In working with outer-styled individuals, whether in marital therapy or long-term individual therapy, the biggest issue that must be addressed, and the biggest barrier to healing, is the failure to come forward as a “truly personal individual.” Depending upon their “level of maturity/developmental level/personal evolution,” the outer-styled will tend to offer up various “over-identifications with externals” in place of a “full-spectrum self.” Why is this pattern so resistant to change? What are the barriers to the emergence of the full sense of self?
The evidence from my clinical work is that the barrier is some varying combination of fear/anxiety related to core-self expression on the one hand, and over-identification with/allegiance to the outer-self on the other hand; that the outer-self so feels like the “true self” that to shift to core-self expression feels like not being who one truly is, that loosing a sense of “familiar self” is akin to loosing the sense of self at all.
Turning first to the issue of the need to keep core-self experience at a distance… what does the outer-style fear about connecting-with/operating-from core-self? In the web document Healing The Marriage Of Opposites http://marriageofoppositesproject.typepad.com/chapter_one_marriageofopp/ I posited that it is the vulnerability that goes along with functioning from core-self that the outer-styled most centrally want to avoid. To add to that, it is not simply vulnerable experiences that the outer-style do not want to have, they also want to banish the awareness/knowledge that they have a fear of such experiences. In essence, they fear knowing that they have such fear; hence they erect defenses to ward off this knowledge (minimization, intellectualization, compartmentalization, isolation of affect, grandiose self-estimation, denial).
In pushing away much of core-self experience, the outer-styled tend to become overly attached to their self-image and their place of exterior value in the world. In protecting their self-image, and the image that others have of them, the outer-styled fear the intrusion of core-self images of themselves; of viewing themselves as helpless, weak, needful, confused, incapable, or dependent. Having aligned with outer self-images, the integration with the more vulnerable images from core becomes increasingly dissonant and anxiety provoking. Akin to this understanding, having already rejected core-self experience in favor of a safe/reliable/controlled outer-self, having set out on this life path with this self-identity, it is compoundingly difficult for such an individual to opt to function from core-self at latter times in their life. This becomes a matter of maintaining congruent identity as much as fearing the vulnerability of cores-self longings, fears and desires. Said differently, there is as much fear of loosing congruence with ones chosen self-identity as there is fear of the particulars of core-self vulnerability. In essence, core-self feeling is a threat to a self-identity based upon not having such feeling, and this dissonance is likely to compound with time.
