Whether reading Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani, Falling Upward by Richard Rohr, consulting with my clients, or even supporting a close family member, the theme that keeps coming up is how to be your true self in a world that has conditioned you to feel inadequate and even bad or wrong if you don’t meet the expectations you were raised to believe made you a good and worthwhile person. One example of this is the following scenario I’ve encountered many times over my years as a therapist.
A woman I’ll call Tess started coming in for counseling recently to deal with her ambivalence about leaving her 21-year marriage. As she admitted in our first meeting, she was looking for permission to make the break from her husband, who kept telling her she was crazy and selfish for breaking up the family. She had always been a “good girl,” doing what she had been raised to do by her parents: don’t upset anyone; put others’ needs and wants before your own; and by all means, don’t get a divorce. She had rented a small apartment to clear her head, but when she went back to the family home to have dinner with her children, both older teenagers, her husband badgered her into staying and then wore her down arguing and pleading into the early hours, until she wondered if she should just give in and go back to the life that had been suffocating her.
The last time I saw her, she had spent a few nights alone and was having her children come to the apartment to have dinner with her. “I can’t believe how peaceful I felt and how well I slept,” she exclaimed. The next time she went “home” and her husband started in on her again, she said she could feel how she shrank and noticed that she was constantly vigilant around him, watching for any sign that he was agitated. “That’s the way I lived my whole marriage, and I never realized how much I shut myself down and tried to make sure he never got upset.” All those years, without being aware of what she was doing, she had abandoned her own thoughts and feelings because there wasn’t room for them in that relationship. A few nights by herself had provided even more contrast and clarity to the choice she had before her. The poet e.e. cummings echoes Tess’ struggle, saying, “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting.”
In Anita Moorjani’s case, as related in her book about her near death experience, she suggests that denying her true feelings and trying to meet others’ expectations when they didn’t fit for her were contributing factors to the cancer that nearly killed her. The biggest lesson she brought back “from the other side” is that we are here to be ourselves in the fullest sense, to honor our uniqueness, and express our genuine thoughts and feelings. In Tess’ case, she is learning, without having to die, that she matters and deserves to be happy. She is also learning that her husband has no intrinsic right to demand she conform to his wants if it means turning her back on herself.
Our physical bodies don’t have to die, but an old self, the “first half of life self,” as Richard Rohr describes, does if we are to fully embrace our True Self and honor our journey as an individual expression of the creative intelligence of the universe (AKA God).
