Genuineness is the expression of the authentic Self, the real you. It is thought, emotion, verbal expression, body language, and behavior that come from the deepest essential core of who we are. It is the congruence of thought, emotion, word, and deed so that an action is not way over here while an emotion is way over there. All aspects of being are working together in harmony when one is being genuine. It is not a mask and costume; it is genuineness of soul—the essential authentic Self—revealed in thought, emotion, and action.
What many of us don’t know, however, is that this essential Self often gets left out of our daily interactions with others, with life, and even with ourselves—even when we are trying very hard to be good people. In fact, trying very hard to be good can actually prevent us from being genuine. But most of us don’t know this or that there is even a difference between being genuine and attempting to be good. In fact, most of us operate by trying to live up to an image of who we think we ought to be. That is, until those moments when we just can’t do that anymore and we temporarily crack open—at which point we do something that we later say was out of character, and then we go back to living up to an image of who we think we ought to be. Sometimes life even becomes a kind of rote automatic responsiveness that just keeps doing what it does, because it must keep doing what it does. But genuineness is different. It is living fulfilled, experiencing life at its most profound and meaningful levels. It is who we came here to be, to embody an authentic heart, soul, and mind and to live from those deep and powerful impulses as an authentic being.
To illustrate the difference between living from the authentic Self and living in an identification with goodness, the following analogy applies. Suppose that an acorn growing into an oak tree was watching the neighbor pine tree and wishing it could produce those funky little prickly cones. Why, oh why was I not given the capacity to make pine cones? What must I do to become a better tree so I can produce pine cones instead of just more of these stupid little acorns? Of course that’s a pretty humorous analogy because we aren’t trees, are we? But, like trees, we are natural organisms—natural beings—though quite often we assume a very unnatural stance in life in order to consider ourselves to be worthy or good enough. Yet, like that tree, we don’t really need to be measuring ourselves for worthiness—we just need to grow into who we actually are.
But how do we find out who we actually are in a world, in a culture, and in a family system that has been insisting since we were young that we identify with being good in order to meet the needs of the system in play? And what will happen to us if we suddenly start being genuine in this world, culture, and family in which conforming to that agenda is tantamount to a sense of survival? Answering those two primary questions is what this book is all about.
The Difference between
Goodness and Genuineness
Most of us have been raised to be “good,” using certain dimly specified, but quickly absorbed ideals that were meant to define us as good (this process will be clarified in later chapters). Most of us have, indeed, been taught that being good is the ultimate in being. That to be without being good is to be unworthy, at least to some degree. This idea of being good is so ingrained that it almost feels essential to our beingness. Because of this, most of us do not really see the gravity of being good or how heavy the weight of this burden really is. Instead most of us see being good as essential to our well-being. But goodness always comes attached to its polar opposite, badness or evil. One cannot think in terms of goodness, without also considering that polarity. In some sense then, goodness is a battle against badness, for to do good is to avoid doing bad. Therefore, attempting to accomplish goodness is generally a struggle to some degree. We must try hard to be good, for if we are not good, we might be bad and if we are bad, we are unworthy.
Yet most of us have been taught that this is a positive kind of striving that builds character and makes us better people. But the truth is that the more we identify with goodness, the more our psychic energy becomes focused on that internal power struggle between good and bad. Over time there is less and less psychic energy focused on being authentic. So not only must we constantly perform as good people, but we must do that without much contact with our deepest authenticity. Further, it is not uncommon at all for us to make deep and early associations to the rewards and consequences of goodness or badness. These associations may stay with us, even as we develop an awareness that they don’t consistently apply and often don’t really even make sense.
We place tremendous power in the way we perceive what good is and what bad is. They are concepts we imagine to be concrete, but goodness and badness are not things we can measure. When we look around it becomes fairly clear that what is good to one family, one culture, or one society may be bad to another. Yet as we shall see, many are measuring their worth as people based on these immeasurable and quite fluid concepts. Since the concepts of goodness and its polar opposite—badness—cannot be measured or defined by any clear standard, they turn out to be nothing more than mental constructs perpetuated by a social agenda, which we have adopted as truth.
