw Harold recently after a gap of many years, and he reported to me that the past years of his marriage were incredible, a big shift from what it had been. What a surprise, to find out that the very things that he feared would make him unworthy of love actually enabled a greater intimacy! He now enjoys more than twenty-one years of recovery.
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