Why Do I Feel Like the Wrong Version of Myself?
The Pattern
You look at your life and most of it is in good order. The work is fine, the relationships are fine, the apartment is fine. And underneath the fine is a low constant signal that this is not the right life and you are not the right person living it. The wrongness is not depression. It is the body reporting that the woman doing the days is not the woman who would have done them if she had been allowed to grow up unedited.
Origins & Context
Donald Winnicott named the gap between the True Self and the False Self in 1960. The True Self is the original organism. The False Self is the compliant version that formed in response to a holding environment that could not meet the True Self. When the False Self runs the life, the True Self does not disappear. She signals. She signals as wrongness, as flatness, as the constant low note under the otherwise functioning days.
Carl Jung wrote about individuation as the lifelong work of meeting the original self the persona has been standing in for. The wrong-version feeling is, in Jungian language, the psyche's invitation. Something underneath has not been let in. The discomfort is the door knocking from the inside.
The more decorated the false self becomes, the louder the true self protests the impersonation. The wrongness is the door knocking from the inside.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You scroll through your own photos and feel mild estrangement from the woman in them. You hear yourself in a recording and the voice is not the voice your inner ear hears. You answer a question about yourself and the answer is technically true and also unrelated to whatever is alive underneath it.
It shows up in the moments you should feel arrived. The promotion, the engagement, the new house. You expected arrival to dissolve the wrongness. Instead the wrongness gets louder, because the more decorated the false self becomes, the louder the true self protests the impersonation.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the False Self organization (Donald Winnicott), the protective self that becomes mistaken for the real one. It is also named in Jungian work as the Persona overshadowing the Self. Contemporary trauma therapists describe it through the language of the Adaptive Self versus the Original Self, where the original self has been waiting underneath the adaptive performance.
Related entries in this library include the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, Self-Abandonment, and the Inner Child who is often the one signaling that the current life does not fit.
Nikita's Note
I felt like the wrong version of myself for almost a decade and tried to fix it by becoming a better version of the wrong one. It did not work. The wrongness got louder because it was never about better. It was about underneath.
The practice that finally moved it was small and unimpressive. I stopped trying to be a better version and started asking, in tiny daily moments, what would the underneath one want now. She wanted quieter mornings. She wanted to wear less makeup. She wanted to tell fewer people about her wins. I gave her what she asked for. The wrongness, slowly, went quiet.
From the work
The more decorated the false self becomes, the louder the true self protests the impersonation. The wrongness is the door knocking from the inside.From When You're Ready by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready — available on Amazon.