The danger here is that living as if these terms have a standard definition can split us off from other parts of ourselves. If I think, for example, that being kind means never saying to another person how I feel about it when they step on my toe once a week as we cross paths, then I will continue to tolerate that behavior, and I will repress all of my genuine feelings about that behavior in the name of being kind. I will tell myself that it would be rude or unkind to hurt his feelings by telling him to stop. How does one remain kind and simultaneously assertive? This is a conundrum for many people who believe that being good (in this instance, kind) must define their character. These are people who live in an identification with goodness that doesn’t allow their authenticity.
The split-off in consciousness created by this kind of thinking means that the parts of us that we think are bad are relegated to the unconscious, where they will fester and mold and come out later in some other hairy, smelly way—which of course we will also deny or attribute to some bad part of us that needs to become good. So, we will repress the so-called bad thing again, until it comes out later, and we will have to repress it yet again.
Most of us feel shame (i.e., a sense of unworthiness) to some degree or another when we have not been what we're taught is good. What do we do with that shame? We tend to repress it and try to live into a better image of what we think good means. While certain religions have purification rituals or prayers that may be used to rid us of this feeling of shame, these rituals and prayers often only serve to help us to repress. The goal and outcome of genuineness is integration, which makes us whole, whereas repression only serves to split us in half.
When we are split in half, part of us is conscious and the other part of us is unconscious. The unconscious part is made up, at least partially, of repressed material, or those things we don’t think are good. We are, therefore, living half-lives—with one half living from the unconscious and the other half living in the conscious world. But even in the conscious world we are not being true to who we actually are, because that would require owning what we have repressed. Instead we live out an identity that matches by mask and costume the requirements placed on us by our family and social world. We never really notice our capacity to utilize the power of our own genuine emotions as messages to us, for us, and about us. Further, we fail to operate out of our essential and very natural compassion. Rather, though we may feel some compassion, we are mostly pushed by guilt to operate out of a list of obligations and methodologies we think will relieve us of guilt.
Goodness operates first through striving to be good. Rather than going within to find authenticity, goodness draws externally from familial and social constructs. But when we are genuine, we go first within to receive what is authentic there, so that when it comes to doing, we simply do what is in us to do. Genuineness is the capacity to move beyond that list of obligations to allow the heart, the mind, and the soul to speak—to be heard and to be acted on. When we are genuine, we are not challenging ourselves to run the obstacle course of goodness in order to prove ourselves worthy. Rather we know that we are worthy simply because we exist. This book will help us move past concoctions, strategies, collusions, and the identifications with mental constructs. Then we can step into the naturalness, the organicity of genuineness.
The Identification with Goodness
What we have said about our efforts to prove ourselves worthy is true for everyone to some degree or another. However, some of us feel this more so than others, identifying with goodness in such a way that we feel tremendous pressure to conform to whatever we think goodness means. We do that by unconsciously donning a mask and costume early in life, which for the purposes of this book, will be called the good guy or the good-guy identity. We will explain more later exactly how that identity develops, but for now we will simply describe this identification.
Good guys have incorporated a belief learned from the external world that guilt is the tool used to distinguish between what is thought to be good and what is thought to be bad. Therefore, guilt has been commissioned to be the ruler of life. Good guys perform the tasks of daily living making everyday decisions based on whether or not this or that task is good, which is further based on whether or not it will make them feel guilty.
As good guys, we commonly take on tremendous responsibility for the feelings and well-being of others, always concerned that we might hurt or neglect another. We commonly believe that our only purpose for living is to serve others—because we unconsciously believe that serving others is visible evidence of goodness, or because we have literally been taught to care for others as our first order of living.
The falsehoods that have been incorporated into the belief system and life of the good-guy identity are often nothing short of self-abusive. These falsehoods tell good guys to sacrifice self in the name of capacities to save, heal, and help others—capacities we do not have—and in the process they end up enabling others to abuse them. All the while they are defining themselves as good people who are doing good and kind things for others.
