Most of my life, I thought I was happy – or, that the best I felt was as good as it gets.
For me, that version of happy is about being nice in order to be safe. “Smile and the world will smile back.” Of course, this is true at some level, but it overlooks what is actually happening for me (for any of us) – on the inside. It’s born of that parental admonishment, “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” that too many of us grew up with.
I can now see that I learned to not feel what was really going on in me in favor of getting approval from the outside. Over time, I stopped noticing; then, I actually stopped feeling what was really going on in me. I began to believe my happy mask – I began to believe “this” was happy.
The thing is, when “bad” feelings (aka anger, sadness, fear) get cut off, “good feelings” (aka joy, excitement, delight) get cut off, too.
We become kind of anesthetized and can access only a small range of our full human potential. And, that’s not very satisfying… but it’s familiar. A wise person (who seemed cruel and insensitive, at the time) pointed out to me this mask version of myself at work one day, telling me I was “like a cardboard cut out.” I was mortified and perplexed – what was he talking about? I could see that I had two kids, a challenging marriage, and a demanding full-time job. I could not see what he was pointing to… that came about 10 years later.
Just look around and you’ll notice how many of us walk around with a mask. We go through life saying, “Really, I’m fine” when we’re not. We don’t realize that the mask is a way of “staying safe,” it’s not who we are. It’s who we’ve been trained to be.
But the mask can only cover so much – we then need a stronger way to zip up all that’s going on under the surface. This is when, despite all our best efforts, our scary parts start to show.
Eventually (whether it is milliseconds, minutes or months), those scary parts bust out into a full-on Reptilian Response.
And that’s scary – for the person Going Reptile, and those on the receiving end.
