WHY BEING YOURSELF ISN'T AS EASY AS YOU THINK
31 AUGUST 2021 (16 MIN READ)
How many times have you heard someone tell you to “just be yourself?” Although massive value exists in that piece of advice, being yourself is a lot more complicated than it seems. As human beings, we operate mostly unconsciously, meaning that our behaviors are driven by various traumas and habits that we are not aware of. For instance, most of the times you get angry at someone, they have merely unconsciously activated repressed emotions or traumas inside you. This is one of the main reasons why meaningless political conversations can often get heated: people need an outlet to express their repressed anger (unknowingly). Since most of us have no clue what’s really going on inside of us, how can we healthily be ourselves? The harsh truth is that we can never 100% be ourselves since we do not know everything inside of us, but we can be as self-aware as possible. Thus, being yourself should ultimately be replaced with being as self-aware as you can be. To illustrate the difference, let me paint a picture of what it’s like to simply be yourself without any self-awareness.
About a year ago, I had just gotten out of flings and relationships where I wore a seductive facade to constantly receive validation. Since I felt so hidden and ashamed of who I really was, the next person I dated had to see me for only me—no games. So, I would text my new girlfriend whenever I wanted, would get upset whenever I felt like it, and vocalized my jealousy or neediness whenever it came to me. What ended up ensuing was an incredibly toxic relationship where my broken manhood was out of control. And what kept my virulent behavior going was the defensive belief that I was just being myself. But what I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t really me—I was acting out my unresolved trauma of maternal abandonment as a kid. The more I thought that dark behavior was 100% me, the less I looked within and did not realize my childhood wounds. After going through this mess, I finally understood what being yourself really entails. It means constantly looking at your wounds once they arise and being aware of your ego. It also consists of understanding who your higher self is and who the lower one robbing you of peace is. And if these things do not happen, then those closest to you will end up acting as outlets who feed your undealt with trauma.
I believe life is mostly about growing into the totality of who we are; that’s the end goal to me. And that mission will never be completed since we are always evolving, but that doesn’t mean I will not try my hardest to get there. Since there are so many sides of us that we still have no clue about, it’s important to try our best to become aware of them. Or else they will control our lives without us knowing—just like my wounded inner child controlled an entire relationship without my knowledge. This article will discuss the importance of understanding who you are in romance and friendship, as well as how to grow into your higher self and away from the lower self—all in an effort to give you the tools to be yourself as realistically as possible.
ROMANCE
Romance: the area where the clichéd advice, “Be yourself,” gets applied most frivolously. As was explained in the introduction, when most people think of being themselves, they forget about the unconscious points of trauma that can control their behavior. Thus, being oneself without self-awareness can often lead to harmful actions and avoidable pain inflicted on others. This unfortunate reality makes it especially dangerous in romance for one to be themselves without self-awareness, as it's the area where the worst of us comes out. Love activates our unconscious wounds from our relationship with our parents growing up. Without romantic feelings, the wounds fail to reach the surface as intensely. For instance, if you had an absent parent of the opposite sex—that undealt with childhood pain will reach the conscious mind once you fall in love with someone of their same gender. Unfortunately, most cannot tell where that pain is stemming from, which leads to controlling and needy behavior without remorse. Any partner you have had who got easily jealous and possessive, simply had parental wounds they needed to take care of; it had absolutely nothing to do with who you were as a person. Knowing this painful reality of love bringing out our parental wounds without us realizing, being oneself in romance without self-awareness can be incredibly damaging. I used to act toxically and defend it with the philosophy of “I’m just being myself,” and that bad habit rings true for many people. However, I only understood who I really was once I discovered my undealt with points of trauma. So how can one do that exactly?
The best tool I can recommend is using love as a mirror. If you are in a relationship, use your partner as a reflection of the work you have to do on yourself. And if you are single, think about past relationships and the ways you acted in them. If you need validation from your partner constantly, then that could be telling you that you did not receive enough validation from your parents as a kid. If you get anxious and needy in moments of distance with your partner, then you might have had issues of abandonment with your parents as a child. If you tend to end things with someone the moment you start gaining feelings for them, then you probably did not grow up in a safe loving environment—which taught you not to trust the people you love—making running away your only option. The list continues, but these are some of the common points of trauma in relationships. So, take time to reflect on your romantic endeavors and pick out the common areas of pain for you. For me, it was abandonment and lack of validation, which reflected the lack of presence from my mother growing up and not many loving words from both of my parents. Once I tapped into the true source of my pain, and healthily unleashed a lot of my grief surrounding it, the trauma stopped controlling as much of my life. The pain of my inner child still visits me in relationships, but since I am aware of his wounds, I am able to separate it from reality and not project my undealt with pain onto a partner. None of this means you have to be ashamed of your past mistakes or trauma, the only way through is to forgive yourself with compassion and give love to your younger self. Please don’t treat your past pain with hatred and fear. It’s also imperative to unpack the pain from previous relationships, or else they will leak into future ones and dictate their trajectory.