Good guys are often living miserable lives of inner conflict and depression; carrying loads of stress, which commonly create stress-related illnesses; or being abused or even literally dying at the hands of abusive people. At the very least, they are carrying huge burdens of responsibility that do not belong to them, and they are often blind to any other possibility.
Thankfully there is a way out of this false identity. As we will see, we do that by learning what is true and false, listening to our internal guidance systems, and coming back to the genuine Self.
How We Learn to Identify with Goodness
Generally speaking, when people use the word goodness, they are describing something like kindness: not too selfish, not mean, not self-aggrandizing, maybe we even mean compassionate or empathetic. But we don’t say those things. We say the people we are describing are good. Parents send their kids off to school every day waving goodbye and yelling “Be good!” And what they really mean is “Don’t get in trouble! Do what the teacher says!” But they don’t say that. They say, “Be good!” And the child hears that there is something intrinsic in this statement, that somehow their worth is wrapped up in whether or not they can be good.
But let’s not get all caught up in semantics, for even if the parents said “Do what your teacher says today,” the children would still know that there was something intrinsic about them, about their own nature that was wrapped up in the accomplishment of the parent’s wish. And what the parents commonly wish for is a child who will be good—a fantasy that runs really close to a kind of near-perfect child—in whatever way the parent imagines a perfect child would look, walk, talk, act, think, and feel. So it isn’t the words used so much as it is this image to which we imprint as children.
Children don’t imprint to words, words just reinforce the original imprint. Children imprint to all the things unsaid in the rooms where they lived as infants and toddlers—things that have to do with facial expression, body language, and what’s floating around in the air like flotsam and jetsam—unresolved issues that belong to the parents but have become unconscious to the parents and are thus easily projected onto their children. Children cling to that stuff as if it were a mirror they could look to to define themselves—and they become entranced with that image and try to live it out as if it were necessary for survival itself.
Indeed, those things we identify with become our very survival and we attach our sense of existence to it. For those who identify with goodness, the idea of giving up this identification is terrifying. Three things are true for this person: (1) she believes that to do otherwise would be wrong; (2) deep down she is doing this because she is so afraid that if she is not good she will be bad, i.e., worthless; and (3) down below it all, she knows that her very sense of existence is dependent on maintaining this idea of self.
Identity is a very strange and interesting phenomenon, about which many volumes of psychological treatise have already been written. I like the simplicity of the concept of a survival trance as put forth by Firman and Gila as they build on John Bradshaw’s concept of the family trance in their 1997 book, The Primal Wound. They describe it thusly:
In the family trance … the family is the unifying center that forces a constricted identification or role upon the family members. To be in the trance is to be so completely identified with one’s role in the family that important aspects of one’s own personal experience remain unconscious. The trance is ultimately the family demanding compliance rather than authenticity … and no small vulnerable child has the ability to say “No” to this … The child scrambles for scraps of safety and belongingness in the only way offered … and pays for it by relinquishing authenticity. 1
Most of our parents were simply not shown or taught how to be present with their own authenticity. Therefore, they do not know how to be present with the authenticity of their children. As stated in the author’s note at the beginning of the book, this should not be misconstrued as blame of the parents. Rather, we have passed down ineffective techniques for generations upon generations. Our collective vision of the parenting process has been evolving over the past century in a more thoughtful and empathetic way than in all the centuries prior to it. This evolution process will continue to bring us closer to seeing how to remain authentic and nurture the same in those around us. But for now, many if not most parents still believe it is their duty to mold the child into someone who satisfies their definition of a good guy.
The only mold the parents have for that image of goodness is largely unconscious to them, and as a result, it is easily projected onto the child. Parent and child both assume this identity as if it were fact, so the parent can then be present with the projected image but not with the authentic child. As the child grows, this identification with what is not authentic will become her primary method of attaining both survival and belonging. This will be clarified much more in later chapters.
