The Difference Between a Persona and a Person

A persona doesn’t seek therapy. A person does. And yet often when I begin a new therapy relationship, I find myself sitting across from a persona. Early in my training it was quite confusing for me. I’d wonder why the hell this person was seeking help. She’s so together, successful, confident. She seems… perfect.

Of course, that’s exactly what she would want me to think. The word persona has its roots in the Etruscan word phersu, which means, literally, “mask.” We all have all kinds of masks we wear for the world – different ones for our work environments, for our various personal relationships, for the corner deli. Of course there’s nothing inherently wrong with this; the wheels of society depend upon our successfully employing the right mask at the right time. When I’m checking out at the QFC and the clerk asks me how I’m doing, he sure doesn’t want me to really tell him. If a prospective employer inquires about my passion for selling his widgets, if I want that job I better find the right mask quick.

The problem seems to come when we’re so accustomed to wearing the mask all the time that we forget or have never known or have come to despise the real person that lies beneath. The truth is that the person beneath the persona is a far more complicated character; he’s often less secure, more neurotic, less cheerful, more fearful. She’s likely more judgmental and more coveting. Likely at times he has primitive or animalistic impulses he doesn’t want and doesn’t want others to know about. Maybe she has cravings. In short, he has a shadow, the term that Carl Jung used to capture the darker – perhaps unconscious – side of a person’s being.

Because we typically go around rubbing masks with each other, many people come to therapy confusing other people’s personas for their true selves, which makes their own true selves all the more troubling.

“Everyone else seems so confident.”

“No one else seems to be so lustful.”

“I feel like I’m the only one on the outside all the time, like I’m always faking it.”

All of this contributes to a great shame that I encounter so frequently in the people I work with. I’ve come to see shame as rooted in the space between our persona and our person: that is, in the knowledge and judgment of the difference between the image of ourselves we present to the world and the three-dimensional person we know ourselves to truly be. This difference for so many of us is a great secret that no one knows about, a secret that must be protected at all costs.

The common solution to this problem is for people to strive to become more perfect: that is, to make the person more like his persona, to make his inner experience more like his Facebook profile. Often people come to therapy for precisely this purpose, as though the right therapeutic experience can make them less lustful or perfectly secure or happy at all times. Many people want to actually feel how everyone else seems. I often wish that my patients could know each other and see immediately how much common ground they have; how they all feel what they imagine to be a singular vulnerability. The truth is that the vast majority of us have a more complicated experience of the world and ourselves than we let on.

So much of the power of the therapeutic or any other healthy relationship is rooted not in its capacity to help someone become more perfect, but in its power to help someone shift their relationship to the truth of who they are, to put their imperfection into a wiser context of the full human experience. Truly understanding the ubiquity of vulnerability frees us from the self-judgment and shame that is often the deepest source of our suffering.

Healthy healing relationships invariably are built upon intimacy. Intimacy gently demands that we drop the mask, and it provides safe ground to know the truth of oneself and meet it with kindness, with understanding, with dignity. Unfortunately, many of us have not ever experienced truly intimate relationships, or at least many of us were not born into families where true intimacy was available, and we learned to hide our more complicated aspects behind a thin facade of charm, or stoicism, or some other flavor of okay-ness. Often such people reach adulthood and have not ever allowed their larger, deeper selves to find a place to land in the world, even within their closest relationships and romantic partnerships, even within their own understanding of themselves. Despite perhaps being surrounded by many others, such people often feel a great alienation and solitude, as though they are never really in contact with anyone or anything.

We need both the ability to wear the right mask at the right time and the ability to drop these masks when it is safe and nourishing to do so. Mental and spiritual health is so much rooted in our capacity to know the more complicated aspects of the person we truly are, to work through our judgments of this person, and to find places in the world where the person – not the persona – may be known.

On Gathering Oneself

Our one-year-old daughter has just learned to walk in the last week. She couldn’t walk at all about ten days ago, and now she needs to watched like a hawk lest she toddle right out of the house. She’s pretty good at it now, but until say, yesterday, she’d take a step or two and fall right on her ass. Sometimes she’d fall squarely on the soft fleshy cushion a baby’s butt is meant to be; other times she’d fall on a block or something, or tumble and smack her head, and she’d find herself startled and in some mild pain. A second’s pause, then she’d shriek.

