[rabbit]

How can I learn to be myself after a lifetime of hiding the truth from everyone including those closest to me and maybe even myself? I was shamed and punished as a child if I did not conform to my parents' wishes, and I am ashamed of all the lies, deceptions and compromises I have used to keep my real self hidden since then. I am in therapy and am currently very withdrawn from my husband and family (like Ozric's wife) because I sense pressure to continue being the person they have always known whereas I now want to change. Every time I give in to the pressure I feel ashamed of the compromise of my integrity and every time I resist I feel ashamed because I can only withdraw and hide rather than speak the truth. I have considered leaving my husband to relieve the pressure, and am both ashamed of that (because I willingly dedicated my life to this man and our children when we married) and ashamed of hiding my thoughts from him. Sometimes I wonder whether I am even being really honest with my therapist when I describe what's happening, or am I just putting myself in the best light as I have always done in order to be accepted so I can survive. I want more than survival, I want to live and truly be myself, but I don't know how to get out of this mess I'm in.

B

[Benjamin Fry]

The answer in a word is ìslowlyî. It will always be a case of two steps forward and one step back. Try to be compassionate with yourself when you return to your ingrained behaviour of withdrawing and hiding.

Iím not clear about the specifics of the difference between who you are versus who you pretend to be. Also, Iím not sure what is the truth that you are hiding. Perhaps you could start by saying more about that here? It would be very constructive if you could recall your experiences as a child in detail and then try to relate them to an experience in the present when you found yourself behaving in this way that you are now ashamed of.

Is there something specific that you are keeping a secret? Or is this a general sense of just not being yourself?

In general, you are of course simply behaving as an adult in the way that you were trained to as a child. Your fear of alienating your parents would have been intense as a child because evolutionarily you stood little chance of surviving without them. Now that you are independent you still feel the emotional residue of those lessons, even though there is no logical reason to do so. This is because you are releasing the overflow of emotions from your childhood which were stored in your body through the mechanism of trauma (how is your physical health?). It is normal and logical that these feelings now want to be resolved, but it makes no sense to our conscious minds since we have forgotten where they come from and often donít know why.

Therapy will be helping you to get comfortable with this process and the more it goes on, the more you will begin to recover your authentic self. This self may be at odds with the life that you have developed with your inauthentic self. But donít worry. Inner change inevitably leads to outer change. Just let it happen in its own time. Either the people in your life will change with you, or it maybe that you will move on, but donít worry about making any too sudden decisions. Nothing will be solved by acting on your external reality alone. It is the inner work that matters. From that, outer change flows effortlessly. Just keep focused on your own emotional journey and the way forward with yourself in your family will eventually open up (after a long and torturous route!)

[crystal]

I can really relate to the way you feel. I have much in my life that I feel ashamed about and this emotion can drag you down and leave you in confusion and embarrassment, sometimes even when you are alone.

My opinion of your situation is this - society will always have expectations of you, wherever you go. If you chose a different lifestyle with different people, they would still make demands on you and you would still have to tell white lies sometimes to appease them. The cost of total honesty will be high, wherever you go.

Don't imagine that there is necessarily a place where you can be totally yourself. What you could aim for, however, is a place where you feel more comfortable with the efforts you have to make to fit in.

Hiding a part of yourself is much more bearable if you feel that you are doing it so as to be part of a valid and meaningful part of society that you admire. If you are hiding a part of yourself to fit in with a lifestyle you don't approve of, this can be really uncomfortable.

Is the lifestyle you have forced yourself to conform to really that bad? Or do you just feel disappointed with yourself for not striking out on your own?

Is the lifestyle you would prefer really that good? Or does it just offer temporary wish-fulfillment, whilst really being quite shallow?

Can you make small changes in your life, letting your relatives get over the shock each time, as they get used to hearing you speak out?

I do not know if my comments are apt as I don't know enough of your situation but I hope some of this helps.

[rabbit]

Thanks for your replies everyone.

Sorry I didn't give you anything very specific to work with, but it would take me hours to tell you all the details, and anyway I'm working on all that with my therapist already.

What bothers me is that my shame may have driven me to become a compulsive liar, in which case I will never be able to admit to the truth. Without acknowledging the truth there is no way out.

That said, I think I do know what the main issue is (though there's any number of things I'm ashamed of), and it's this:

