The Phony Persona

This is the opening chapter of my book Brain Cells: Escape Your Mental Prisons, available through Amazon.

Our modern dilemma is simple: we live in a post-truth world, where mendacity is not just expected, it’s rewarded. And yet, you cannot truly enjoy fulfilment if you’re living a lie.

This section is all about authenticity – how to find your voice, speak your truth, and express your life on your terms. The opposite of authenticity is deception, so we also need to discuss how to navigate a world full of fakery, how to process the lies and half-truths of others with grace and dignity, and how to eradicate dishonesty from your own life.

Success, joy, and fulfillment come from living life on your terms, completely free of the phony limitations and expectations imposed on you by your parents, your cultural heritage, your friends, or society. Fulfillment does not come from living someone else’s dream or agenda, no matter how successfully you do it. Please note that I’m not advocating Ayn Randian selfishness and individualism, because I firmly believe that our deepest joy in life comes from being of service to others. So the questions becomes, how do you honor your dreams and desires and still uplift and support others?

One of the major problems of the modern age is that lying has become mundane. A couple of years ago Margaret called me out of the blue for an emergency session. She was stricken with fear, because she’d seen a report on a lie-for-profit website claiming that Arab terrorists were streaming across the southern U.S. border. This claim is plainly laughable, and yet she believed it. It was published on the web, and it lined up with her biases about “Arabs,” and so she was quaking with fear about a non-existent threat.

Deception is the scourge of the modern world. But even more troubling is the willingness of people to latch onto the opinions of others uncritically, and to spread them far and wide. We believe things not because we have verified them, but because they feel true. And they feel true because they match our biases and prejudices. Many of us have a very well-muscled us-vs.-them mentality, and we believe anything that confirms our darkest opinions of “them,” no matter how outlandish. If the source is one of “us,” we think it must be true. We believe misinformation when it comes from friends and authority figures, and there’s no authority figure more godlike to a small child than a parent.

Some people will ask, “If it feels true, isn’t that my intuition? Shouldn’t I trust my intuition?” My response is that your intuition is always stunted when you’re gripped by fear, shame, anger, or outrage. Therefore you need to learn the difference between a triggered emotional reaction and true intuition. In other words, much of what you feel is based on limiting subconscious beliefs, biases, and prejudices, not intuition. And until you’ve shifted your limiting subconscious beliefs, your intuitive sight will always flow through vision-warping goggles.

When you’re well-practiced at parroting unverified rumors and innuendo, it becomes much easier to tell intentional lies. And when you’ve told enough intentional lies, you begin to believe them. Any well-practiced thought eventually becomes a belief, and so a well-practiced lie becomes a delusion. And in some cases, the self-deception can come to feel so natural that mendacity metastasizes. Some people are so comfortable lying that telling the truth feels awkward and alien, and therefore they lie even about the most insignificant things, when telling the truth would cost them nothing.

Metastasized mendacity is epidemic in the political arena. It’s not universal among politicians, but the power to slander and destroy wielded by the power-hungry is immense, and it’s a tool that honest politicians who strive for authenticity are often unwilling to use. And so the liars win.

Basking in falsehood doesn’t need to be so overt and obvious as what Margaret experienced. Most people live their lives enmeshed in subtle weave of fakeness that’s designed to make other people like and respect them. We wear masks in order to both please and appease others. That is, we misrepresent who we are, and what our interests are, and what we’ve done in the past, and how much we weigh, in order to be liked and accepted. We also do it to prevent others from turning on us. We feel that if people saw our true face, if they knew the truth about us, they’d either attack or run away screaming and never look back.

There are certain arenas, such as gender identity, where the stakes are so high that some people go through life never revealing their truth to anyone, not even themselves. Having been conditioned by a lifetime of threats, acts of violence, rejection, ridicule, and humiliation, they unconsciously decide that living a lie is the only way to feel safe.

This happens at the cost of authenticity. If you lack authenticity, you block yourself from living life on your terms, and you deny yourself connection with others who love you for who you are. You end up attracting into your circle of friends and into your romantic life people who love you for your false persona, but not for you. You attract flatterers and gossips. When you casually misrepresent even the most insignificant things, you connect only with people who like you for your mask, and you drive away those who prefer the honest you. When Margaret took a close look at her circle of friends, she realized they were all frightened conspiracy theorists, and the fears they all shared with each other were bouncing around in their own private echo chamber.

This problem is compounded when you attract friends and romantic partners who are also hiding behind a false persona. Consider this simple scenario: you and your best friend both secretly love superhero movies. But you’re so used to being ridiculed that you feign disgust the topic comes up. Your friend then concludes you hate superhero movies, and so she rolls her eyes as well. And thus you go through your entire friendship avoiding something that could give you both immense pleasure. But to get your fix, you both sneak off from time to time to watch superhero movies in secret, and so the lie gets compounded.

It’s even worse when you both pretend to enjoy something you dislike, because you think the other enjoys it. Imagine you hate superhero movies, but you endure watching them for the sake of your friend, who also secretly hates them.

I admit this is a silly example, but it extends to everything in life – sex, gender, life goals, passions, hobbies, and so on. Re-imagine the two scenarios I just described, but involving a married couple and oral sex.

Misaligned desires are especially common in scattered families. Do you endure annual holiday traditions that you secretly dread when you celebrate with your family? If you ask, you might find that no one else in your family likes them either.

The bottom line is this – if you’re wearing a mask in order to please and appease others, and if they’re all wearing masks to please and appease you, then where is there room for honesty and authenticity? Where can intimacy emerge? True intimacy requires vulnerability, a willingness to expose your true self. There can be no intimacy when face-to-face contact is blocked by masks, no matter how pretty they are.

Imagine living life free of your masks. It may be scary at first, but when you’re honest about who you are and what you like and dislike, you begin to attract people and experiences that match your authentic expression. Yes, some people will drift away, or even viciously reject you, but when this happens you’re just making space for new friends who are in better alignment with your core personality. Authenticity helps you clarify who your true friends are. This principle holds true in business as well – when you authentically express who you are you connect with clients, customers, and business partners who are in alignment with your core persona.

When you’re hiding behind a thick layer of masks, it’s easy to become overly judgmental.You become willing to reject, ridicule, and even punish people who express genuine authenticity. This is especially true when others are authentically enjoying something that you secretly desire for yourself, but are ashamed of. This is shadow projection, which we’ll discuss later in the book.

We misrepresent ourselves for many other reasons that go beyond wanting to be liked or appease others. Sometimes we lie to manipulate, or to control, or to make money. The lie-for-profit website Margaret was addicted to spreads false information for two main reasons – for political power and to rake in the cash. And it’s very effective at both, but only if you allow yourself to be manipulated by its lies. When you strip off your masks and declare to the world who you authentically are, it probably won’t cut into the mendacity industry’s profit margin, but it will help you to recognize or at least question deception when you encounter it.

Some people have built very lucrative careers spreading lies and gossip, so whenever you’re confronted with a conspiracy theory or allegation you haven’t verified, ask yourself, “Whose agenda does this serve?” With a lie-for-profit website such as the one Margaret visited, their agenda is not your happiness, but your pocketbook and your vote.

Take a moment to ask yourself how much time, energy, and effort you put into seeking the approval of others. When by default you embrace a false persona in order to be accepted and to fit in, you’re living in the unspoken energy of “I’m not good enough as I am.” So how much time do you spend trying to prove yourself to people who really don’t care? How much energy do you waste trying to prove your parents wrong, or to prove them right? How often do you twist your logical mind into knots trying to justify parroting someone else’s interests and opinions? How much of your life is someone else’s dream?