The Masks We Wear

When I showed Jenny the image above, she asked if I’d ever intentionally cut my hand playing a board game with my ex and my sons and bled out all over the board. I laughed, no, I hadn’t. I can see why she might have wondered. I told her I did cut my palm once but not with anyone around. She said that sounds like it might have been a form of psychosis. I laughed again. Also makes sense. I was around 20, I had this intense urge to take a razor to my palm and offer my blood to the earth; it felt like a purging of something. The cut was a real handicap for a couple of weeks and I never had the urge to do so again. I know a number of people that cut themselves at one point in their lives. It never seemed that crazy to me; in fact, not much does. Everything checks out when one goes deep enough for the answer and finds the root of the pain that authors the behaviour.

There are as many ways to manage pain as there are humans, but there are universal themes; ways of being that many can agree on. One of those is the donning of metaphorical masks: a psychological framework to cover up the truth of how we actually feel. We think it’s to protect ourselves from the world but what we are really doing is protecting the world from us. We do it because at some point we learned that our truth was not welcome, not wanted, inconvenient.

As a coach, one of the things I do is help my clients identify their masks, understand them, discover what’s beneath them and why they were created, then find out what it’s like to take them off. It’s always a revelation. Inevitably, they experience the opposite of the fears that kept them from removing the mask in the first place.

They become enlivened, empowered, and energized. Intentions they set and actions they take from that place become grounded, self-oriented, and incorruptible.

Do you know what masks you wear and why you wear them? How do they protect you? What fears do you carry about what the world might do if it saw beneath them?