Text Box: Aloha and Good Morning, Increasingly, I’m noticing two things: how distasteful and jarring it feels when I hear critical, negative conversation and how often that same critical, negative conversation falls out of my mouth. It’s a pressure in the psyche: a nagging urge to complain, criticize, gossip and compare that seems to grow stronger until complied with. Physiologically it’s like a mosquito bite. You know you ought not to scratch it, that scratching it will only make it worse, but it feels good and you can’t quite help yourself. Pathologically, this urge is more than a little like Tourette’s syndrome. It’s an outward expression, or explosion, of untold volumes of unspoken critical, comparative, negative thoughts. In the course of my lifetime, I’ve built up a powerful persona to present to the world, a mask, behind which to hide the parts of myself that I didn’t like or that seemed to be the cause of pain or rejection. Text Box: This mask is an idealized, but distorted self-image based in my case upon exaggerated characteristics of love and serenity. My mask-self can admit to only its distorted imagination of what a perfectly positive, loving person exemplifies. There is no room for flaws or negativity. If such exist they must be the fault of persons or circumstances beyond my control. Text Box: Certainly, there is no room in the mask-self to admit that I might be the source of such abundant critical thinking and cutting conversation and yet criticism is the shadow language of the mask, designed to reinforce our superiority by simultaneously exaggerating our distorted “positive” by comparing it to an equally distorted “negative” attributed to another. Alas, the critical comparing may reinforce our small ego, but it does it at the cost of creating greater separation, of denying our oneness and discounting our divine unity. ”Everyone thinks you’re so great, so nice, so … perfect,” shouted my ex-girlfriend, implying that she certainly knew better – to which my inner voice silently replied, “Well, obviously they know me pretty well. I am great. I work really, really hard to be loving, supportive, generous, and kind. If you can’t see that, if you can’t appreciate me, then it’s your loss.” At the time I didn’t realize that her mask was fighting with my mask, like big horn sheep bashing their heads together. We were each driven by distorted images triggered by whatever external circumstance set the whole thing off. Nor did I realize the implied statements I am great, I am loving, I am kind were just as untrue as the idea that she was somehow unloving, unaccepting, or unappreciative. Text Box: So, when someone says, “Oh Holman, you’re such a nice guy,” I feel equal measures of gratitude, flattery and embarrassment. Gratitude because I do my best, flattery because you noticed and embarrassment because it isn’t wholly true. I am not a nice guy. That’s a distortion. I am not nice. To say so is a one-sided misrepresentation, a trap of the mask-self. What is more accurate is that I have niceness within me. I have love and kindness within me. I have perfection within me. I am none of those things, yet all of them lie within, all are accessible – though they may not always be present. Equally accessible are darkness, addiction, cruelty, greed, hate, anger, pride and the urge to over-indulge. These are much harder to awaken to, admit or embrace. All this together is the primordial mud of our humanity and it’s completely okay. What’s important is not the presence of the light or the shadow, but rather the way in which we express or deny it. Our mask is the outer layer of our personality. It is an idealized self-concept used to deny and to cover-up our shadow self by pretending no such shadow exists. If our human flaws and frailty are hidden behind exaggerated, saintly qualities perhaps no one will notice them and we will not be hurt or rejected. The mask keeps vast parts of ourselves suppressed, stealing our natural, creative energy and separating us from the magnificent flow of Spirit unfolding into form in each eternal, explosive, unlimited moment.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

 

And Mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

 

We smile, but, oh our cries

From tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Text Box: In the presence of pain and apparent rejection, children form generalized conclusions, snap-shots frozen in time, painted in reductionistic black and white and negatively magnified to prove her erroneous conclusions. This image is riddled with untrue, all-or-nothing, fatalistic ideas. An image might embody the thought, if I feel rejected now, I will always feel rejected; therefore people don’t care about me and I am unlovable. The child then begins to connect the dots. I feel rejected because I was bad. If I am bad I will be rejected. I can never be bad again. The child then exorcises the “badness,” and the mask is born. Text Box: Where images are distortions slanted to the negative, the mask is a distortion slanted to the positive. An image is not genuinely or authentically negative; nor is our mask-self genuinely or authentically positive. Both are distortions. Our mask is a distortion of real, genuine characteristics, primarily love, power and serenity. The mask takes these real, present, positive parts of our soul and imperfectly copies one or more of them and then uses this distorted copy in a self-protective scheme to create separation, transference and denial. Images are distortions of genuine, unfolding emotions like rage or fear, which if allowed full, appropriate expression would arise and dissipate within moments like a wave rolling onto the beach that reaches its crescendo of self-expression and then naturally slips back into the sea. Images are more like an invading hoard who, having assaulted the beach and conquered the shoreline, start building fortifications there. Genuine, spontaneous emotions unfold in the now. Images hook our attention and yank us right out of the present moment. All behavior is a strategy to meet a need. Some strategies are simply more “effective” than others. If the “need” being met by the strategy is generated by the shadow self, it will likely stand in opposition to our conscious desires, the evolutionary invitation of the higher self and risk the displeasure of socially unacceptable behavior (which created the mask in the first place.) Now we have a strategy that reinforces the small ego and alienates, separates and reduces our finer feelings. According to Susan Thesenga in the book The Undefended Self, our masks tend to organize themselves around corrupted copies of three basic higher self qualities: love, power and serenity.

Continued on the Next Page!

Contents © 2008 by  Holman R. Meyerhoffer, LMT—Project Transformation