Love Your False Self Too

A reflection on our true self, false self, and whole self.

Poet Robert Bly wrote, “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”

Twenty is pretty precious. I didn’t stop putting my true self into the bag (a.k.a., my false self) until I was about thirty-three. Then I spent a decade taking my true self out of the bag, learning to love it again, letting it dream dreams and write stories, helping it to feel all the joy and all the pain, giving it permission to make the most of its time here and to wonderfully waste some of it too. During that decade, however, I also reflexively did something else: I threw the bag out with the bathwater, so to speak.

When we finally realize we’ve rejected our true self while prizing our false self, the temptation is to prize our true self and reject our false self.

By the time I was thirty-three, I’d built a bag called “Dr. Kelly,” inside of which I was toting around a sensitive, creative little boy whose early relationships didn’t always feel great. Dr. Kelly, on the other hand, was a relationship expert. Literally. He’d gotten a doctorate in communication and conflict resolution.

It was a shock to discover the professional identity I’d constructed was actually compensating for quite a bit of insecurity. As it dawned on me that my Ph.D. was part of a pain management project dating back to my childhood, I rejected my expertise in favor of my creativity. For instance, I wrote an entire book about relationships called True Companions and never mentioned anywhere in it—nor anywhere on its book jacket—that I’m a relationship expert.

Over the last few years, though, something new and hard and good has been happening. Not only am I learning to love the little boy I was carrying around inside the bag of my false self, I’m also learning to love the bag itself.

Healing and humaning aren’t just about loving our true self; they’re about loving our whole self.

In other words, I’m finally learning to integrate my creativity and expertise. Which is why, I think, I recently wrote this in the first draft of my next book:

In college, I wrote my honors thesis on marriage and joined a research laboratory in which we studied communication. I went on to get a Ph.D. from Penn State University where I studied thousands of hours of videotaped marital conflict while writing a dissertation on the core relationship conflicts that float beneath the surface of everyday conversations, such as who’s going to pick up Johnny from school, or why watching Monday Night Football doesn't count as a date night.

Then, suddenly, I was a full-time marriage therapist with a wife of my own. Naturally, with all that training in relationships and communication, I quickly healed every marriage that came through my office, and my own marriage was nothing but bliss from the very beginning.

Well. Actually.

At the office, every couple’s top request was better communication, but traditional communication tools were almost entirely ineffective at improving their connection. The vast majority of them were already excellent communicators, functioning well in their vocations as doctors and attorneys and teachers and entrepreneurs and stay-at-home parents of exceptionally busy households. The problem was, they were shutting their communication toolbox at the moment they needed it most, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Meanwhile, at home, I would feel lonely but refuse to show myself. I’d hope for peace but go on the attack instead. I’d try to let go, yet cling ever more tightly. The more I tried to fix our marriage with all of my communication tools, the worse I seemed to break it.

Finally, I gave up.

I don’t mean we got divorced or I had an affair or anything like that. Rather, I shifted my focus from relationship transformation to self-examination. I traded out communication tools for introspection tools. In other words, for almost twenty years now, I’ve studied the way communication breaks down not between us but within us. What I’ve discovered is that it has nothing to do with your communications skills and it has everything to do with the moment your heart closes.

That’s the moment all communication and connection comes to a halt.