The Disconnected Self
by Martha
Beck, Ph.D.
 I
base all my counseling on the premise that each of us has
these two sides: the essential self and the social self. The
essential self contains several sophisticated compasses that
continuously point toward your North Star. The social self is
the set of skills that actually carry you toward this goal.
Your essential
self wants passionately to become a doctor; the social self
struggles through organic chemistry and applies to medical
school. Your essential self yearns for the freedom of nature;
your social self buys the right backpacking equipment. Your
essential self falls in love; your social self watches to make
sure the feeling is reciprocal before allowing you to stand
underneath your beloved's window singing serenades.
This system
functions beautifully as long as the social and essential
selves are communicating freely with each other and working in
perfect synchrony. However, not many people are lucky enough
to experience such inner harmony. For reasons we'll discuss in
a moment, the vast majority of us put other people in charge
of charting our course through life. We never even consult our
own navigational equipment; instead, we steer our lives
according to the instructions of people who have no idea how
to find our North Stars. Naturally, they end up sending us off
course.
If your
feelings about life in general are fraught with discontent,
anxiety, frustration, anger, boredom, numbness, or despair,
your social and essential selves are not in sync. Life design
is the process of reconnecting them. We'll start this process
by clearly articulating the differences between the two
selves, and understanding how communication between them broke
down.
Getting to
Know Your Selves
Your essential
self formed before you were born, and it will remain until
you've shuffled off your mortal coil. It's the personality you
got from your genes: your characteristic desires, preferences,
emotional reactions, and involuntary physiological responses,
bound together by an overall sense of identity. It would be
the same whether you'd been raised in France, China, or
Brazil, by beggars or millionaires. It's the basic you,
stripped of options and special features. It is
"essential" in two ways: first, it is the essence of
your personality, and second, you absolutely need it to find
your North Star.
The social
self, on the other hand, is the part of you that developed in
response to pressures from the people around you, including
everyone from your family to your first love to the pope. As
the most socially dependent of mammals, human babies are born
knowing that their very survival depends on the goodwill of
the grown-ups around them. Because of this, we're all
literally designed to please others. Your essential self was
the part of you that cracked your first baby smile; your
social self noticed how much Mommy loved that smile, and later
reproduced it at exactly the right moment to convince her to
lend you the down payment on a condo. You still have both
responses. Sometimes you smile involuntarily, out of amusement
or silliness or joy, but many of your smiles are based purely
on social convention.
Between birth
and this moment, your social self has picked up a huge variety
of skills. It learned to talk, read, dress, dance, drive,
juggle, merge, acquire, cook, yodel, wait in line, share
bananas, restrain the urge to bite -- anything that won social
approval. Unlike your essential self, which is the same
regardless of culture, your social self was shaped by cultural
norms and expectations. If you happen to have been born into a
mafioso family, your social self is probably wary,
street-smart, and ruthless. If you were raised by nuns in the
local orphanage, it may be saintly and self-sacrificing.
Whatever you learned to be, you're still learning. Your social
self is hard at work, right this minute, struggling to make
sure you're honest and loyal, or sweet and sexy, or tough and
macho, or any other combination of things you believe makes
you socially acceptable.
The social
self is based on principles that often run contrary to our
core desires. Its job is to know when those desires will upset
other people, and to help us override natural inclinations
that aren't socially acceptable. Here are some of the
contradictory operational features that, mixed together,
comprise the You we know and love.
Your Two
Selves: Basis of Operations
Behaviors of
the Social Self Are:
Avoidance-based,
Conforming, Imitative, Predictable, Planned, Hardworking
Behaviors of
the Essential Self Are:
Attraction-based,
Unique, Inventive, Surprising, Spontaneous, Playful
As you can
see, you are definitely an odd couple. Only in very lucky or
wise people do the social and essential selves always agree
that they're playing for the same team. For the rest of us,
internal conflict is a way of life. Our two selves do battle
against each other, in ways small and large, every single day.
