[PaulaS]

I´ve read quite a lot about the "false" and "true" self and I think many people seeking therapy feel they have lost some part of themselves and they don´t feel having contact with themselves and their feelings.

The false self is often created at a young age and means you form a kind of self that´s created because you don´t get the opportunity to show your real self and your real feelings. It can be due to a lot of things, more or less traumatic.You hide your true self behind the false one and you end up feeling not connected, feeling lost and not knowing how you really are.

Has anyone in here worked on those issues in therapy? What kind of therapy was it? How did you talk around those issues and how did you get help finding more of your true self?

Constantly. I don't think that terminology ever was used, but essentially that is what it all boiled down to. As the result of very early trauma, I never felt comfortable in my own skin, never felt real, always felt very broken, flawed, and damaged.

All of my therapy has in some way, shape, or form been working on those old perceptions of myself -- misperceptions. My current therapist is very behaviorist in his approach -- not a hardfast CBT therapist, but very much uses aspects of various behavioral therapies such as CBT, REBT, DBT, etc. He is very eclectic, which I prefer, and uses what he feels most appropriate to whatever presents as the issue, including those plus psychodynamic work, Gestalt, etc. So, "What kind of therapy was it?" -- the one that worked best at the time.

Much of the work surrounding my mistaken beliefs (core beliefs) about myself is very REBT/CBT in approach, but he wasn't the type to pull our worksheets or analyze every thought distortion (that would have driven me crazy); he was much more real than that and we did a great deal of deep work surrounding my history and the origins of those beliefs (many people claim you can't do "deep" work in behavioral therapy, but I suspect they were in very standard, step-by-step CBT).

It took many years to unravel where that "false" self (as you call it) had come from, and probably almost as many years to really figure out who was my "true" self. I have finally gotten there, but it was a long, slow process.

[Salmon77]

This is something that comes up for me a lot. We talk about the situations that necessitate a facade, why that seems better, what/who is being protected and/or closed off. I dunno, still working on it but it's getting better, I think. I'm in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Existential therapy. I think it would have really helped if he hadn't moved away.

[nottrustin]

We have discussed that I feel often feel fake because I hide so much. T does not believe it is being fake but calls it my public face. It is my attempt at trying to protect everybody including myself. I learned early on to hide pain in order to keep everything going. It is my way of protecting myself

Originally Posted by nottrustin

We have discussed that I feel often feel fake because I hide so much. T does not believe it is being fake but calls it my public face. It is my attempt at trying to protect everybody including myself. I learned early on to hide pain in order to keep everything going. It is my way of protecting myself

Sometimes I wonder if most people are doing this. There's no way to really know is there?

It's kind of sad that we feel we need to do this.

[nottrustin]

Originally Posted by puzzle_bug1987

Sometimes I wonder if most people are doing this. There's no way to really know is there?

It's kind of sad that we feel we need to do this.

I think most people do it to some degree...some just are better at hiding than others

[stopdog]

I have not usually felt I wasn't my true self. I felt like my true self made me appear like an alien to everybody else, but not that I wasn't knowing or being who I was within myself.

[Salmon77]

Originally Posted by puzzle_bug1987

Sometimes I wonder if most people are doing this. There's no way to really know is there?

It's kind of sad that we feel we need to do this.

As someone else said, it's a matter of degree. Everyone has to put on a public face sometimes, but the difference between the external and internal self may be great or small. Some people may wait until they're among friends to show their "true" self. For other people that "true" self is never acceptable and must always be suppressed. A person can get lost.

The thing is, we die every day. Who we once were, false or true has gone.
Working on what I'm truly feeling in the here and now is what we mostly focus on.

[ombrétwilight]

I don't think anyone has ever or will ever see my true self. They just see various extents of it, with ex-T being someone I trusted and loved enough to show a great degree of. Don't get me wrong - it's not that I don't care for her enough to show her the true me, but that I was never comfortable showing off this side of myself. To a certain degree, I've always been ashamed of it. The true "me" to me is the angry and scared little girl living day-in and day-out in an abusive situation, who is defiant to her parents and was a little tyrant among her peers. As time went on I learnt to mask the outward signs of disagreeableness with social adequacy and wry humour and this is what my ex-T saw even when I was describing my greatest trials to her. She has picked up on the disconnect between what I'm saying I feel and what I express in our interactions as I see the forced smile she puts on to mirror mine.

But then and again, what or who is actually the true me? I've spent so long living in between these different skins that they've sort of melded together at the seams and undermine one another without my conscious knowledge. I guess the "false" me is in fact not really that false today but initially emerged as an alter ego when I first began to control my anger/destructive tendencies so as to fit in. She began as a separate identity in a way but over time the two identities came together much more naturally. Even though I still keep up public appearances (a practice enforced by my mother "so others will not laugh at me" but actually to protect herself), I slip much easier into the role of the socially apt person now.

[unaluna]

I have always felt like this wasnt me, this wasnt the life i chose. But i was too locked in to it to make different choices. The past few years, thru therapy and certain life choices, these feelings have diminished and i am so glad i dont feel so apart from myself anymore. I dont ever want to go back to living that way. So yeah we talk about true and false self a lot.