I'm a Christian and so is my husband, our parents and most of our friends. We all believe in marriage for life, and I've heard you support that on this site too Ben. However, I'm not happy in my marriage, to put it mildly. 16 years ago I suffered a miscarriage in circumstances which led me to blame myself (and my mother greeted the news with the same "you ought to be ashamed of yourself" tone of voice as always), following which I did not get the support/acceptance I needed from my husband, but another man was there for me. We fell in love and he invited me to live with him, but I decided not to. My husband knows about this, by the way, because I told him. Despite what I have written above I think I could have borne the shame and possible ostracism following a divorce (There would have to have been a divorce - I did not and would not (could not?)have had a sexual relationship with the other man while still married), but my husband and I already had a child and I did not want that child to suffer the loss of a parent. I think I knew then that my husband would never be able to give what I wanted in this particular area, but decided I would "do without" for the sake of the child, as parents always have done. Since then we have had more children and I have suffered a lot of ill health starting about the time I saw the other man for the last time (you are right to make the connection, Ben, though I have only just come to understand it myself). I found my way in to the therapy I'm in now as a result of a new health problem which has developed over the last couple of years - and true to your theory this has come to the fore because I am now in a relatively "safe" place in my life compared to where I was before. Things haven't been all bad between my husband and me at all, but have deteriorated since I've been in therapy this past year. I still don't want my children to suffer the loss of either parent, but (as someone else wrote on your site a while ago) I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and my husband has noticed that I'm not making the effort to be the wife he wants anymore. I feel that if I was being honest I would say that I wanted to leave - except that because of my children and my Christianity I don't, and I'm also financially dependant on him at the moment. If I say nothing I think maybe he will eventually leave one way or another (he has talked about suicide, but rejected it as he realised the insurance won't pay for suicide so he wouldn't be able to leave us well-provided for), though he's got the same reasons not to as I do. Like I said in Ozric's topic, is there any way we can stay married and provide for our children (who we're both prepared to make enormous sacrifices for) while I become the person I want and need to be?

B

[rabbit]

PS you talk about working on the internal and letting the external take care of itself, which makes sense, but I think maybe I see marriage (and children?) as transcending those barriers - in Christian marriage 2 become 1, symbolizing the mystic union between Christ and His Church (you've no doubt heard those words before).

[Benjamin Fry]

I do think that your commitment to your marriage is admirable. After all if you are a religious person and you make a vow supposedly in front of God, then perhaps it is worthwhile seeing where that may take you. I have a slightly different perspective (although perhaps just a different wording for the same reality) which is that relationships tend to work us over psychologically and so leaving a mature one for the relative ease of a new one can create a very false hope. After all, you once (presumably) loved your husband, the same way perhaps as you loved the man you considered leaving him for. Whoís to say if you had left that the new relationships would not have turned out the same. (Iím here to say it probably would have done.) Perhaps instead of the upheaval this would cause for you (and others) it is much better to stay in the tired relationship and also to begin to use it to learn about yourself from your emotional reactions to it. This might be the kind of wisdom that ancient priests brought to the wording of the marriage ceremony (or it could be a patrician plot to exploit women!)

In your case, I suspect that the communication has gone out of the relationship. You are being reborn in therapy and will have a lot to talk about. Perhaps your husband (who might not want to be reborn) doesnít want to hear it. Thatís a really tough challenge for someone starting out on the hard therapeutic work of inner reconstruction. You will struggle enough against your own ingrained resistance. What you need is support from others, not more resistance. However, he is who he is, and you are married with the beliefs you have. So the challenge is how to make the best of it.

It is likely that you repressed so much for the sake of others up to now that it made you ill. At that point you made an irreversible decision to start to take care of yourself too. You can be married and make a priority out of your own needs. It just might be unusual and countercultural for you. It would help if you could bring your husband into the therapeutic dialogue. I presume that you have done exercises on articulating your own feelings while not trying to blame someone else for them. Could you do this with your husband. A great way to put some instant understanding into a relationship is to play a very structured game of listening and repeating. You start and say a few words. Your husband says: I heard you sayÖ and repeats you. This goes on simply like that until you are spent. Then it is his turn. Try it. It is not as simple as it sounds.

Generally Iíd like to point out that you talk a lot about how to stay married and to also be the person that you want and need to be, suggesting that the two seem to be mutually incompatible. However this would not seem to me to be objectively true. You are very clear that you want to be a person who honours your marriage vows. You have made considerable sacrifices in the name of your family, children and beliefs. You donít sound like someone who ìwants or needsî to be divorced. What you sound like is someone who seeks a strategy for managing the disappointment of a less than perfect marriage, while simultaneously finding some autonomy for yourself, both internally and externally. Thatís not impossible. It requires that you set out a framework for the part of your life that you want to be independent of your family and you make sure that you give as much commitment to that as you currently do to everyone and everything else. After all if you can commit to marriage through thick and thin in this changing world, then you clearly have the courage to stick to a plan. Make that plan include a corner of independence for yourself and you might start to find a way through all of this, without having to go backwards in ways that you donít agree with.

[Benjamin Fry]

Morals are obviously important to you and lying can feel very uncomfortable to a person whoís principals it violates. It is in fact quite a negative way to treat yourself. What you are saying is that your own truth isnít good enough for others. This really says that you arenít good enough.

Ask yourself where the statement ìbut could not say soî comes from. You werenít given permission as a child to present your reality to a non-judgmental household. You want to now find that kind of permission in your emerging life. I suspect that if you keep working on the inner work, then one day youíll just find the truth popping out of your mouth before you can help it. Then of course everyone else will go mental, but thatís a rite of passage that you will have to get the courage and strength to go through. It would be great if your husband could join you in separate efforts to understand your feelings better. It would most likely help him to be less threatened by what he now calls ìword gamesî. This statements that force him to take ownership of his feelings are not welcome to him right now, probably because he feels he has nowhere to take these feelings. Counselling could help him with that and thus perhaps create a little more space in the home for your own.