Most of us identify to some degree with the concept of goodness. In fact, for many, not identifying with goodness is tantamount to being emotionally or even physically abandoned by our parents. Many of us had intuitive knowing that our parents’ love for us was conditioned on how much we did or did not embarrass them or live up to their agenda. That love could only be tested if we developed the chutzpah to challenge it by stepping into our authenticity to some degree. If we did that, and they still loved us, even if they didn’t approve, they passed our test. For example, many children end up testing the love of their parents by coming out of the closet with regard to gender identity and sexual orientation. Many parents prove their love is unconditional, but others are not able to look past what they have been taught to be goodness.
The identification with goodness is difficult to shift and balance due to the complexity of variant motivators and reinforcements, for who doesn’t want to be surrounded by good people? There are loads of perks for being good, which seem to add to something we call self-esteem but is actually just perpetuating the role. Parents like us, teachers like us, other kids like us (if we are not too good). We get to be the captains of teams, we get to be teacher’s pets, we get the Boy Scout badges, we get the good stuff, right? So what’s the problem?
The Problem with Being Good
To be surrounded by genuineness, which can be trusted for its sheer authenticity, is deeply satisfying and ultimately the truest form of relatedness. But when we identify with goodness, it is not genuine. It is a coping mechanism to help us survive. And there are several different conundrums attached to it.
- 1. Because the identification with goodness does not come from a genuine center, but rather from that core connection between belonging and survival, fear of abandonment, fear of not being liked or loved, fear of being bad—and therefore, unworthy—and the related fear of punishment, it becomes serviceable by many who would use and abuse those who identify as the good guy.
- 2. Because the goodness with which we identify doesn’t come from a genuine center, but rather from the above fears, there is always an underlying anxiety that pushes one to be good even when one does not feel like being good—which ultimately means it lacks genuineness, comes off as lacking genuineness, and puts us yet further into a state of anxiety because we sense it isn’t genuine but feel it must be done.
- 3. Because the goodness carries around its natural polarity—badness—like a balloon filled with poisonous gases that could pop at any moment, the good guy fairly constantly fears consequence or punishment. Therefore, it is very easy for others to convince the person identified with goodness that he is bad if he doesn’t do what the other person wants him to do (especially if the manipulator can learn just how to use the word selfish, as in “You’re so selfish for not doing what I want you to do”).
- 4. Because goodness carries around its natural polarity like that balloon above, fear of punishment is a constant, so when life’s difficulties, which happen to all people, happen to this good guy, she tends to feel that she deserves it.
- 5. Because our idealized ideas about goodness seem to interpret it to be opposite of our idealized ideas about badness—both of which seem to us to be measurable things—guilt and fear of guilt become primary motivators.
- 6. Because people who identify with goodness very commonly are also innately more empathetic, they tend to carry around on their shoulders responsibility for others’ emotional well-being, financial well-being, and well-being in general.
- 7. Because people who identify with goodness carry other people’s stuff on their shoulders, they often live in a scapegoat mentality in which they carry, for the family-of-origin, all the guilt and responsibility for unresolved issues—issues which they find difficult to separate from their own identity.
- 8. Because good guys have learned to carry other people’s “stuff,” they are often made to take the blame or carry the burden of others, including family and other groups of people.
- 9. Because guilt, responsibility, and fear of punishment are primary issues for the person so identified, they often live very unsatisfying adult lives of service and self-sacrifice, even though they would say that they “don’t mind it” when it comes to serving and saving others.
- 10. Because guilt, responsibility, and fear of punishment are primary issues for the person so identified, they often serve others by sacrificing self, thinking that this is the ultimate in goodness. In the process they build up a reservoir of resentment for all of their sacrifices, yet they feel that even this resentment is bad and must be repressed in order to continue to serve and save others.
This list is still incomplete for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the formation of identity around goodness can also be quite self-righteous in its almost dogmatic demands that others should likewise feel identified with goodness. These wishes, of course, go mostly unexpressed because of the idea that it isn’t good to judge others, and resentment builds over the years as the good guy harbors secret grudges for all of their own sacrifices and the lack of the same from others.
