Dear Seaturtle:

I have more time this morning, sitting in front of the computer, to reply to your yesterday’s posts more attentively. You asked me yesterday: “Him calling me selfish, cold and that I made him feel used. Those are things my father also told me. I don’t want to be those things, do you think those could be false selves?”

From Wikipedia/ true self and false self:

“The true self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and the false self (also known as fake self, idealized self, superficial self and pseudo self) are a psychological dualism conceptualized by English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott used ‘true self’ to denote a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self with little to no contradiction.<sup id=”cite_ref-2″ class=”reference”></sup> ‘False self’, by contrast, denotes a sense of self created as a defensive façade,<sup id=”cite_ref-:0_1-1″ class=”reference”></sup> which in extreme cases can leave an individual lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty behind an inconsistent and incompetent appearance of being real, such as in narcissism…<sup id=”cite_ref-:0_1-2″ class=”reference”></sup>

“when what Winnicott was careful to describe as good enough parenting—i.e., not necessarily perfect<sup id=”cite_ref-4″ class=”reference”></sup>—was not in place, the infant’s spontaneity was in danger of being encroached on by the need for compliance with the parents’ wishes/expectations.<sup id=”cite_ref-5″ class=”reference”></sup> The result could be the creation of what Winnicott called the ‘false self’, where ‘other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being’.<sup id=”cite_ref-6″ class=”reference”></sup> The danger he saw was that ‘through this false self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real’,<sup id=”cite_ref-7″ class=”reference”></sup> while, in fact, merely concealing a barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming façade”.

* I will submit this post next because I expect lots of extra print because I pasted and copied from Wikipedia. In the next post, I will remove the extra print.