The ultimate goal of a relationship is to have your partner accept all of you, but how can they do that if you don’t know yourself? To truly be yourself, you have to try to understand and recognize all of you—especially the dark and painful sides. And the more you do this, the more you will be able to help your partner deal with their trauma and pain. A relationship is not always about being lovey-dovey and having infinite orgasms, rather, it’s how well you can hold each others’ hands while walking through the darkness. A healthy partner must support and honor their loved ones' negative emotions and trauma, but that can only be done if they treat themselves the same way. Accept your own darkness and it will be much easier to hold space for the trauma of others.
FRIENDSHIP
The same shitty advice that's told to those entering the dating world is also used for those looking to make new friends: “Just be yourself.” Most people automatically wear a mask of flattery around new people; they put on a smile and try their best to receive validation in the form of someone’s admiration. This means you may treat people differently depending on the responses they give you—meaning you constantly change yourself for other people. I used to be a master of disguise, shapeshifting until the right costume won over somebody’s heart. The scary part is that I did that unconsciously; I thought I was just being myself. It may seem like putting on a seductive mask can lead to having more friends, but in reality, it only leads to false friendships and making yourself look like a fool more so than you would think. People can sense when someone really knows themselves and is being authentic; those types of people seem incredibly attractive and powerful. Think of someone who seems entirely sure of themselves and compare them to someone who constantly changes their identity to receive validation. Which one do you respect more? And which one would you want to spend more time with? It’s easy to tell if somebody is speaking from a place of truth versus saying whatever they can to receive admiration. Unfortunately, knowing yourself and not giving a fuck about the validation of others is the harder route; putting on a performance is the easy way out. The former requires painful investigation into one’s shadow, and the latter just entails putting on a mask. If you want to make the right friends and drop the need to constantly receive external validation, you will have to look deep inside yourself for the moments that broke you—because that is the only way you will know who you really are. The other option is to keep putting on a disguise and attracting friends who expect you to be someone you are not.
To break the performative habit of putting on a false persona rooted in a need to be liked, one must ask themselves: whose validation have I been searching for my whole life? Because if you do not heal the root cause of the issue, you will keep trying to heal it through other people—and that strategy will never work—hurting you more in the long run. Begin your journey at the familial level. Did you feel you received enough validation from your parents growing up? If the answer is no, connect with that little kid begging for the approval of their parents, feel their pain with compassion and empathize with it. Expel the grief and learn to separate the emotions of your inner child from your current self. Next, think of your time in education, such as lower, middle, and high school. Did you experience any bullying? Did you have enough friends to make yourself feel validated? Use the same process for the inner child here. Keep peeling back the layers until you reach the present moment. Whose validation were you begging for at any point in your life? Work through the wounds and learn to separate them from who you are now. Personally, I rarely received validation from my father growing up, who is a traditionally strong alpha male. Thus, I noticed myself constantly itching to receive the validation of strong men throughout my life. I tended to put on the biggest performance for those sorts of people. The urge to be intimidated by strong men, and gain their admiration, still comes to me, but I have learned to see that as my inner child coming out and not who I am at this moment. Cultivating this habit through mindful observation has allowed me to stop wearing a mask and honor who I truly am. I also got bullied by “the cool girls” in middle school, which made me addicted to female validation in high school and college. Not knowing the root cause of this need for admiration was the main contributing factor in my womanizing habits. Knowing who I am means understanding that I have a hurt boy inside of me who constantly desired his father’s approval and cried frequently about girls calling him fat. That is who I am, not just a handsome fellow with a brain and muscles. To know yourself means honoring and owning the worst parts of yourself. Without that awareness and radical ownership, your traumatic moments in life will start to control your future.
UNDERSTAND THE LOWER SELF
We all have two sides to ourselves: the lower self and the higher self. The lower self is your ego, and the higher self, in my understanding, is a state of heightened self-awareness that connects to a divine entity. In order to spend as much time possible as our higher self, we must investigate our ego and become more aware of its tendencies. In the end, awareness prevails over the lower self—not repression or blindly listening to every thought in your head. The four key emotions that the lower self feeds off of are: fear, anger, anxiety, and envy. So, the next time you find yourself residing in one of those emotions, listen to the thoughts that come with them—as that is your lower self talking. Let’s begin with fear in relationships. Think about a time when you have feared that a romantic partner was cheating on you or talking to someone else. You took one tiny potential piece of evidence and made a full-blown movie out of it. The thoughts created by the lower self led you to treat your partner unfairly and wish harm upon the potential mistress. Thus, by allowing fearful thoughts to compromise your belief system and seduce you into harmful action, you allowed one emotion to bring out your lower self. This doesn’t have to be the case.
