Your Story is the Key to Recovering Your Authentic Self

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

– James Joyce, Ulysses

If you find that you often get in your own way, it might be time to explore aspects of your personality that you want to change. To put it another way, have you lost touch with your authentic self and if so, how do you recover your authenticity?

Essentially, you gave up your authentic self as an infant in favor of being attached to others for survival. You traded your authenticity for a mask, or persona, which is a role you play, which includes certain beliefs and behaviors, called your personality. This persona was meant to help you survive by maintaining attachment to your parents.

For example, in adopting a persona of the “unemotional one” maybe you learned not to cry, even if you were hungry or needed a diaper change. Maybe you became the “one with short attention span” as you learned to distract yourself with other objects and happenings around you, so you wouldn’t feel the discomfort. Maybe you learned to ignore the discomfort, pretending it wasn’t a big deal, becoming “the strong one”.

Your persona and the accompanying personality probably worked well for you throughout infancy and into early adulthood. These were the years when you were learning how to operate in the world, continuing to tell that adaptive story about who you were and how you behaved, even though you were no longer physically dependent on others for survival. Old habits die hard.

Then, some time in adulthood, you may have started to notice that certain beliefs and behaviors, which used to work well for you in the past, were now getting in your way. The same beliefs and behaviors you adopted to cope when you were small were now keeping you from important things you wanted in life.

The point is your authentic self has never left you. You buried it under a protective layer of limiting beliefs and coping behaviors to maintain attachment between you and your parents. Only you can decide whether the role you adopted and its companion beliefs and behaviors leftover from infancy are still working in your favor. If they are not, it’s time to do the work to recover your authenticity.

If you’re ready to start to unearth your authentic self, here are a few action steps for finding your way back to the genuine you:

1. Discover and learn about your attachment style.

Your attachment style describes how you typically bond and behave in relationships now, as an adult. Interestingly, it reflects the bonding process you likely went through with your primary caregivers in infancy. Knowing your attachment style may provide clues about details from your childhood that explain any limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging behaviors that are part of your personality as an adult. Take a few minutes to learn more about attachment styles and discover the style that describes you best.

2. Find out details about your early childhood years.

Details about your mother’s pregnancy and especially your first 18 months of life can add to the story of how you developed your attachment style and personality. For example, when I was born, I needed medical attention that required a transfer to a hospital 90 miles away. The doctor told my mother to stay home with my 15-month-old brother rather than spend time at the hospital because my prognosis was not looking good. So, for the first 10 days of my life, I was in a hospital alone with occasional attention from a nurse for basic feeding and diapering.

To add to this, when I was around 6 months old, I had an abscess in my ear that went undetected by a doctor. Based on the typical medical advice of the time, the doctor didn’t detect any medical reason for my crying and advised my parents to leave me in my crib to cry, so I would get spoiled. A few days later, when the crying didn’t stop, my parents took me back to the doctor, who finally discovered the abscess.

Upon reflection, my life-long story has been one of self-reliance, independence, and a lack of self-worth. Maybe it’s because my infant-self began to believe that only a baby who was worthless would be left alone without help when she was in pain. Maybe I started to believe that I couldn’t rely on others to meet my needs and learned to disregard my hunger, discomfort, and pain. By being “strong” and self-reliant, I would maintain my parents attachment to me because they would see that I wasn’t weak and needy. Today, I can see these same adaptive qualities from my attachment style of believing I’m unworthy, self-reliant, and strong enough to ignore pain are qualities that became part of my personality. While this story about myself may have protected me as a child, as an adult they can get in my way and keep me from getting things I want in life.

My example shows how knowing your attachment style along with stories from your early years can give you a sense of the basic story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are. Your story will give insight into how you have seen yourself in the world and explain how you have strayed from your authentic self.

3. Identify and explore limiting beliefs and how you react negatively.

Once you know your attachment style and any relevant events from your early childhood, you can begin to “recover” your authentic self by questioning the limiting beliefs and coping behaviors you adopted. You can decide which thoughts and behaviors to reframe and consciously let go of to return to a more authentic way of being.

To recover more of your authentic self, the early years of childhood hold most of the clues to how and why you adopted certain beliefs about yourself and behaviors that helped you cope. After identifying how you adapted in infancy, you can work on letting go of the limiting beliefs and coping behaviors that once protected you but don’t work in your favor anymore. As the main work of adulthood, reframing or shedding the beliefs and behaviors of your impostor persona reveals the truth of who you really are and brings you back to the original, authentic “you”.