Growing a false self

In his article How We Become Who We Are Not [from his new book The Mandala of Being], Richard Moss, MD outlines the dynamics we may experience in learning to be someone who is not our authentic self.

“How do children come to believe that they are indispensable to their parents’ well-being,” he writes, “and that they therefore must become the champions of their parents’ unfulfilled dreams, fulfilling them by becoming the good daughter or the responsible son?

“How many people revolt against their parents’ relationships by condemning themselves to lives of cynicism about the possibility for real love?

“In how many ways will members of one generation after another efface their own true natures in order to be loved, successful, approved of, powerful, and safe, not because of who they are in essence, but because they have adapted themselves to others?

“And how many will become part of the detritus of the cultural norm, living in poverty, disenfranchisement, or alienation?

“We are not born anxious for our survival. How is it, then, that pure ambition and the accumulation of wealth and power are ideals in our culture, when to live for them is all too often a soulless pursuit that condemns one to a path of unending stress, which fails to address or heal the core, unconscious feeling of insufficiency?”

[Painting: Mask 12 by Robert Peluce - from the shadow self page3]
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