The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age
There’s a dual focus in The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age. It starts with the obvious “real self.” The second focus is two ends of what Masterson considers a dimension or continuum. On the one side, we have what he calls the borderline – a person who can’t express themselves due to their lack of real self – and on the other, the narcissist – a person who has an inflated false self that prevents them from getting close. For Masterson, finding a real self was protection from both extremes.
Attachment
I didn’t get far before I felt the haunting pull of how Masterson’s descriptions paralleled attachment styles. Secure attachment relating to having a real self, anxious to the narcissist, and avoidant to borderline. He doesn’t describe a disordered type of attachment. (See Attached, Attachment in Adulthood, Attachment in Adults, and Attachment Theory in Practice for more.)
What differs from attachment theory is that Masterson’s theories aren’t research based. They’re based on observations and have never been empirically validated – at least, not that I could find. Conversely, there has been a great deal of research on attachment and validation of the basic concepts. That’s important here. While Masterson may have some useful concepts, where possible, I’d encourage looking for similar concepts in attachment theory, since these are more likely to be validated – and therefore correct.
Facing Reality
For Masterson, the key to finding a real self is facing reality. The more in touch with reality someone is, the more of a real self that they’ve cultivated. The false self, as he explains it, is developed on the premise of avoiding painful feelings – even if that means denying reality.
Facing reality is hard. It’s hard, because we believe what we believe until we’re forced to adjust it to better fit reality. (See How We Know What Isn’t So and Going to Extremes.) While we’ll readily accept information that conforms to our world view, we’ll only accept contradictory information under duress.
Facing reality is also doing the things that you know are right– even when they’re not pleasurable. It’s easy enough to avoid responsibility in many cases, but it often ends less well than simply doing the right thing from the start. It’s an important lesson that too few people learn. They get trapped in the cycle of avoiding difficult topics, getting called on them, and avoiding some more. (See Leadership and Self-Deception for more.)
In No Bad Parts, Richard Swartz speaks of the exiles – parts of our personality that we deny because we find them unacceptable. This, too, is a form of avoiding reality. To face reality, we must acknowledge that there are parts of all of us that are not perfect and that we must come to terms with.
Appropriate
All emotions are okay. It’s the lesson that resonates through How Emotions Are Made, Emotion and Adaptation, Nonverbal Messages, Emotional Awareness, and Advice Not Given – to mention a few. But there’s a difference between an emotion being okay and it being appropriate to the circumstances. Masterson suggests that the real self doesn’t block emotions – it accepts the emotions as they come and then evaluates them. It’s a sort of judgement as to whether the emotion is the right intensity and at the right time.
Evaluating emotions in such a cognitive way isn’t possible for many people – but it’s an interesting perspective that connects to the advice about paying attention to our emotions and trying to understand their meaning.
Success and Failure
It’s easy to believe that there are only failures when you’re confronted with a major failure. It’s hard to get the perspective that we each have both failures and successes. Masterson suggests that the real self can do this better than fake selves can. It is perspective-taking in a sense, being able to incorporate into our moment-to-moment thinking the events of the past that we know are true. It’s learning to balance the good and the bad and not get stuck in one side or the other.
Needing Intimacy and Fearing Rejection
It’s a dangerous trap – one that most closely aligns to a disordered kind of attachment – to feel helpless to avoid the need to be intimate with someone and simultaneously terrified of rejection. If they get to see the real you – as one does with intimacy – the fear is that they’ll reject you. (I’ve got a set of master posts involving Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy that give a fuller exposition of this topic. Also see Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy, Revisited.)
Self-Ownership
No one gets an owner’s manual for their life. We sort of muddle our way through it, and along the way, we learn how we’re supposed to behave – for right or wrong. One of the challenges that we sometimes incorrectly learn is that we’re responsible for other people’s feelings. We find ourselves in a world where our parents or guardians can’t manage their emotions, so we work hard to behave in ways that don’t trigger their anger. The problem is that this leads to a denial of self. Instead of learning what we enjoy and what we want to do, we’re constantly adapting to others and trying to head off any potential explosion that may be around the next corner.
It, too, is a trap. We believe that we’re no longer responsible for our happiness. We decide that we must do things for others instead of learning what we need to do to be ourselves.
No More Fantasies
There’s a point in everyone’s life where the way that we view ourselves moves from “I’m young” to “I’m old.” It’s an inflection point that often causes a midlife crisis, where they divorce to marry younger versions of the person they were with. They might purchase sports cars and dream of what it would have been like to have had the car when they were young. Slowly, even these changes lose their luster, and it becomes apparent that the dreams of our youth are just that – dreams. We’ll never do the things we said we’d do. We’ll never be who we thought we’d be.
In short, we have to give up our fantasies. We must accept that where we are and who we’ve become is far enough – that we’re enough. It sounds easy enough, but it’s far from it.
Sustaining Healthy Relationships
Relationships take work – and they’re worth it. Henry Cloud in The Power of the Other encourages us to build our relationships and to draw upon them. He also recommended finding Safe People. As those who study trust and vulnerability are prone to say, we trust because it’s more valuable than the risk of betrayal. (See Trust, Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, and Building Trust.) We have relationships because they return more than what we invest in them.
Defective
Another trap is believing we’re defective. We believe that the relationships we’re in aren’t ones that we deserve. She’ll figure out that I’m defective someday and leave me. He doesn’t understand how broken I really am – and when he finds out, he’ll leave. This is called impostor syndrome in professional circles, but in personal circles, it’s feeling unworthy. (See It’s Not You, It’s What Happened to You for impostor syndrome.)
The Compounding of the Unresolved
The one thing that is true of life is that if we don’t resolve the discrepancies between our true self – our beautiful self – and the one that we project to the world, we’ll end up continuing to pay interest on this gap. William Glasser in Choice Theory explains how our quality world – his way of describing our internal representation of the world – is critical to our ability to adapt in the real world. If we want to thrive and enjoy our lives, it seems we need to begin The Search for The Real Self.