Are You the Central Character in Your Life?

The feeling of living behind a mask often springs from a disturbance in one's early relationship with anger. The most threatening of emotions, anger between child and parent is also inevitable, because no parent can fulfill all of a child's needs. A famous child psychoanalyst, the late D. W. Winnicott, said that a parent's job is to neither retaliate nor abandon the child in the face of the child's anger. The parent's duty, he would say, is simply to survive that anger. There will always be frustration or disappointment in relationships. Parents who can allow a child to hate them temporarily, who can survive that hatred and return love, are bestowing the greatest of gifts. When a parent is too needy, however—because of depression, loneliness, overwork, unhappiness, alcoholism, selfishness, intolerance, insecurity or a host of other factors—a child will instinctively put the parent's needs ahead of her own. In creating a false front to manage parental demands, the child puts a mask into place—a mask that soon hardens into a shell. Instead of learning that anger is tolerable, the "as if" person learns only to maintain the connection at all costs. And the costs are high; something wonderful is lost when that naturally occurring anger is suppressed. Spirit becomes impoverished. Whole aspects of the self are vaporized.


http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Are-You-Hiding-the-Real-You-from-Yourself/4