False Self

When someone gets pulled into a narcissistic dynamic, the deepest wound often reaches into identity. Over time, they can lose touch with their own instincts, needs, and boundaries just to keep the connection, avoid punishment, or hold onto hope. A painful gap opens between who they really are and who they felt forced to become.

The mind and body remember that self-abandonment. Every time truth was swallowed and intuition was ignored, self-trust wore down. That is why so many people come out of these experiences feeling disconnected, emotionally drained, and unsure of themselves in ways they can barely explain.

Healing starts with understanding that this confusion has meaning. Recovery is a return to the authentic self, a rebuilding of inner safety, and a gradual restoration of trust in your own mind, body, and perception.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I just had a conversation with Darren McGee and we were talking about a concept that Darren introduced me to about a month ago over the phone, and he got it from Carl Rogers, and it's really interesting. You need you need to hear it. The concept is so Carl Rogers posited that we have an authentic self and then we have an ideal self that's adapted to the needs of the environment, and that there's tension between who you really are and who your family, your culture, your church requires you to be. Authentic self and uh adapted, or more commonly called the ideal self, but the ideal self isn't an adapted self. And when Darren called me and he was talking about it, he said that we know that there's a false self in narcissistic personality disorder. This was posited by Winnicott, Winnickott, and then developed by Kernberg. And we know that they're essentially fused with their false, grandiose, delusional self. You know that. But what Darren suggested to me was that there was an imposition of a false or idealized self onto the target that through trauma bonding and through intermittent conditioning, the target becomes fused with. The target becomes fused with the false self that is imposed upon them through it's it's called it's called co-idealization, but the narcissist idealizes you and creates a false version of you that you then have to live up to or you're going to be punished. And you were punished. That's why you're here, because you're in pain, because of the punishments for failing to live up to the false self that was imposed upon you. At the same time, the narcissist is idealizing themselves. That's what the false self is. It's a it's a it's a flight from reality, it's an escape, it's a defense from the reality. This is a fairly mediocre person, this is a fairly average, one-of-the-mill, everyday quotidian pedestrian person, and they hate that, they want to be something else, so they create a false self. Once you're idealizing them and they're idealizing you, and you are being through intermittent reinforcement conditioned into existing as the false self, then we have the creation of the shared fantasy space. This is a really important piece of the puzzle. And the dissolution of the shared fantasy space and of the trauma bond is going to require the eradication of the false self. Now, if you've done my narcissistic programming course, you would have seen um the work around identifying within the narcissistic shared fantasy space the narcissist's role for you, caretaker, life coach, uh footlicker, um mobile ATM, sex doll, pimp, uh what do you call a male? It's uh giggelo, um, porn star, uh audience member, acolyte, fawning worshipper. These are the roles, and this is the script. So you could say, well, we've already got that, yes, but there will be extra pain, identity uh uh um confusion and dissonance when you are trying to unblend from an identity that you're fused with, which is the false self, it can create an identity crisis. So when you're thinking, I don't know why I feel this bad, I don't know why I'm this distressed, it's probably the identity crisis that of uh that's created by decoupling from the false self that's imposed upon you. This is Darren's idea based upon the Carl Rogers framework. Now, when you talk to a person um and they make noises with their face that come through as code, your brain, because you speak language, and in this case you speak English, you decode what they're trying to say. So they have a map of reality, they speak from their map of reality, it goes into your ears, into your brain, and then you try to map their map of reality. And we roughly call this like empathy, I guess. You know, you're creating a simulation of their simulation because their map is a simulation of reality. Okay, this isn't the philosophy channel, it doesn't really matter, but that's what we do. So Darren is a different human being to me, and he has a different experience and different education and different training to me. So when I walk in his world, I see things differently through the dialogue, and this is why dialogue is good, and that's why therapy can be good, Socratic dialogue can be really good. And as he was talking, I'm getting a sense of a different terrain where different things matter. There's there's more import is granted to different objects, different concepts in that terrain. And then as he was talking, I thought, oh, you heard him say um the narcissist is bonding with you and idealizing you. Incorrectly called, I think it's incorrect to call it love bombing because I I, apart from anything else, I think that's gendered. I think men will love bomb women, and maybe in same-sex relationships, the man or the woman could adopt the role of um the the knight errant or the um the the I can't think of the mythical character. Somebody write down who I'm thinking of. The character from medieval times who seduces everybody is it Don Juan? I can't remember. Um so so that that can happen, but I think it's it's kind of gendered. It's a love bombing. Oh, you're so amazing, you're so wonderful, here are some gifts, here's a wonderful experience. There's a lot of men. I never experienced that once, and there's a lot of men I've spoken to, most men I've spoken, in fact, all men I've spoken