Your Authentic Self

A major goal of therapy is to help our clients build, often from the ground floor up – to find your authentic Self. Many of us suffered adversities that impinged on the developing Self as it traversed the earliest developmental years. There are significant stages of development that culminate in young adulthood where our sense of self becomes stabilized as it manifests in our inner life and in activations (actions) in the ‘real world’.

The Self is formed in years 0 to 5 and becomes consolidated in the teen years and in an additional launch phase after high school — further solidifying in college and/or early career years. Fantasy, for example, plays a role in our toddler years (if allowed) as we learn to create imaginary tales that later become the basis of our creativity and translate into unique life endeavors.

If life conditions are sufficiently healthy to foster and support growth in personal awareness and self-examination, we develop qualities needed to persist: frustration tolerance, ability to stick to our endeavors, resilience, discipline, and emotional intelligence that allow the maturation of the authentic Self.

Due to a multitude of scenarios, this naturally healthy progression may have been impeded, thwarted, neglected, intentionally squashed or painfully denied. These adjectives do not begin to describe the various situations where the Self can be defeated and/or lost forever.

Therapy crystalizes the realization that you are missing a core sense of yourself. Often that realization is masked by symptoms: depression, anxiety, ennui, roving symptoms in the body including chronic pain, substance abuse, hyper-busyness and other expressions that mask alienation and a felt sense of meaninglessness. The absence of Self can cause chronic difficulties in relationships.

A healthy Self exists as separate and is not defined by others; it is separate, although influenced by your cultural lineage, race, education, your family, friends, partners or friend group, yet you exist differentiated and separate from these influences as well.

Can you think and act for yourself? Does your direction emanate from the inside? Can you feel a sense of your unique destiny?  Know what makes you happy? Live freely with will, determination and creativity that emanates from within rather than is dependent on the outside?

Over the years, our character defenses (false self) also solidify unless there are transformational events that encourage us to maintain a balanced focus on self — as the outer world and relationships capture our attention. Our façade is necessary as are our healthy defenses but not when we become unconscious of and captive to our defensive structure.

For some, the Self was formed but then defenses emerged that capsized the boat. These maladaptive styles dismantled the budding healthy expression of self. Unhealthy defensive structures obstruct the healthy self and can cause irreparable damage. Therapy helps to cohere the remnants of health and regenerate them.

Character defenses shut down the development of the authentic Self as they are utilized to provide a false self (Masterson’s term) that protects you in compromising situations. The false self, if needed for psychological and physical survival, will dominate, and other critical aspects of self-development will be relegated to the margin or banished completely.

For your authentic Self to develop early-on, you need nourishment, safety, support, challenge, love and respect that helps you build self-reliance. Those resources create a safe-space to develop, explore and discover your authentic Self. As a child you can be free from bad relational bargains and can figure out who you are. It is the Self, what Reich labeled as the core, where our true natures emanate. The Self is our guide and helps us define, over our lifetime, what is healthy.