Your emerging awareness of your self required that you learn when and how and to whom it was appropriate to reveal that self. Some expressions of feeling had to be hidden and others had to be faked if you were to gain approval and avoid disapproval. You had to be the person that they expected you to be. You had to learn the doctrine of the mask, that is, how to develop your compliant false self.
At the time when your self-confidence and self-esteem depended largely on your success in meeting external standards, you responded to your self as you saw others responding to you. You knew you had a self, but you were not yet sure just what that self was all about . It was necessary to hide your own identity behind a pose that would protect it from the punishment and humiliation that sometimes accompanied other people’s disapproval. For a while it was necessary, but eventually the lifelong process of self-definition had to begin— otherwise how would you distinguish the “me” from the “not-me”?
Who are you . . . really?