Could it be we put the masks on to compensate when we don't have the tools we need to authentically be ourselves?
This is one aspect that I find so fascinating -- this sort-of quest for "authenticity," as if there exists just one Me.
But all of the things we talk about here, and we read about in the panoply of books that regularly get cited here, talk about process, evolution, growth, change, improvement, enhancement, self-assessment -- in other words, a dynamic rather than the presumably stable state, "The Real Me."
So Coach writes that "Doing things for others brings out the best in me," which implies logically that there also exists Not-Best in Coach -- else "the best" would always be out there. So which is the "real" Coach -- the "best" or the "not-best" -- or both -- or neither?
I find it ironic, too, that we LBS's are able to say "I want her/him to accept me as I am" and in the next breath say "I'm going to work on being the best LBS Me that I can be" [which means WE don't accept us as we are, else we wouldn't feel the need to change!] and then in the next say "I totally reject what s/he has done."
So WAS should accept us [because we're on the side of Right and Good because we're standing up for our marriages] while we are simultaneously rejecting them [because of "what they're doing to us"].
But if one is enjoined to accept the "authentic, real" then, shouldn't we at least entertain the possibility that the WAS we see is the "authentic, real" them? That, in other words, walking away is what THEY "really" do?
