How many masks do you wear?

Nobody is the same with everybody.

We all present ourselves differently depending on who we’re with. I’m different with colleagues from how I am with my daughters, and different again with my partner. It would be very strange if I weren’t.

But for a boarding school survivor, this perfectly normal shifting of self can get tangled up with something else: masking. And it can seem like something we’re doing wrong. But is it?

We learned to mask early on – school seemed a safer place when we hid behind a mask. And even then we had multiple masks – a mask for teachers, another for friends and yet another for children we didn’t trust. And what about when we went home?

I doubt that this is so very different from the experience of children who went to day school. It would never have made sense to present the same face to teachers as they did to their friends. But there is a difference. It lies in whether the child has anyone with whom they feel safe enough to be themselves. If there was no one with whom you felt that safe, those masks could form a complete shell, behind which you became entirely hidden from view.

The problem isn’t simply that we continue to mask in adulthood. It’s that, behind that all-encompassing shell, we can lose sight of who we actually are.

This is something I have seen in many of the ex-boarders I’ve worked with. They really don’t think there is anything else inside that shell. The shell is who they think they are.

And when what their partner sees is someone who rages at them, lies to them, ignores them or simply forgets about them, it can be painful for both of them to imagine that there might be nothing else underneath.

My role then is to help my client (and their partner) to understand that:

• they created those masks to keep them safe at school, and perhaps at home as well

• each mask was a creation of their own inner ‘Tiny Architect’

• what kept them safe in childhood, may now be getting in the way of intimacy

• that the Tiny Architect is still alive today and can create something new, something relational

• that the route to transformation is through practising new ways of being, over and over again

I often find myself reminding clients of how it sounds when a child starts to learn the violin, but that with practice it starts to sound lovely. The same is true when we practise the new skills which will bring us closer to the people we love. At first we mess up and have to apologise. But every time we give it another go, it gets easier and better.

And in doing so, something else begins to happen. We start to discover who we are underneath the masks.

Not some ‘authentic self’ that has been sitting there fully formed all these years, waiting to be uncovered. But the person we choose to become. Someone who recognises that understanding where a behaviour came from does not remove the responsibility for changing it. The person who wants to be good at love. Good at staying present when our partner is angry. Good at listening. Good at empathy, vulnerability, honesty and transparency. Good at staying calm in a storm instead of raging.

Perhaps that is what being ourselves really means: The journey from being a survivor to being fully alive.

It’s what we’ll be exploring in my workshop on October 27th, Beyond Survival: From Protection to Connection. Register here to grab your place.

If you don’t want to wait until 27 October, or you’d rather talk about what’s happening in your own relationship, you can book a complimentary Clarity Call with me here.