Sue Monk Kidd: False Selves
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” Kahlil Gibran
I especially relate to Sue Monk Kidd’s naming of our false selves, or the masks we wear that we initially put on to protect ourselves from the difficulties we encounter from our very beginnings. Still, these identities are not our true selves. These are similar, but an expanded, feminine form of Fritz Kunkel’s four: Turtle, Star, Eternal Boy, and Tyrant. Kidd describes the Little Girl with a Curl (pleaser, very good), Tinsel Star (overachiever, perfectionist, performer), Rapunzel (waiting to be rescued), Little Red Hen (duty), Chicken Little (fear-based like Turtle), Tin Woodman (no heart or connection to body). Finally, she offers advice on recognizing these false selves and removing the mask with each of them.
In When the Heart Waits, Kidd challenges us to think about who we would be if all of the roles we play were suddenly stripped away. I connect to her writing about the difficulty of letting go or diapause. I remember my difficulty in completely retiring from medicine. First, I worked four days a week, then twice a week, then twice a month, and finally, one day a month. It is hard to let go of a persona that has been ours for forty years.
Kidd describes the tension that arises when we recognize these false selves that have dominated our lives. She describes an orphanage of banished selves still crying out inside of us. What happens when we still hear the “ego logic” of the Star and the Red Hen driving us to promote ourselves, or hear the Little Girl with the Curl who feels abandoned and unloved and wants to please? What happens when the Star decides not to perform because she learns more about God’s love and no longer needs to be approved by others? I remember this was my persona from an early age, when my grandfather first put me up on top of a picnic table when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old to play my accordion at our family’s 4th of July picnic. She has been so much a part of my life for so long.
On the other hand, we know we are connected to our authentic self when we respond out of love rather than fear, and honesty rather than approval seeking. The Tin Man is healed by reconnecting our body to our mind, heart, and soul through creative dialoguing with our body. I am reminded of the body exercises of Anthony DeMello.
Kidd believes that when we do find our true selves: Rapunzel no longer gets someone to rescue her, the Woodman recovers his heart and embraces his feelings and body, the Little Girl with the Curl finds her own voice, the Red Hen stops taking care of everyone else, and the Pleaser stops pleasing.
Sometimes other people we live with may have difficulty when we change. This is because they no longer know how to react to us as our true selves.
Kidd calls us to hold our false selves in our hands, trace our fingers over the masks we wear, and begin to find the real person God created us to be.
Joanna joannaseibert.com https://www.joannaseibert.com/