The False Self in Service to Others

A central theme of my personal psychological story is service to the other as a way of relating. In many aspects of my life serving, giving, and altruism are dominant themes. As a social worker, I’ve served the adult mentally ill for 25 years. My social philosophy is built around the socialist ideal of giving what you are able and taking what you need. My highest moral ideal is the saint, a person who gives because they feel moved to give.

While most would say I’m a good person, I’m certainly not a saint. I definitely don’t serve because I feel moved to serve. What I’ve found through self-analysis is that the psychodynamics of my serving is complicated and mainly motivated by the opposite

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of the desire to serve.

As a child, I lost connection to essential emotional, physical, and desiring parts of myself because of the repression necessitated by the family I was born into. I then compensated for their lack of emotional acceptance to function in life. Key defenses I unconsciously adopted were intellectualization and emotional-somatic numbing. Central to my self-development has been the cultivation of my awareness and the retrieval of my lost feelings.

Over the past 30 years, through Buddhist mindfulness practice and psychological self-analysis, I’ve studied the psychosomatic dynamics of being in service to the other. I cultivated a mindful self-observation to study the psychosomatic mechanics of my repression. This kind of self-study produces both subjective knowledge and self-change by bringing awareness to what was previously unconscious. In directing attention and recognition to unconscious parts one subtly alters self-knowledge and capacity to feel.

Both my parents emphasized intellectual achievement and felt deeply uncomfortable with physical contact, emotions, desires, and needs. In response to feeling fragmented, I reacted with intellectualization and a sense of numbness. In a myriad of ways through daily interactions, my parents “taught” me how to be a member of their family. For example, a common trope in the family was to react to unwanted self-expression by saying “he’s just trying to get attention,” as if trying to get attention was a bad thing and not a sign of a lack of care. This judgmental rejection of my needs was part of a larger familial system that we unconsciously acted out.

Fearing rejection, I cut off the vital emotions. Subjectively, I experience this fear as intense bodily constrictions, particularly around my heart. Fear became the foundation of my outward personality that Donald Winnicott called the false self. This false self develops alternative goals, desires, and strategies as compensation. The sense of my intrinsic value was lost with rejected feelings and desires. My dominant purpose in life became channeling my energy toward attaining my value as a person from others. The other took the form of things, people, and acclaim. I constructed my world around my need to gain validation wherever I could find it. This requires reading others and responding to their needs.

The worlds I constructed to organize my life goals and val-

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ues I call myths. I use the term myths in both the old-fashioned, pejorative, Enlightenment sense of imaginary stories that were thought of as real and in the postmodern sense of worldviews that all societies use to create culture. These myths are whole worlds of thinking, believing, feeling, and desiring that formed me and drove me toward my life goals.

Three great myths set the parameters of my life struggles. Number one, I demanded that my life-mission was to gain personal worth by becoming an intellectual somebody while always fearing I would become a worthless, intellectual nobody. I learned how to read what the other wanted in order to present myself in a way worthy of intellectual success. Later in life, I used my sharpened focus on the other in a positive way as a mental health clinician to mirror, understand, and serve.

Number two required that I suppress my subjective experience of feelings to avoid some vaguely imagined “trouble.” With my natural range of emotions cut off by fear, I used obsessive thinking to anticipate future interactions. My emotional energy was rerouted into mental rehearsals to anticipate future social encounters and make sure things went well. This “trouble” I’d get into could occur if I didn’t think first about the other’s needs and anticipate ways to avoid blame and conflict while gaining their approval. This pattern in adulthood was a repetition of my childhood conditioning where I learned to suppress my own needs in favor of the other. This cognitive strategy helped with psychotherapeutic work, but it required overcoming my conditioning to learn how to have conflict and set limits when necessary.

The third required that I attain the unattainable woman. Trying to attain what is unattainable is obviously contradictory. I needed to act in such a way that the rejecting woman would accept me and so transform me from valueless to valuable. This personal fantasy is represented in the fable of the frog who needs a princess to kiss him to transform him into a prince. I was dependent upon the unattainable princess kissing me—the frog—to attain my goal of becoming a man. Here again, as in the other two constructs, I learned to read the other and perform to their liking, so I’d get the value that I believed I lacked. In doing so, I often found myself serving women and appearing selfless by anticipating their needs.

In discovering, reflecting upon, and working through these myths, I realized that they share a few essential elements. All these

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psychic pillars are founded on fear. In one, I fear being a “nobody” by failing to become an intellectual “somebody.” In two, I fear the wrath of the disappointed other and the “trouble” I’ll get into by not performing like I’m supposed to. In three, I am terrified of the unattainable woman’s rejection and seek value from the person most likely to reject me. My false self has been constructed on a foundation of fear and anxiety. I experience a pervasive gnawing sense that there is just something wrong with me that I must remedy through some form of service.

All the psychic creations require that I gain my value as a person from the other. The self-value I must attain from the other occurs through recognition. Recognition means being seen and known—recognized—and so not being invisible or nonexistent. To be nonexistent is to be dead in life. The fear of remaining dead in life fuels the need to be valued by others and brought back to life through them. If I can’t come alive through being recognized by the other, I bear the constant threat of never living and never having lived my one chance at life.

To gain the longed-for recognition, all three require a performance whose criteria of success is determined by the other’s reactions. If the other approves of my performance, I’m valuable. If the other disapproves, I’m worthless. My felt value-lessness caused me to sacrifice myself to the other in order to get the value I lacked. The other was my path to redemption. Instead of having intrinsic value I had to go through an alienating exchange that required a performance. The performing self is a false self and necessitates a negation of the true self. The true self constantly presents a potential danger because it could ruin the performance and sabotage my becoming what the myths drive me to become. Defending against the real self requires more somatic constricting in order to enact the performance.

I gained positive reinforcement for my false self because it served others. Yet, at the same time, enacting my persona made me feel dead while living. Importantly, a powerful consequence of becoming mindful of these psychic pillars has been their slow and steady dissolution. Through awareness, a space opens up between myth and reality. It seems that as this open space expands, I can transcend the grip of fear and see a different way forward. As I continue to engage in my self-development, I hope to eventually open a space big enough to experience the desire for heartfelt giving. Then my giving will be doubly valuable because both the oth-

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er and I receive what we need.

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