We never get enough of whatever lets us feel safe being ourselves

You are deceiving the world around you. And I am, too.

We mostly do it by what we don’t show to other people. We deceive by the things we hide. It’s not a conscious decision. We learned in our formative years what people didn’t like about us. We learned the parts of us that would cause us trouble when others saw them.

And so we learned to hide who we are.

We built masks for ourselves. We learned what would make people approve of us — and we wore those masks with pride. We craved approval. We craved love. We didn’t understand what we were doing, but we learned that acting in certain ways got us more of what we needed.

We learned to think of those artificial behaviors as our personalities. We learned to believe that these masks we showed the world were who we really are. But we were fooling ourselves.

Personality is a mask. That’s not who you are. Your personality is the defense you learned to use — to hide the real you from the world. And most of us hid so well that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.

For years, I thought my personality was who I am. I thought that if I studied enough about personality, I could learn the real me. Maybe it would even allow me to share the real me with someone else.

I think this is the way most people look at personality. It’s even how most of our systems of understanding personality work. If you want to look at personality that way, you’re really studying your mask — and the masks of other people.

I’ve slowly come to understand that this thing I call my personality was the result of my unconscious effort to be “good enough” for other people. Whether you see it yet or not, the same is true for you.

When I was a child, I learned that I wasn’t acceptable — or loved — unless I was perfect, so I learned to wear a mask that was based on the pursuit of perfection.

I learned that I had to act a certain way, achieve certain things and follow “the right rules.” When I acted in these perfect ways, I made adults happy. My teachers loved me. I was praised by strangers. And my father was happy with my excellent “performance,” so he gave me love at those times.

On the other hand, I learned to hide my feelings. I learned to hide all the parts of me which wouldn’t help me get the praise and approval and love which I desperately craved.

You did similar things, but you might not realize it yet. I’ve learned that if you trace these things that we did for approval — which we’re still doing today because we assume that’s who we really are and we don’t know another way to live — you will come to understand why people’s Enneagram types are what they are.

If you learned that you needed to be perfect, you might have become a Type 1, as I am. If you learned that taking care of other people got you the approval and love you wanted, you might have devoted yourself to others and become a Type 2. If you learned that people gave you approval and love for outward success, you would have found narrow channels in your life where you could be a success, so you would have become a Type 3. And you would feel miserable when you’re not succeeding.

I could go on through the other six types, but you should get the idea. The things we think of as our personality — which we’ve become convinced are the real us — were dictated by what others wanted us to be.

And the things that we’re still afraid to show other people — those are the things that directly relate to who we really are.

Do you have something which makes you nervous to talk about? Are there things you’ve run away from discussing — even with friends — for reasons you’ve never understood? Those are areas you learned to hide from, most likely because they got negative attention when you explored them as a child.

Why do we keep pursuing more and more of something we don’t actually need any longer?

Why does a wealthy and successful person always have to pursue more wealth and success? Why does a “helper type” keep throwing himself or herself into roles that are emotionally or even physically damaging — for other people? Why does someone who has spent a life becoming as perfect as he knows how to be continue to try to be more perfect — and unconsciously beg other people to tell him he’s good enough?

It’s because we are pursuing the wrong things. We are still running on autopilot from the programming we got as children.

We can never get enough of whatever this is that we’re seeking. I can never get enough approval and admiration from others to finally take the place of the love I wanted as a child. You can never achieve enough, take care of enough people, be smart enough, be powerful enough — or be whatever it is that you learned to pursue — to feel that you’re good enough or loved enough.

We’re afraid to be our real selves. We don’t even know what those real selves are. We’re afraid to look too deeply — because we came to associate those things we someone’s disapproval. And so we’ve learned to run away from people and run away from feelings which trigger what we fear.

If you want a good way to start seeing what that might be, ask yourself what things you have emotionally run away from. What things has someone tried to discuss that you can’t allow yourself to talk about? What feelings or thoughts have filled you with such angst that you put them into a mental box and hid them, telling yourself that you might look at them one day, but maybe not?

If you find those things — and everyone has those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings — you’ve found the starting point for seeing what you once felt you had to hide.

And so we continue to project what we’ve always used to impress people or to deflect them from seeing us. We identify with those outer actions and habits that feel so familiar. We keep telling ourselves this is who we really are.

And we keep those scary thoughts and feelings hidden in a mental box. We try to forget they even exist.

Unconsciously, we’re afraid that if we are our real selves, the people whose love we want will not love us. We’re afraid they won’t be impressed. And we’re terrified that they won’t give us whatever it is that we think we have to receive from them.

No matter what you’re chasing, you will never have enough of it to get what you’ve really wanted. The only thing you can do is to realize that the mask you’ve worn for the world simply reflects what you were taught would get you what you need.

And now it’s time to admit to yourself — probably for the first time in your life — that your life-long chase for something from your childhood will never get what you need.

You don’t want success. You don’t want wealth. You don’t want praise or power or whatever you’ve been after.

You want love. You need love. And the only path to finding that love is through the path of the parts of yourself that have scared you the most.

You can have love. The real kind. You can have what you’ve always thought you were after. But it’s not going to look like the picture you’ve had in your head. And you’ll never find it if you keep pursuing whatever you’ve been pursuing since you were young.

That’s not where love is hiding. Love is hiding in things you fear.