As the West evolves, the concept of individualism is constantly challenged, critiqued, praised, and embraced to varying degrees. We are, ironically, the loneliest of cultures, and yet the one who encourages the differentiation and celebration of the individual more than any. After all, you were “born this way.” Why be anything but your true self? 

But what is authenticity? What does it mean to be one’s true self? 

In day-to-day life, this question often manifests in the form of our behaviours and emotions. Do we hide or “control” our underlying emotions? Or do we express and act out on them? If I want something, why shouldn’t I go for it? If I feel something, why not say so? 

Of course, the question is far more complicated – and less black and white – than this. 

Self-Expression and Mental Health: What Lies Beneath

Gabor Mate (pronounced like the tea, mah-tei), a popular physician and mental health expert, argues in favour of the above mentality: that the repression of emotion or of the self indeed harms a person. In one interesting interview, he challenges the idea that children should be made to resolve their anger on their own, internally, before being allowed to rejoin the group. He says this teaches them to hide their true selves, to their own detriment in the long term. 

Not everyone will agree with this idea, nor the precedent that it sets. After all, I don’t like expressing anger in front of people. I also expect others to have some self-control around me, even if they’re frustrated or upset. While I would never want someone to repress emotion, I wonder where the balance point is. 

As a physician, Mate’s concern is one of health. Get in the habit of hiding your emotions, and you end up bottling up the pressure, hiding the self, and paying for it down the line with stress and disease. He argues that Western culture in particular perpetuates norms that exacerbate this negative pattern. 

I’m not going to challenge that idea; the mechanism and connection between emotional repression and negative health outcomes seems clear to me. 

As a result of Mate’s thinking, you might argue that unhinged expression is the path to authenticity.

I tend to disagree. The balance is in the middle somewhere, and emotions are only part of the equation. 

Identity is Not Emotion

One of the major errors in thinking that we face today involves mistaking feelings for identity. We’ve given Descartes’ modernist idea a post-modern twist: I feel this way, therefore I am. 

Emotions are important, vital parts of our existence. In some ways, they weigh more heavily than rational thought since they are primitive motivations concerned with our survival as well as our thriving. To deny them entirely is, in a way, to deny the self, and to shirk authenticity. I do think our modern over-embrace of emotionality has come as a reaction to the dryness of modernism’s over-emphasis on rationality. We compensate for our ancestors and their hyper-stoicism, perhaps. 

But our nervous systems involve and require both the emotional and rational, and both make up parts of our humanity. I think it’s the balance of these two that makes humanity the greatest living creature. Yes, rational thought is what separates us from animals; but it is the integration of the rational and emotional that truly makes us incredible and powerful and, it turns out, healthy. 

Of course, there’s a social dimension to all of this that we’ve hinted at. What does it look like to be me in a context that expects something of me? 

How Do We Find the Self?

Carl Jung’s concept of individuation – his word for becoming one’s authentic self – answers this question quite well.

In a nutshell, individuation is integrating the underlying self with the person we are in society. Much of childhood we learn the rules and expectations of those around us, and our task is to prove ourselves competent to be a part of that community. But eventually, the deeper self – and all of its emotional motivations, whatever those are – have to come out. The mask that we put on in the world is not us, and our bodies, minds, and hearts know it.

It is the balance of the emotional and the rational that leads to a fuller self and a fuller life. This, I think, is a key aspect of authenticity. That said, the moral question of how we manifest our authentic self might be a different discussion altogether. 

But this authenticity is not expressing every single emotion that comes our way. It is appropriate expression, socioculturally and situationally adapted. It is emotion understood and manifested, processed but not spilled, validated but controlled. It is also intellectual evolution, self-control without repression, and emotionally enriched rationality. It is, finally, freedom through emotional appreciation and appropriate channelling. 

My editor pointed out that finding the true self might be considered a major task – if not the task – of maturity. 

Me, With You

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said that it is only in the company of certain people that the different parts of the self can be realized. Others, therefore, bring out the authentic self in unique and cool ways. 

If this is true, it highlights another contemporary error: we think it is only within, on our own, that we can understand or discover ourselves. It must be apart from societal input or expectations. 

Again, there’s a grain of truth here: expectations and so-called norms pressure us, and the need to fit in can lead us to hide parts of ourselves. At the same time, to think we know everything, moral or otherwise, is foolish and a recipe for chaos. Together, we are honed, refined, guided, and grounded. We also get input from others, and such input could be revelations of the self that we might otherwise be blinded to. 

Complex sociocultural questions still abound, of course. 

At the end of the day, our authenticity remains a paradox. You can’t simply act upon every emotion or urge that you have. Yet you must not deny them or let them remain repressed. They must be processed appropriately, within your cultural context. 

How exactly we process will be a little different for everybody, and far too much for this post. 

Keep feeling… And thinking about your feelings 🙂