The True Costs of Hiding Your Real Self
Self censorship creates physical, emotional and social dis-ease.
The lump in your throat as you swallow your words...
The growing knot in your belly...
The way your legs tense up to hold you in place, or the blood as it drains from your hands...
If, like most people, you learned early in life that being yourself meant rejection, abandonment, shame, judgment, punishment or bullying, then you learned to develop a persona (fake personality) that would get you the "love" you wanted.
Now, as an adult, you likely experience tidal waves of fear flooding your body any time you move away from the persona towards true self expression. Those physiological sensations are designed to move us away from the "danger zone" of what we fear most. Most of the time, the sensations win.
Most of the time, we retreat back into the "safe" confines of our body whenever these physical cues ping us.
But this kind of "safety" will not only cost us our health; it will cost us the slow death of our soul.
"I can't be friends with anyone who doesn't believe in systemic racism," she said, looking at me in disbelief that anyone could believe otherwise.
She was telling me about the recent end of a decade long friendship, which had disintegrated under the weight of irreconcilable world views. My agreement seemed to be a given in her mind. She didn't ask for my opinion; instead, she looked at me knowingly: you're like me, and people like us share these core fundamental beliefs.
My belly churned, my jaw clamped shut and my heart started pounding.
"Ugh, not today," I said to myself.
"Does she really mean this, or is it hyperbolic?" I wondered.
Two weeks ago I had reached out to this friend during a time of intense emotional turmoil for a Zoom "friend date." (We don't live near each other). Already exhausted, my heart hurting and overwhelmed by life, I dreaded more conflict. So instead of speaking my truth, I made the choice to defer that uncomfortable conversation to a later date, when I would be more resourced.
This is a pattern of mine, and a symptom of fear of freedom.
This friendship is 30 years in the making.
Here we are, 3 decades in, and I'm afraid to be myself in her presence. Does she even know me? If I’m being honest, the answer has to be no; not fully. I've kept those parts of myself hidden during hundreds of seemingly insignificant yet monumental moments like this one.
For the rest of that friend date, I was consumed by the unconscionable knowing that I wasn't being myself; that she didn't really know me; that I've allowed her to assume so much about me (for decades!); all the while lamenting her lack of curiosity about me (because if she did ask, I would share my real opinions and beliefs).
This isn't her fault, though.
Being myself (and choosing my relationships) is 100% my responsibility.
My body expressed what I couldn't: for the past two weeks, my gut has been in knots and my digestion has tanked; my jaw feels sore from clamping shut, and systemic tension grips my body. This friendship means a lot to me, and in many ways our history makes it harder to be myself. I haven't been willing to risk the end of this friendship until today.
A few hours ago I finally reached out, shared my truth and asked if we could talk about it. My body already feels lighter.
When we suppress our beliefs, opinions, feelings and self expression, the vagus nerve - via neuroception - registers registers that we are socially unsafe.
We may become hypervigilent, physically tense and socially anxious. The vagus nerve, largely responsible for regulating the gut brain axis, intercepts communication signals coming from the organs as they travel to the brain. The organs have long been known, especially in Chinese and ayurvedic medicine, to correspond with human emotions. Emotions are felt physically in the body, nowhere else. We don’t feel emotions in our “minds” - they exist as sensations flooding our body.
The primary inputs that the vagus nerve responds to are social and environmental triggers that cause an emotional reaction inside of us.
IMPORTANT: it's not the external events that trigger the vagus nerve to interpret that we're not safe - it is purely OUR reaction/response to those external events.
The body is always listening: to the psycho-emotional-energetic messages we broadcast daily that reverberate throughout our physiology; these messages are then broadcast to other people, and the environment at large. Human beings are antennae, or tuning forks for harmony and disharmony; for vitality and dis-ease. We feel truth (and untruth) in our bodies.
Nothing needs to be verbally exchanged for us to “know” these things about other people; our bodies register all of this data subconsciously, which informs our subconscious psychology, and subsequently - our relational behaviors.
What was it costing my within this friendship to withhold my true self? Whether she knows it consciously or not, she’s aware that I hide aspects of myself; that I’m attached to her friendship, and too cowardly to jeopardize it.
