True Self Vs. False Self- Who is Running Your Life

          This is really interesting because as an adoptee, I find it extremely hard to distinguish between the two.
       
          I came across Pete Gerlach, a 70 something year old veteran/psychotherapist who was wheel chair bound due to a muscle disease and wanted to share his 31+ years of experience working with families and his discoveries. He came across many astonishing patterns in people who came from "low-nurturance" families, and when he tried to research he found nothing on the topic, so he dedicated himself to getting the information out there via a no-profit website where anyone can go and study the mind-blowing truths about why their lives have always felt like their hands were tied together whenever they chanced upon success. He himself was an ACoA, and woke up in 1980's when his marriage fell apart and he realized he had nothing. He began researching, and discovered that his early experiences were hindering his path at success, and he further realized that this was not limited to ACoAs. it was everyone who came from a childhood of neglect, emotional, physical, or mental trauma. I love his honesty and sheer wisdom, and the clear way he explains the workings of what happens to neglected children. It shocks me, and my heart starts racing each time I start reading, and perhaps it is an inner child saying "help this is too much!"

          Gerlach says that inner children are the parts in you that were shamed at a young age, and therefore hindered in growth. Erik Erikson taught of the stages of development, for example mistrust vs. trust at age 1, and says that if one does not get the maximum care at those ages they will have a part of them that get's stuck in the negative state.

         Lisa A Romano, the Break Through Life Coach and an ACoA, who has dedicated her life to helping others get through the same trauma that takes over a person's life, says that these broken parts call out to us to heal whenever we encounter simillar situations later on, via flashbacks and triggers in our current situations which stimulate these inner feelings to come to the surface.

          She further says that children who come from homes where their emotions were not seen and validated, grow up feeling like they are crazy and their reality becomes a "match" in attracting situations that reinforce that idea, for "what goes in must come out!" This is shocking, yet so resonating. SO many people walk around feeling shame based, but not even knowing that there can be a different way of life, because they were so injured that that state of bring is their norm. It is truly sad. Romano states that she was in an abusive marriage with a narcissist that could not see her, and whenever he put her down she had no other mode than to accept it and she in turn treated her kids the same way. It was all sub-conscious, and many of us do the same without realizing. If asked, we would say we are behaving regularly, but some of us wake up to the reality that something is wrong but we are too ashamed to face our inner wounds. It was interesting to me to hear that so many of her recovering clients said that their lives were in turmoil before meeting Lisa, but they thought there was NO WAY OUT, that this way the only mode. They were constantly self- critical and deeply entrenched in guilt and shame for their thoughts and behavior patterns, that freedom from it seemed foreign.

          On to the Codependent and Narcissistic personalities Dynamic. I will briefly touch upon it here because I don't want to distract too much from the topic. Ross Rosenberg, a Psychotherapist and expert in Codependency, Narcissism, Trauma, and Sex Addiction (which he believes are all tied together), states that these personalities are drawn to each other like magnets in a field, and they both have an underlying base of emotional, physical or mental neglect stemming from childhood. The dysfunction causes them to grow up leaning on one side of these extremes of personalities. The Narcissist is empty and seeks to have others fill them up, while the codependent has no sense of boundaries and feels they need to give everything of themselves in order to be worthy of love. Therefore they are a match "made in heaven," with all their volatility. They actually reinforce each other's traumas, when one get's fed up and tries to pull away, both getting hurt, and promises of continuing their usual behavior; the cycles bringing them back to their inner mindsets. However, they are always unsatisfied, and may question why, but fee; stuck in self-blame and feel they cannot change.  I have been in such relationships as the codependent, and the highs and lows were a roller coaster, and no one around me understood what i was going through not even therapists. The shame kept me locked in, but realizing that it was not my fault was my first step of recovery.

         Anyway, back to Pete Gerlach and False Selves. A False Self for adoptees is, I feel, much more complicated and harder to get to the bottom of. Why? Because as Betty Jean Liften, author of Lost and Found in Adoption states, adoptees have grown up with a fracture that affected them at the beginning of their lives, so there is no PRE-TRAUMA PERSONALITY. The actual sense of self is cut off when they find themselves cut off from their only familiar person, who they feel is another piece of them, and they go into a state of shock and grief. No body acknowledges their grief, and they are conditioned to think that their whole world is a bad place and they must not make any wrong moves to escape the devastation from reoccurring. The grief is unbearable for such a small mind to grasp, but NO body helps because she is thought to have no feelings and no sense of reality. It is truly devastating to think about the possibilities of the baby being ripped from their real mothers, this is why people do not consider it.

          What does this mean for the False Self of an Adoptee? They are to deny their own realities, and conform to those around them. Even more devastating than a child of abusive parents, because they feel straight from the get-go that they have no self at all. As we know, a mother and child are one being in the baby's eyes until 9 months of age, for the brain is still developing and he is totally dependent on his mother, who he KNOWS and is AWARE of from her sound, movement, smell and emotions!! How can we look past this and ignore the facts?! Yes, there IS a loss in adoption, the baby does lose their source of  all life. I have to keep reiterating it to myself in order to come to terms with my loss, because, as we know, nobody remembers their baby memories. But the emotional memories are remembered, as Paul Sunderland says, it is an implicit memory, meaning it is "remembered but not recalled." It takes place in the body, and can be triggered through flashbacks of anxiety and stress, without a directly known causes. He states that adopted are over-represented in clinics, and are more likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees, but their plights are still overlooked.

         Everything triggers me. Everyone triggers me. I cannot have a casual exchange with someone without being shaken to the core of my existence. I can fake it, sure, but the idiosyncrasies will grate on my insides like chalk on a board. "Do you even know what I am?" my guts scream, as the person fakes their smile, or jokes jubilantly. It is a rest when the person knows who I really am, and all my complications. My awkward pauses, stares into the distance, and seeming disinterest in other's lives. I can empathize with anything if I was invested, it just takes me more time than average people because of inner chaos. The more I pay attention to myself, the more I notice my feelings and understand why I react, the better I can be at empathizing with others. I am learning this more now, and it is helping me become unstuck in the beliefs that I am shameful and unworthy of loving care. :)

          One of my inner critics, as Gerlach calls the inner children, is my thoughts of being "bad." The belief that when I am not busy doing. I am unworthy of being a human being. I do not give myself breaks and time for myself, this is a big obstacle in relationships because I tend to view others in this light when I am down, and I am overly critical and hard to please. But, noticing it's origins can help reduce it and come back to reality. The "manager" personality that can calm this child in me would be my loving, compassionate self that can soothe the frantic thrashing of seething anger of this inner child which does not let me have rest. The more I practice it, the more it can be helped.

          I am writing all of this because I am trying to get to see myself. I have a hard time with that, because all my life I have been repressing my True Self out of guilt and embarrassment for BEING ME. Therefore, it is time to let it out in love, and I WILL soon see loving results.

          I have to mention Ralph Smart, or Infinite Waters. He helped me realize that the only person's opinion that matters is yourself, and once you are out for yourself, no body else's criticism will matter anymore. This sounds rewarding, because that is a big thing that holds me back in life. The world is a hologram, everything you experience is coming from you, so if you see things with love, everything will be love.

          I am convinced that the more a mother is attuned to her child,  the higher the chance a child will have to grow up to become self-actualized and trust in God. To a child, the mother is like God, because he trusts all his needs will come from her. The more the child is distanced from her. the less they will trust in the actual God later on, because of not being able to trust early on.

         Love,
         An Adoptee Heart