Let's make up some details about the life of Melvin the Middle
Manager, to serve as a hypothetical example. When his alarm
clock rings at six a.m., Melvin's essential self tells him
that he needs at least two more hours of sleep; he's been
getting less than his body requires each night for the last
several years, and he's chronically exhausted. His social
self, however, reminds him that he's been late to work three
times this month, and that the boss is starting to notice.
Melvin gets up.
He eats
breakfast alone. This floods his essential self with
loneliness for his wife, who moved out last week. For just a
minute, Melvin thinks about calling her, but his social self
immediately nixes that idea. For one thing, it's six-thirty in
the morning. For another thing, Melvin's wife is sleeping at
her boyfriend's apartment. Melvin barely even notices his
essential self's suggestion that he go after the boyfriend
with a baseball bat, because his social self knows how wrong
and futile that would be. Instead, Melvin goes to work.
At the office,
Melvin's social self sits quietly through a meeting that bores
his essential self almost to death. The guy next to him is a
smarmy twenty-eight-year-old with an MBA from MIT who was
recently promoted right past Melvin. Just looking at this guy
makes Melvin's teeth clench. His essential self wants to
squirt ink from his fountain pen onto the little twerp's
oxford shirt, but his social self bars the way yet again.
Instead, Melvin's essential self writes a nasty limerick about
the MIT MBA in the margin of his notebook. Then his social
self scribbles it out, lest it fall into the Hands of the
Enemy.
And so it
goes, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. After
mediating this constant struggle for decades, Melvin's inner
life is hollow and numb. If you ask him what he's feeling, he
won't have an answer; his social self doesn't know, and it is
the only part of Melvin that is allowed to speak to others.
Melvin's social self has kept him in his job, his marriage,
and his life -- but only by sending him off his true path. Now
everything is falling apart. His sacrifices seem to have been
for nothing. The problem isn't that Melvin's social self is a
bad person -- in fact, it's a very good person. It has the
horsepower to get Melvin all the way to his North Star. But
only his essential self can tell him where that is.
The
Disconnected Self
Most of my
clients are like Melvin: responsible citizens who have muzzled
their essential selves in order to do what they believe is the
"right thing". There are, of course, people who fail
-- or refuse -- to develop a social self. They live completely
in essential-self world, never accommodating society in any
way that runs contrary to their desires. But I very rarely see
anyone like this in my practice. You, for example, are not one
of them.
How do I know?
Because if you were totally dominated by your essential self,
you wouldn't be reading this. You'd avoid taking advice from
any book, even if it happened to be the only thing available
in the prison library. That's where you'd probably have to
read it, because people without social selves generally end up
in cages. If we all ignored our social selves, every neck of
the human woods would be another variation on Lord of the
Flies; people would be stabbing each other with forks, looting
rest homes, and God knows what else.
So I'd lay
heavy odds that you, personally, are heavily identified with
your social self. You're reading this because you're the kind
of person who seeks input from other people, people like
life-design counselors and book authors. You're trying to make
yourself a better person, and you're pretty darn good at it.
Congratulations. Having a strong social self is a terrific
asset. It's allowed you to sustain relationships, finish
school, hold down jobs, and meet a lot of other goals. But if,
in spite of all these achievements, you're feeling like Melvin
-- discontented and unfulfilled -- I can tell you with a fair
degree of certainty that your internal wiring is disconnected.
You need to re-establish contact with your essential self.
Paradoxically,
if you want to do a really good job at this, you're going to
have to stop thinking about doing a really good job. To find
your North Star, you must teach your social self to relax and
back off.
Excerpted
with permission from the book:
 Finding
Your Own North Star
by Martha Beck, Ph.D.
©2001. Excerpted by permission of the publisher, Crown, a
division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of
this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission
in writing from the publisher.
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About The
Author
Martha Beck, Ph.D. is an author,
"life coach" and sociologist. Her best-selling memoir Expecting
Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic recounts her experience
bearing and raising a son who was prenatally diagnosed with Down
syndrome. Dr. Beck holds three degrees from Harvard University, and has
taught a variety of subjects at Harvard and the American Graduate School
of International Management. She speaks frequently about the
psychological and social issues relating to children with disabilities.
Her articles on these topics have appeared in many publications, from
Parenting Magazine to Reader's Digest.
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