What is it costing me?
No matter how many people we surround ourselves with in an attempt to "belong" or gain social status, if we don't feel free to be ourselves then our body will succumb to a state of chronic distress (not to be confused with the sympathetic nervous system response, commonly referred to as the “stress response”). Stress itself is not bad. In fact, we would not be able to wake up in the morning without sufficient release of cortisol, the oft-demonized “stress hormone”. If we want to be more accurate to the reality of human physiology, we would describe the sympathetic nervous system as the means by which we harness the energies of arousal, or focused attention.
When we respond to social environments with fear of “banishment from the tribe” and subsequent self censorship, or pretending to be someone we’re not, at a physiological level we enter a state of functional freeze. Frozen by fear, we begin to fawn, behaving in ways that we perceive will gain us social favors, or at least - not get us banished by the tribe.
Unbeknownst to most people, the freeze response does NOT belong to the sympathetic nervous system; it’s actually registered by the vagus nerve as an aspect of the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is usually regarded as the “rest and digest” state of the nervous system, but this isn’t totally accurate. Functional freeze takes over when we don’t take action during the acute phase of sympathetic reactivity. When we register a threat and choose NOT to fight and NOT to flee, we enter functional freeze. If functional freeze becomes chronic, we lose access to the natural cycles of cortisol release and sympathetic states that give us energy, focus, drive and enthusiasm for pursuing a life well lived.
Instead, we might experience any or all of the following:
▶ chronic fatigue
▶ anxiety
▶ digestive issues
▶ cold hands and feet
▶ chronic soft tissue pain
▶ poor memory and brain fog
▶ inability to focus
▶ lack of motivation and drive
▶ overwhelm
▶ and more!
The only way out of the freeze response is back UP the chain of central nervous system activity into:
We choose to face and confront (fight) whatever threat we’ve perceived.
We decided to flee, and putting enough distance between us and the threat that it is no longer perceived as an omnipresent danger.
Ironically, many of us get really good at being alone in an attempt to get away from the awful feelings of being misunderstood (or the potential pain of rejection). But being alone triggers the vagus nerve to detect that we now face a different threat: disconnection.
Like many people, I got really good at fleeing. I shrunk my social world to such a sufficient extent that no one could get close enough to trigger my fears of abandonment or rejection. During this phase of my life, which lasted nearly 20 years, I experienced all of the above symptoms.
In this state, the body has difficulty performing basic daily functions like digestion and elimination, let alone repairing injuries or eliminating toxins. Additionally, chronic fear (of anything) can thicken fascia, creating literal armor in the form of “thick skin.” This thickened fascia has its own painful consequences, which I won’t go into today.
If you want to read more about these phenomena, I highly recommend Gabor Maté's books "When The Body Says NO" and "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" or Bessel Van Der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score."
My personal philosophy on this is that the vagus nerve (and the entire body) is performing its function brilliantly: it is alerting us to the fact that we are not being ourselves; life is rapidly passing by and our Soul, our essential self, is missing from the equation!
"Not being yourself is so very painful!" the body cries, expressing what we cannot.
The only cure, then, is to be ourselves - openly, socially.
Forget gargling and humming and massaging your inner ear in order to "calm" the vagus nerve. Forget fascia release, chiropractic or EFT. If the root cause is a fear of being ourselves, the only cure is to face that fear and BE who we truly are in the presence of others.
It's no coincidence to me that the primary method of stimulating the vagus nerve is via the voice box.
You can't fool the vagus nerve (or the body, period).
When we open our mouths to speak, our body knows if we are being our true self or pretending to be someone we're not.
We are social creatures, and there is no True self outside the context of relationships that allow us to hear the sound of our own voice.
Since 2008 I've worked with thousands of people struggling with chronic pain, autoimmune conditions and feelings of stagnancy or stuckness that can be traced back to their careers and relationships.
Across the board, when we really dig in and get to the crux of the matter, everyone voices the same core fear:
We're afraid to be ourselves.
Why is this so hard?