If you have ever made a mistake like this, which I definitely have, that’s good, because now you know how much harm it can bring. Using this reflection, next time a similar situation arises, allow awareness to combat the lower self. Understanding how becoming the lower self can lead to harm, tell yourself, “I have nothing to fear. Whatever happens will occur for a specific reason. I know my values and will not allow this emotion to compromise them.” I also like to give my lower self a specific name, so when he’s yapping some bullshit, I can just say, “Oh shut up Sacul (my name backwards).” The next step, as explained in the previous sections, is to connect with an earlier version of yourself that was in pain. Since your lower self is your ego, and the ego is designed to protect your identity from emotional harm, your lower self is ultimately a buildup of traumatic moments it’s trying to protect you from reliving. Hence, why the ego leads to overly confident delusions and bouts of envy—to distract you from the truth. So, to defeat this harmful mental loop, try to connect a lower self activation with a previous point of trauma, giving that earlier version of yourself empathy and love. By showing your ego that it’s ok to revisit points of trauma that affected your confidence, it will stop protecting their conscious release—leading you to have more control over the way they affect your life. On the other hand, by keeping your traumatic memories locked up, your ego will continue to seduce you into thinking your actions have nothing to do with them, while the points of trauma unconsciously dominate the trajectory of your life.
Mistakes are the key to becoming familiar with your lower self. Next time you do something or treat someone in a way that you deeply regret, try your best to remember the thoughts and feelings that got you there. The more familiar you become with your thoughts and feelings, the more you will be able to identify your lower self and thus be less likely to give power to it. Ok, now back to the main point: being yourself. Since we are so unaware of our lower self, and the thoughts and emotions it feeds off of, most people do not really understand who they are. They can only reach a solid understanding once they investigate their shadow: the lower self. And they are much less likely to get there if they just accept everything they do as “themselves” and fail to look further than that. For that reason, you must become close acquaintances with that dark side of yours. You have to understand its every move or else it will continue beating you down—without you even knowing most of the time. I do believe every human should be at war with their lower self, but that does not mean the war should lack compassion. The metaphor I use for the battle is that of ancient Japanese samurais, like Miyamoto Musashi. Although they fight to the death, each strike comes with an immense amount of respect. The enemy is their teacher and friend until the bitter end. Using their philosophy, I feel honored to go to war with my lower self and I respect his power, as well as his strategically cultivated moves. Some days he lands a stab through my stomach, but I get right back up the next day—and think about what moves I can use to beat him. No matter who wins or loses, each fight I gain a better understanding of myself, and that’s all I can really ask for.
CULTIVATE THE HIGHER SELF
This may sound corny, but unlike the lower self, the higher self feeds off of peace and love. Only when I am in a state of serenity and needing nothing but my own presence, does my higher self arise and offer me guidance. Reflect on a moment where you were having a good time and suddenly a voice came into your head telling you a much needed answer. What followed was you being shook to your core and your life suddenly making a whole lot more sense. Each time that occurs, that is your higher self communicating with you. I have a notebook where I write down each time a thought like this arises. Here are two from the past month: “Strive to believe in yourself more than anyone could ever believe in you,” and “You are not defined by your feelings. But how you react to them. That’s your legacy.” These truth bombs are the main reason why so many see the higher self as a connection to a divine entity—because out of nowhere a massive pearl of wisdom suddenly appears in your mind unforced. It’s easy to see this as God communicating with you, but nobody can know if that’s actually true. Thus, I will leave that interpretation up to you. This type of communication is the easiest place to start noticing the higher self, but it can stay within your mind for long periods of time as well. You just have to stop allowing the lower self to control your mind. The three best ways to do this are meditation, exercise, and entering flow state.
Through meditation, we can actually target the areas of the brain that are associated with the ego and calm them down. This fortunate outcome allows meditation to be the best way to exit the lower self. Whenever fear or anger is strong in my system, I first feel the emotion and connect it to a sore spot in my traumatic past. Once that is completed, I do a meditation exercise that entails breathing in for five seconds, then breathing out for ten—for about ten minutes. While I’m breathing, I visualize all my anger, and its associations to the past, leaving my system on the exhale, and anything I love or am grateful for entering on the inhale. Once that is completed, my lower self is much smaller, and my higher self starts to restore itself inside me. This habit has fundamentally changed my life for the better.
Since the lower self feeds off an uncontrolled mind, it’s important to spend a good amount of time every day connecting with our bodies—in comes exercise. A hard workout does wonders for not only physical connection, but beating out the ego as well. On one hand, exercise does help silence the mind, but on the other, working out is deeply uncomfortable, which the ego despises. Therefore, by doing a grueling workout, we take a lot of power away from the ego (as long as we do not stare at ourselves flexing in the mirror the whole time). Lastly, flow state gives us a unique invitation to get to know our higher self. Flow state entails being immersed with the task at hand, which ultimately means you are as present as can be and away from your egoistic mindset—two key components to being in a higher state. So, make sure to enter a flow state each day doing something you love to do. Pay attention to the way you think and see the world during that time because that’s how it’s supposed to be.
To be yourself, try to spend as much time as you can as your higher self—because that is who you are in your full actualization. However, you can only accomplish this through also understanding your lower self and their trigger points, creating a yin-yang that each person must master.
