Hiding Behind A Mask?

Hiding Behind a Mask?

Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.

James 5:16

“You’re the first person I have ever been completely honest with.” Every psychologist hears these words from time to time, but it was Sidney Jourard who made sense of them in his in-depth book, The Transparent Self. He was puzzled over the frequency with which patients were more honest and authentic with a clinician than they were with family or friends. After much study, he concluded that each of us has a natural, built-in desire to be known, but we often stifle our vulnerability out of fear. We’re afraid of being seen as too emotional or not emotional enough, as too assertive or not assertive enough, too whatever, or not whatever enough. We’re afraid of rejection.

The result? We wear masks. We put up our guard. We become what Abraham Maslow called “jellyfish in armor” by pretending to be, think, or feel something we aren’t. Consider the words of a letter whose author is unknown, but it could have easily been written by each of us:

Don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the face I wear. I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks—masks that I am afraid to take off; and none of them are me.

Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don’t be fooled. For my sake, don’t be fooled. I give the impression that I am secure, that all is sunny and unruffled within me as well as without; that confidence is my name and coolness my game, that the water is calm and I am in command; and that I need no one. But don’t believe me, please. My surface may seem smooth, but my surface is my mask, my ever varying and ever concealing mask.^a

We often vacillate between the impulse to reveal ourselves and the impulse to protect ourselves. We want to be known, of course, but not if the risk of rejection is too high. Wearing masks is a common practice, even among loving couples.

So are you both feeling safe enough to talk about a mask you sometimes wear in your own relationship? How about revealing one of your masks right now? What would it be, and when are you most likely to wear it? Why?

Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it’s so touching when you get to see something real and human. I think that’s why most of us stay close to our families, because no matter how neurotic the members [of the group], how deeply annoying or dull—because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance.

—Anne Lamott

^a 142