My heart constantly breaks for us, for humanity. We share this core fear and deeply painful core wound, and yet we continue to judge, reject and abandon each other every day.
Some of us learned NOT to be ourselves so early in life that many of us don't even know who we are. And if we don't know who we are, how can we share our true self with other people?
Our initial attempts might be clumsy or messy or occur nothing like the way we intended or pictured in our unreliable mind. We're taught that "you never get a second chance to make a first impression." What if we need a second, third, fourth, 100th chance to express what we feel and know inside but have so much difficulty embodying?
Sometimes, we do know ourselves; and there's a history of being judged, ridiculed, rejected or abandoned for expressing who we already know we are.
Sometimes, we can consciously sense when another person will not have the capacity to accept, understand and love us for who we are (because they haven't accepted, understood and loved themselves yet).
Silence may be wise here, or silence could become the prison bars that lock you inside an unfulfilling relationship.
The illusion is that we're not free to be ourselves.
We are.
As adults, we always have the freedom to be misunderstood, judged, rejected or banished from the tribe and choose to love ourselves enough to be true anyway. Because, at the end of the day, there's only ONE person whose opinion truly matters:
YOU (what you think and feel about yourself).
ME (what I think and and feel about myself).
If we're afraid of someone else's judgment, it's because we fear our own self judgments.
Most of us are very self critical, and speak abusively to ourselves in our own minds.
If we're afraid of rejection, it's because we've rejected ourselves.
We constantly reject parts of ourselves that we dislike or wish were different.
If we're afraid of abandonment, it's because we've abandoned ourselves.
We created a persona, or "preferred self," and banished our True Soul into the shadows.
Instead of looking within, most of us look outside ourselves for acceptance, validation, understanding and love. We also criticize, judge, reject and abandon the people around us before they can do the same or worse to us.
Meanwhile, our bodies bear the burden, haunted by a disowned soul that will never stop trying to get our attention.
How to be your true self:
Accept that freedom will feel terrifying and disturbingly uncomfortable.
Accept that you will likely be judged, misunderstood, rejected and abandoned (by some people). You may also need to end one or more relationships yourself (this is healthy fleeing, and gets us out of chronic freeze and fawn states).
Decide that you will learn to accept, understand and love yourself. No matter what. No matter what. No matter what.
Decide that you will no longer judge, reject and abandon yourself. No matter what. No matter what. No matter what. And when you do (which is almost inevitable), you will practice self forgiveness; and start again.
Get to know yourself. Go out and taste life; feel it; play with it. Get to know your own opinions and beliefs. Know your likes and dislikes, pains and pleasures. Above all, get to know your own body and make yourself at home there. Get to know your emotions and sensations and how to interpret them so you can meet your own physical, emotional and spiritual needs.
Share what you know about yourself with others: all of your weird and wonderful opinions, beliefs, feelings, needs and boundaries.
Be willing to let go of anyone and anything that's not meant for you (the True you).
Realize: there is no destination. There is no knowing yourself once and for all. There is no being your True self once and for all.
Being our True selves is a moment by moment, day by day experience of embodied presence to Life as it unfolds in all of its mysterious, agonizingly painful, beautiful and miraculous glory.
If we're brave enough to loosen our death grip of control, face our fears and learn to love ourselves through the self discovery process, we will begin to tap into more freedom than we can even fathom right now.
I've tasted this freedom, and I know that it is vast beyond my current comprehension.
I reached out to my friend, and she agreed to meet me on Zoom to hear about my self censorship and fear of rejection.
Click here to read about that experience.
Now, tell me in the comments section what it has cost you to cast your true self into the shadows. And if you’re walking the path of openly expressing yourself in your relationship, I’d love to about that. Freedom isn’t an easy path to walk. Often, it feels like: panic, gut churning, nausea, sweating, clenching, resistance and terror. And - it’s worth it!
With love,
Elisha
I am really touched by your writing here.
As someone with a perfectionistic streak not only in my career, but also in my relationships, I couldn’t be more encouraged reading someone else say, “What if we need a second, third, fourth, 100th chance to express what we feel and know inside but have so much difficulty embodying?”
Beautiful! Thank you so much.