At a glance
Keeping a version of yourself running is work, and the tiredness is the bill. The performance is rarely vanity; it was built to keep you safe in rooms where being plain was not safe. This article looks at what it was protecting, why dropping it feels dangerous, and where to begin.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The performance is usually old. Clients can often date the start of it to a particular household or a particular school, long before the job it does now.
- It costs most where it is needed least. Clients report the heaviest effort with the people who would mind least if they stopped.
- Dropping it brings exposure before relief. Clients expect to feel free and feel frightened instead, which is often why the attempt gets abandoned early.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does being plainly myself feel like a risk?
Because at some point it was one, and the part of you that learned that has not been told the situation changed.
Most people can find the room where it started. A household where one person’s mood had to be managed by everybody else. A classroom where standing out was expensive. A first job in a country whose rules nobody wrote down. What you built there was intelligent. You read what the room wanted and you supplied it, and it worked, which is the difficulty. Strategies that work never get reviewed.
So two things sit side by side. You want to be known. You keep producing a version that is easier to like than to know. Both are yours, and the second one is caution rather than dishonesty. It has a long service record.
Is there a real me under this, or did I invent one?
There is something under it, and it is usually smaller and more specific than people expect.
People arrive expecting to uncover a hidden personality, bolder and more interesting than the one they show. What actually turns up is modest: a set of preferences, irritations and needs that were never allowed to count for much. The same person with the editing switched off, rather than a different person waiting behind a door.
Feeling unlike yourself is also not one experience. In a cross-cultural survey of 523 adults describing an occasion when they felt most or least like themselves, the accounts of feeling least like themselves separated into distinct kinds, including a self-conscious, watched version and a flat, deflated one; participants from East and South Asian backgrounds also reported the heightened, exceptional sort of authenticity less often than Western participants.1 The events were recalled rather than recorded at the time, so memory shapes them, and the cultural pattern describes groups rather than any one person. It matches what I hear. Being watched and feeling flat are two different complaints, and they need different work.
Why is it hardest with the people I most want close?
Because the more there is to lose, the more carefully you manage what they are given.
With strangers the performance costs nothing. If they do not warm to it, nothing follows. With a partner, a close friend, the people you have assembled a life among, the arithmetic changes. If they met the plain version and went quiet, there would be no second explanation available to you. So the editing rises exactly where you most wanted it to fall away.
This turns up often among people living away from where they grew up. A second language hands you a slightly smaller self to work with, and a culture learned in adulthood gives you rules you follow rather than rules you feel. Some of what gets read as being false is the lag between knowing what is expected and finding it natural.
What was this version of me built to protect?
Usually a feeling that was unwelcome in the room where you learned to do this.
- Need. Wanting something openly, somewhere that treated wanting as a demand.
- Anger. Having an objection, somewhere that made objections cost more than they were worth.
- Ordinariness. Being unremarkable, somewhere that made attention something you earned by performing.
- Not knowing. Being uncertain out loud, somewhere that made uncertainty unsafe to admit.
Winnicott described a self that gets assembled to meet what the surroundings require, with the more spontaneous one kept behind it. I find the description useful because it stops this being a character fault. Something was protected, competently, by a younger version of you who had fewer options than you have now.
What helps, and when is this bigger than a habit?
Begin where the cost is high and the risk is low, which is rarely the same place.
- Pick one small true thing. A preference about where to eat, an opinion about a film. The size matters less than the fact that it was not calculated first.
- Watch what the body does afterwards. The spike of exposure usually passes in under a minute, and knowing that changes what you are willing to try next.
- Notice who you do not perform with. There is usually someone. Whatever is different about them is information worth having.
- Stop auditing the result. Checking how the plain version landed is the performance arriving again in another costume.
These are not enough in every case. If the performance runs continuously, if you look for a preference of your own and find nothing there, if dropping it brings panic rather than discomfort, or if what has to stay hidden is something you have never told anyone, then this is deeper than a habit and doing it alone is the harder road. The same is true if staying hidden is keeping you safe from someone in your present life rather than from a memory, which is a different situation and needs to be treated as one.
Most of what I see in individual psychotherapy on this is not a search for a truer personality. It is finding out what the version was for, who it was built for, and what becomes possible once it is not required in the room.
Questions people ask
Can therapy change this, or is it just my personality?
It changes, because the performance is a learned response rather than a fixed trait. What usually shifts first is how much it costs you, before how often it happens.
Do I need to know what I am hiding before I come?
No, and most people do not. It is easier to find in the room than on your own, because the pattern tends to show up in the conversation itself.
Will I have to talk about my childhood?
Only where it is useful, and not as the starting point. The present cost is usually the more honest way in, and the history arrives when it becomes relevant.
What if I perform in the sessions too?
You probably will at first, and that is workable material rather than a problem. Watching it happen in front of me is often the quickest route to seeing how it happens elsewhere.
Can the sessions be in English?
Yes. All my work is in English, in Copenhagen or online. If you grew up in another language it is worth saying so early, because the plain version of you may be easier to reach in one language than the other.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