to. There isn't a man who's ever said to me, Yes, I experienced love bombing as described, but we are idealized. So love bombing happens, but it's a rather uncomfortable uh transmission from cult psychology that's been taken over into narcissism psychology. Love bombing. Is it is it really the same? It's idealization. And what happens in a cult, it does map onto what happens in a cult of one, but not perfectly. Idealization is the better term. And what Darren said is in the idealization phase, there are abandonments, micro-abandonments that function as tests to answer the question, will you betray yourself? So he says that. And if you watch the whole interview, I'm sort of fading in and out of consciousness because I'm sort of processing what he's saying and I'm also asking questions and fielding questions from the followers. And then I start to think about abandonment trauma and betrayal trauma. And I remember being told betrayal trauma is one of the worst types of trauma a human being can experience. And then I thought, oh, self-betrayal trauma. There is a trauma in being betrayed. It's awful to be betrayed. It was the it was the chaplain who works, I can't remember the chaplain's name. If you do, please write it in the comments, and I'll bring him on for an interview again. The chaplain who he's stationed or he was stationed on the East Coast, and he was attached to the Marines, the American fellow. And he was telling me about betrayal trauma in the context of um veterans who come back with uh post-traumatic stress disorder and how there can be a sense of betrayal, feeling betrayed by the system, feeling betrayed by your government, feeling betrayed by, I don't know, commanders of your unit or whatever. And this can be can create a really nasty, persistent um post-traumatic stress, a deeply felt sense at the animalistic biological levels of the body that I am not safe. I am not safe. It is not over. What I thought was true before was smashed to pieces, and now I live in the desolation. I live in the bombed-out house of what once was, with no option for leaving to a nice new house, with no option for cleaning this house up and rebuilding it from the ground up, just nothing. Betrayal trauma, bloody awful. We all agree. I said self-betrayal trauma, but I couldn't get there without Dar Darren's paradigm. So I do think that this is his self-betrayal trauma. When you do when you watch a YouTube live by anybody, or you go into a Facebook community or an Instagram uh comment section um and people are doing QA's, there is a question that will always, always, always come up. How can I ever learn to trust myself again? How can I ever learn to trust my judgment again and to move on? That's self-betrayal trauma, isn't it? That's self-betrayal trauma. You, because you are you, but you know, you're psychologically literate, you know you have parts and states and self-states and ego states, and not all your parts agree and disagree, and you have to negotiate them. And we know this. Uh, we have parts therapy, we have internal family systems, great modalities for this. Fantastic. I haven't been able to verbalize this, I've not been able to formalize it because I'm not I'm not smart enough, and I haven't really given myself the time to do it yet. But I think, as well as parts, we need to wrap our heads around a concept that there is an element of you that is observing you, and that is granting you permission to behave in certain ways, and even granting you access to certain emotional states, including enthusiasm, enthrallment, euphoria, excitement, fascination, uh, based on its observations of your behavior across time. I wrote and talked about this a lot when I used to work out at the Liverpool Science Park, and I used to jokingly, you know, I used to draw on the big whiteboard there, and I'd draw like the eye of Sauron, and I'd call it the Eye of Sauron, which is not gonna work long term as a name for this, because there's too much evil implied in that. This isn't an evil judge. There's a part of you, there's a part of me that watches us and our behavior, and then I claim determines the behavior we can and cannot engage in, and determines the emotional states that govern or cause behavior, like anticipation, uh, sorry, uh enthusiasm, excitement, euphoria, fascination. I want to do this, this is so cool, I feel good. Self-betrayal trauma would be when that part of you that I haven't formalized, I'm sorry, and I don't know of any psychologist who is talking or has talked about it, if you do write in the comments and I'll go, I'll go read, is observing you betray yourself across time and then start to create systemic limitation. So if you are acting, so there's let's say there's you, and then there's there's this part of you that's observing you, and you're acting, you're acting well enough. You you're you're pretty safe, uh, you have good discernment, you know, the the guy is charming, the girl is pretty, but you know there's something not great about them, and you're interested, but you have the impulse control to walk away. This eye of Sauron, which we can't call it that, then says, okay, this person is functional. I can afford to give them enthusiasm because they're safe to have the state of enthusiasm and to move forward in the world and and push forward, it's safe. If you're judged by that part of you as dangerous, your enthusiasm is switched off. I claim. This is just my claim, and I could be wrong, but I think this is the one thing that's been in the back of my mind since at least 2015, 2016, when I used to coach people, and I just had this intuitive sense that that's what was happening, and I could see it in myself. So it sort of turns the look at like the depression model would be turned on its head in that sense, it would be uh inverted, not less popular nowadays, um, but I still argue a good source of information about certain elements of psychology, Jordan Peterson. Back in 2017, 2018, when he started talking about lobsters and how when they climb dominance hierarchies, serotonin is released and they behave in a way that's observably different. And then biologists came along and said, This