The False Self Tribulation [Part 2]

Withdrawal, dissociation, and surrender to the monster

Ever felt like your emotions, thoughts, actions, and even desires made no sense, as if you were possessed by a foreign entity? If you find this sensation relatable, keep reading… this series of essays might just save your life… literally.

I don’t know why I instigate
And say what I don’t mean

— Linkin Park, Breaking the Habit

Have you ever suspected that your will wasn’t your own, like your body, mind, and soul were hijacked by something else pushing its foreign desires through you and in your name?

Did you ever suspect that you might be possessed by some other entity that hijacks your consciousness into desiring and doing all the wrong things — the things that are diametrically misaligned with your core values, no less?

This series on the false self is a follow-up to ‘The Price of Redemption’ and ‘Crawling by Linkin Park’.

The “science”

Psychology describes dissociative identity disorder as a coping mechanism, a way to dissociate from yourself and from your environment, when your inner trauma from severe systematic abuse in your environment becomes unbearable. It feels like disconnecting from people, yourself, your values, your desires, and whatever is going on in the world. It feels like the world is moving without you. You feel like you don’t belong. You don’t know who you are, and you don’t even know if you are real.

Existential philosophy is the product of dissociated individuals questioning who and what they are.

Bad medicine

The false self is the cure that is worse than the disease, the knee-jerk reaction that makes things worse, like running away instead of standing your ground when faced with a wild animal. It’s a faulty self-defense mechanism, something that went wrong in our design or evolution, whichever you believe. Nature makes mistakes; lots of them.

The pure, untainted self — accurately named ‘inner child’ due to its virtuous innocence — cares about others so much that it generates self-deprecating conclusions when others abuse it.

When a tree branch randomly falls on your head, causing x amount of pain, you brush it off and move on. But when a human with a baseball bat deliberately swings at you in the head, causing the same amount of pain, it traumatises you deeply. Why? Isn’t it the same pain? Why is the instance involving intent more traumatising? Because you give agency to the person, and therefore, meaning to his aggression against you. Your innocent subconscious self starts wondering what it was about you that deserved to be hurt. It grants so much undeserved credence to other people that it justifies their abuses against you just to make sense of them… just to keep respecting others more than it respects itself, like a child always assuming that all adults know better; even when adults are being horrible.

So, the inner self, this innocent child, creates a fake persona to insulate itself from abuses. This persona is that which would deserve the abuses against you — if you do the time, you might as well do the crime. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: you become that for which you were unjustly treated.

This now makes sense to the inner child. It is a fair conclusion. You are treated like a bum, so you become one. You are humiliated, so you must become shame-worthy. You are treated with disrespect, so you wear the mask of someone unworthy of respect, someone scorned. It makes sense. It’s fair. And because the inner self is pure and innocent, it seeks to be fair… It will tell itself it won’t deserve love when everyone around it appears to hate it, especially the people closest.

So, with the true self withdrawn and dissociated to numb itself from the pain, the false self takes over the identity gap. Remember the example I gave earlier about the falling branch and the baseball bat? When you become someone self-hating and self-destructive, then the abuse you receive feels more like a random falling branch than a deliberate bat swing. The purpose of creating a false self is so that you are not shocked when abused, but rather, to feel like it was deserved, and therefore, easier to accept. It hurts when you feel unjustifiably punished. You take the pain better when you know you had it coming. As a new persona worthy of being abused, you already make sense of people’s intent to abuse you, because you now feel like you deserve the abuse, the punishment for being an awful person (even though you weren’t awful when you received the abuse).

By surrendering to the monster of the false self, you willingly become worthy of your punishment, even though you weren’t at the time you were punished. This makes it fair to be abused, which mitigates the pain of abuse. You accept pain more easily when you feel it’s justified. For example, you aren’t traumatised by the pain of penance, of going to the gym, or of visiting your dentist (the latter is debatable).

You can take the pain more easily when you know there is justification for it. And the false self is there to give purpose to your pain, to make you worthy of it so that you don’t drown in despair, screaming “unfair!” whenever the world strikes you down. It’s a sort of satisfaction to do the crime after being unjustly punished for one. The false self is there to spare you the pain of feeling wrongly harmed by making you feel rightfully harmed.

This horribly flawed “self-defence” mechanism of the human organism indicates that, if a conscious entity did create this reality, it is either indifferent to us (at best) or is deeply flawed and unable to control its own creations.

Why? Because this isn’t helping. If anything, it makes things worse. Humans are severely flawed, oversensitive to life-defining trauma, and susceptible to mental disease over the slightest of stimuli. Humanity is plagued by troubled individuals with horrendous, unresolved trauma.

Falsehood

The false self takes a mind of its own. It becomes self-aware, complete with a self-preservation instinct. It will torture and sabotage and corrupt the inner pure self, thus perpetually creating the need for the false self, just like racketeering. This is why the false self deliberately leads you to self-destructive behaviours and abusive people: it needs the inner child to keep getting abused and thus maintain the need for staying withdrawn, the need for a false self. Only the inner self has the power to create the false self. The false self cannot sustain itself because it isn’t you, not really. The false self is fake.

When the false self is behind the wheel of your consciousness, your real self takes the back seat. The false self is then in charge of your desires, your thoughts, and even your will. It makes you think you want to take that self-destructive path in life, or to make those stupid decisions that make your life even worse. Still, you are accountable for stepping aside and letting the false self rule over you.

The false self makes you think you are attracted to a trainwreck of a person while it hides your true, pure feelings for people who are literally perfect. Those who keep saying that there aren’t good people out there? That’s their false self literally blinding them from the good… the false self wants to keep you suffering with abusive people. That’s how it can sustain the false need for it.

The false self will bring you more pain than any other external abuser.

Next part of the series: Recognising the false self.