It is not goodness—whatever that is—but identification with goodness that is the problem, because it isn’t even real. That identification is just a coping mechanism for the pain of not really authentically belonging to the parents. What if, because we can’t really define goodness in any standardized form, it has no validity as an identification? What if that identity is just as fantastical as our comic book superheroes? What if what we are really looking for and truly need is genuineness, which when it connects to others, bonds us in a genuine sense of belonging?
We must be very clear on this point: we are not trying to talk people out of doing genuinely kind, truthful, loving, honest, passionate, and compassionate things. But an identification with goodness is not genuine. It is a mask and costume made up entirely of sacrifice of our true Self in order to please the agenda of the primary people in our lives, whom we so desperately need. It isn’t that people who are identified with goodness don’t have compassionate, kind, and thoughtful feelings and behaviors. The problem comes when they run their lives from guilt, shame, and an urgent sense of responsibility for others instead of from the genuine core of their being.
Why We Identify with Goodness
Even though there are obvious problems in identifying with goodness, we still do it. As Firman and Gila described earlier, we are too young and vulnerable to say no to the hypnotic trance state insisted upon us in the family of origin. Therefore, in the case of goodness, that identification becomes the primary way of thinking, feeling, and behaving, which facilitates our belief that we will survive and belong in a particular family system. The inner self is lost to conscious awareness, and the outer identity becomes the main focus. Here is one of the clearest definitions of identity I have found:
Identification is the opposite of self-consciousness. In a state of identification man does not remember himself. He is lost to himself. His attention is directed outward, and no awareness is left over for inner states. 2
This definition clearly explains why we maintain this identity—we do not remember anything else. And as Firman and Gila remind us, when we live in an identity, “our actions become limited and controlled by that particular world view.” 3 Because we can do no other then, we live our lives and pick the jobs, relationships, and activities that match or prop up our identities. All of our energy will go to living into that identity. The rarely heard and barely audible voice of the authentic Self is consigned to the back rooms and closets of our lives. But, if what we are doing seems to be working for us, we are not likely to quit doing it.
For example, Beth has been raised by parents whose definition of goodness means that she should always be pleasant—which, of course, also meant that she should never be unpleasant. On the surface of it, this definition looks to be harmless, for don’t most parents want to raise pleasant children? But our earliest definitions of pleasant and unpleasant can only be defined by what is picked up from the external world—things such as facial expression, body language, and words. Beth, who is a sensitive child anyway, knows that this issue is very important to her parents and, of course, she wants to be good so that she pleases them. To a child, parental acceptance of a child’s behavior looks suspiciously like their acceptance of her personhood. It’s hard for her to tell the difference when she is young. So she tries really hard to do and say things that will not only be seen as nice, but as pleasant as well. She smiles a lot, she dresses in a pleasant fashion, she does things that please others, always watching to see if their facial expression and body language indicate that she has pleased them. If this pattern is reinforced enough, she will begin to identify as a people-pleaser. As long as she can win people over with her people-pleasing behaviors, she is being reinforced in the role and will likely keep doing it. Even if there is a cycle that includes despair and hope, she is still likely to keep doing it, because for every downturn to the despair there is an upturn to hope based in her people-pleasing behavior.
Of course we can’t blame Beth’s parents for this. And, as stated, none of our discussion about parents should be understood as blaming them. First, as we shall later see, projection is an unconscious act. One cannot be blamed for what goes on in the unconscious. Rather, the hope would be to make what is unconscious conscious. Second, as we shall see in some of the examples that follow in later chapters, the parents are probably coping with identities of their own. And third, what we want to do here is understand how this problem came to exist. We cannot do that without looking at parental projection. But we do not wish to blame, because blaming would make us all victims and relieve us of responsibility for doing anything about it. This book is all about taking responsibility for our own actions and doing something to change our lives for the better.