The persona. The mask we wear. The character we choose to become to play our role in the particular drama we found ourselves in. A role given to us and created by us so we could fit in, belong, be accepted, so we could survive. We couldn’t survive alone. We needed to be in relationship with the tribe or environment around us.
It became our identity. Our ‘doing’. Our conditioned response to the challenges and opportunities within that environment. Built into it are opportunities and limitations, rules and guiding principles, permissions and entitlements, expectations and restrictions. What I can do and what I can’t do.
The challenge is that we stay loyal to this protective armour long after it has served its purpose. The self-awareness and self-management baked into the emotional intelligence of our personality is often one built on fear and insecurity.
“I don’t want to feel that way again.”
It protects us from feeling the pain, fear, rejection and abandonment that we once felt. Our “awareness” is often just vigilance. A mechanism of self-protection.
The persona, this adaptive strategy, is an attempt to simplify the world into a narrative of “I’ll be happy, safe, or lovable when…” A transactional dynamic: “if I do this, then I’ll get that.” What we are really looking for is happiness, safety, love.
What happens is that our ‘doing’ becomes safe, happy, lovable – but our ‘being’ is hidden behind it. We are loved for what we do rather than who we are.
We remain loyal to our persona because it kept us safe. It is the strategy that most effectively outruns or overcomes our deepest fear of rejection, abandonment, unworthiness. It is the most effective answer to the problem we always trying to solve.
We learned to hide our vulnerability. Certain emotions weren’t welcome or safe to express. On top of fear, anger, sadness or even joy sat the weight of shame, guilt, or anxiety. So, we created a mask. A way to hide the emotions behind the strategies of our persona. All the things we do to avoid, distract, suppress, deny, numb, or hide what we truly feel.
“Every act an expression of love or a cry for help.”
These are the very foundations of the happy, safe and lovable when strategies of our persona.
But the essential ingredient, the only way to break the cycle, is self-love. The persona survives because it has taken on the stories and beliefs of others: I’m only acceptable, safe, lovable when I…
These are the self-imposed barriers we put between ourselves and our own acceptance.
Liberation is freedom from the cage we’ve built for ourselves.
“You can’t be attacked if you don’t feel the need to defend yourself.”
“I remain in the prison even when the door is open.”
The glass ceilings we can’t break through are our own. Yes, society plays its part, but the biggest limiting factor is our own insecurity. Our own belief that we are unworthy.
Without a foundation of positive self-regard, we outsource our worthiness to others. We keep looking for external validation as the measure of our worth.
The perverse truth: our personality is vigilant for the very things we fear most. At the faintest sign of danger, we leap to engage the strategy that has always kept us safe.
The hero swoops in to save the day. The cape is donned. And the “success” of safety is used as the very justification that perpetuates the strategy.
This is effective self-awareness and self-management. But nothing changes. We stay in the same habit.
Nothing changes until we become our own source of acceptance and self-love. Only then can we explore the habits and reactive patterns of our protective persona.
Until we see ourselves as worthy and deserving of love, we will continue to reject the love of others. We’ve been burnt before. We learned not to trust. We learned to be vigilant. Safer to believe the criticism. Safer to take on the stories of others, prove our worth, please those who cared for us.
If we can’t love ourselves, we can’t truly receive the love of others.
The hardest thing is simply to BE. To come out from behind the doing of our persona and rest in our essence. To accept, to surrender, to be comfortable in our own skin. We long to be seen, heard, understood. Which means we need courage – to show up, to speak our truth, to keep sharing until we find the words that others can understand.
We must become the source of our own love. To BE LOVE. To connect into the universal energy where we find higher purpose and deeper meaning. To connect with whatever we consider divine – God, nature, pure being. To disappear into something bigger than the limited self. The permission to be nobody, no thing. To dissolve into the wide-open space of awareness, celebrating all things and everything. To feel our place in the fullness of life, the legacy of our ancestors, the depth of existence.
And then, we can BE LOVED. With the courage to be, to connect with something greater, we also connect with our family, our tribe, our community. Celebrated for our unique strengths and contributions, accepted and appreciated in our deepest vulnerability. Willing to be held. To welcome support.
Only then can we break free. Emerging from behind the mask of persona, no longer bound by old stories or trapped by others’ expectations. Free to choose our own path. Response-able rather than reactive. Liberated. Free to become a celebration of all that we are. No longer hiding the parts we were once told were unacceptable or unlovable.
Clear view 