So as I watch all of this go down, what do I do?

Though it’s clear she’s not injured, my instinct is to rush over and swoop her up and bring her to my chest. No doubt this as much (if not more) about my own anxiety in the moment than it is about what I’ve decided she needs. In fact I’ve discovered that my swooping and scooping actually increases her anxiety quite a bit. If I swoop and scoop, I’m communicating to her that she needs me even though she hasn’t asked for me; I’m telling her some distressing story about what’s taken place, and her concern is fueled. I’ve found instead that the best thing to do for her is remain calm, demonstrate my presence, and allow her to gather herself. She’s actually quite good at being able to do this. After the shock of the moment fades, she realizes she’s just fine, she’s not telling herself any tragic story about what has befallen her, and she moves on happily to the important business of emptying the contents of the kitchen drawer.

This capacity to gather ourselves in the face of stress – to feel distressed and then find our center, to remain in contact with the truth of the moment, to respond with dignity – is a hugely important component of living well. I believe this capacity is innate. Animals and young children who have been treated well enough are able to respond to adversity with great resilience. It is cues in our early dysfunctional environments or anxious stories we tell ourselves later in life that bring us away from this natural resilience and into far less skillful modes of self-protection.

Tara Brach, a Vipassana Buddhist meditation teacher I admire, has said that in the space between the stimulus and our response lies our power and our freedom. She calls this space the ‘sacred pause.’ Without this intentional pause between what has just been experienced and what we do in reaction, we find ourselves prisoners of habitual and often totally unproductive ways of responding. This reactivity is designed to protect the self from some perceived threat, but more often than not it increases the danger of the environment and brings us further away from what we really want.

The groups I run are fascinating venues to observe the impact of various ways of responding to difficulty. The relationships between group members, like any real relationships, are fertile ground to find actual or perceived threats to one’s sense of self. In group, someone might say something that triggers someone else, or remind someone unconsciously of their punitive mother or neglecting son, or say something that really was jerky, and suddenly any given member might be feeling all kinds of stress. Maybe this person is angry or sad; likely they are wounded and their psychic safety and sense of self is disrupted.

Now, what does this person do in response?

Let’s agree that this happens all the time in life – at work, with our partners, in our families, in traffic. We get triggered. Maybe we get wounded. We get stressed by the endless stimuli that living throws at us. When we are disrupted by this stimulus, what do we do next?

Many Eastern traditions would say that before we do anything we must stop and pause. Eastern spiritual traditions and the Western therapeutic milieu have much common ground, including the shared emphasis on consciousness, on being aware of what is happening as it is happening. Brach’s sacred pause is the essential moment between the prick of life’s arrow and our next action; it is a time to become conscious of what we are experiencing and intentional about how we move forward.

In the early stages of a new therapy group, as in much of life, there is often a good bit of the two basic forms of maladaptive response to the arrow’s prick: aggression and withdrawal. Both responses are employed to create space for oneself, to carve out a little breathing room and establish one’s boundaries. And in one sense, both are effective in a very limited sort of way; they do in fact serve to keep one’s tender underbelly safely removed from the difficult moment’s sharp edge. The problem is the space created through shoving (aggression) and hiding (withdrawal) are deserts; the stuff of life (intimacy, meaning) cannot be found in the space created through acting out or curling up. In group as in life, the impact of habitually acting without pause – of acting before gathering oneself – is clear and poignant: it is a recipe for alienation, emptiness, and suffering.

And yet if when we are wounded we then gather ourselves – if we recognize what we are feeling and why, if we understand the fuller context and deeper truths of any given moment, if we understand what it is we really want and the best way to bring ourselves to it, if we first take some deep breaths – we may respond with powerful skill. We may meet the inevitable pains of living with dignity and resilience as we stay in contact with the stuff that makes life so rich and worthwhile. I see this so often in group as well.

This ability to gather oneself can be learned. I know it because I see it all the time – both in my patients and in myself. Learning to gather oneself requires knowing oneself – knowing what it is that we tend to feel, understanding what those feelings are rooted in, learning to separate the present stimulus from deeper pains we may carry. It requires seeing the truth of what works for us and what doesn’t; how aggression and withdrawal carry great unwanted consequence; and how taking time in the sacred pause allows us access to a one-year-old’s wisdom.