this is not this is not correct. It's not right. Okay, it's not right, but it's speak, it's a it's right next door to what I'm talking about. I don't talk in terms of climbing dominance, dominance hierarchies. I don't want to create dominance hierarchies, so I don't talk dominance hierarchies, but however, dominance hierarchies exist, whether I want to talk about them or not, they do. So I'll say, I'll use different language. If you observe yourself behaving in a successful and safe way, you're more likely to be able to get be granted permission from on high, from that part of you, because you're observed as safe. Okay, feel enthusiastic. Here's a bunch of energy. Go and throw yourself into that project. You know what you're doing. If you engage in self-portrayal, that part of you might be like, oi, look at what this kid's doing. Turn off their energy. You can't trust them to engage in projects, you can't trust them to engage in relationships, you can't give them the energy to surge forward because they'll surge off a cliff. Oh, I can't get out of bed today. I'm depressed. Oh, I can't. I love to train, I love to go to the gym, but I just have this really weird anxiety today, and I don't know where it's come from. Maybe, maybe, maybe the self observes the self. Like his hypothesis was something like as you slide down a dominance hierarchy, so as your social status goes lower, you become more depressive. And he was claiming uh you would actually have less serotonin and other neurotransmitters that are associated with happy states and motivated states and having your back straight and your chest out and up, um, as a direct result of that. I'm not an endocrinologist, so I'm not gonna say that because I don't know. I'm making a claim for something that I've observed. If you have self-betrayal trauma, this may be something that we need to start, if it's a real thing that we need to take seriously with some urgency, because it could be upstream of everything else in your life, including doing therapy. I want to do therapy to overcome the narcissistically abusive relationship. I don't have the energy today, I don't know why. God, I know it would help me. I should speak to a counselor, I should speak to a therapist, I'll do it tomorrow. Maybe, maybe you then start. I'm not saying it's adaptive, I'm not saying it's intelligent, it might be a really old piece of uh evolutionary software that we've inherited from long ago that that says something maybe, I'm just positing ideas, something really dumb. If you act safe, you get energy and enthusiasm. If you act dangerous, me not give energy and enthusiasm, name your favorite neurotransmitter, name your favorite um hormone that we think is you know the be-all and end all of happiness or bonding. Remember, there's a there's a thing ages ago about there's a big fad for oxytocin, and everybody's like, oh, it's the love, it's the love uh hormone or neurotransmitter, it's all about love and bonding. And then uh, you know, some neuroscientists and endocrinologists pop their head over the parapet and they're like, Oh, we're really glad that you're enjoying this. Do you know it's massively associated with withdrawal from heroin? Do you know it's massively associated with heartbreak? Do you know that it spikes when you're in pain for something you really? The point I'm making is that you know, the pop psychology um easy to digest uh article that we get on social media or we get in some lightweight paper, will be something like I remember when I was a kid, I used to teach self-defense, and we would say adrenaline is when you are attacked, you go into a fight or flight, and you get an adrenaline dump. And I remember being on a forum, and there was a there was a doctor on the forum, and he was like, It's it's yeah, yeah, you're receiving adrenaline. Do you guys think you're just getting adrenaline? And just as a sideline, it seems to be the case that where endocrinology is up to, uh am I saying that right? Endocrinology? That's hormones, right? Yeah. And neuroscience is up to, it's not as simple as this neurotransmitter make happy, this neurotransmitter make big sad, this neurotransmitter make angry. It or hormone. It it just never that simple. If you're ever being fed something that suggests it's that simple, it almost definitely isn't. Okay, fine. What do we do? Because we want to feel good, right? Can we feel good and motivated to pull our lives together, to go back to work, my god, to get into another relationship or another friendship? If this, if the trauma of the whatever this part is that's observed you watched you betraying yourself, thinks I can't give them the motivation and the energy and the whatever you feel when you're higher status, and you're climbing the dominance hierarchy like a lobster. You were disappointed I didn't do Jordan Peterson before, weren't you? Well, I I I aim to please. You see, the thing is, you put your back straight, just like a lobster does, and your shoulder it's really just Kermit the Frog. Like, he's from a place in Canada that I found out. He doesn't have a weird accent, you know. Where he's from in Canada, everybody talks in that kind of uh high-pitched way. It's it's an it's a it's a regional dialect, it's not he it's he doesn't have like a funny accent. He's talking the way people from his area should talk. Anyway, I don't have the solution for you. I've only just two hours ago had the conversation with Darren, but this is a light bulb moment for me, and I'm sharing it with you. We must look at self-brayal trauma because it could stop you from going to therapy. It could stop you from getting your life sorted out, it could stop you from sorting your health out, it could stop you from, you know, giving up the things that are interrupting your sleep cycles or whatever else. We need to look at this. Really grateful for the conversation. With Darren, there's like a bit of depth that I got there on issues that I've been thinking about for a long time. But this thing self betrayal trauma, you are being asked in the early phases of a narcissistically abusive relationship will you betray yourself? Ominous, ominous things.