I was just watching a youtube on Jungian personas and masks. The problem, Jung said, is that people put on masks to gain love and acceptance but hide their true authentic selves. Over time, they forget who they really are and become their mask.
The video was about how to remove the mask and discover your true self, but all I kept thinking was “love and acceptance? just for putting on a mask? how can I learn this skill?”
For a book on the subject, Alice Miller’s The drama of the gifted child is all about losing yourself in masks and finding yourself in adulthood. Seems written with therapists as the target audience.
Its answer to your question: your high abilities will never truly substitute the love and acceptance you didn’t get, and insisting in it will give you depression.
I’ll have to read that again. I think I went through the entire book thinking she meant “academically” gifted.
Nope, she clarifies at the beginning. It’s emotionally gifted, as in especially talented in detecting other people’s emotions and expectations and mask accordingly.
I wasn´t a very careful reader.
But, kind of someone with sublinical autism, would it be fair or delusional for me to identify as “gifted” in that way? I think I’m pretty average at emotion detection.
Don’t get too hung up on the “super powered” meaning of gifted. It really is a curse she’s describing. If you relate to the rest of the symptoms she describes, chances are you qualify.
I’ll need to give that one a read. I’m nearing my sixth decade of life, and while I think I found love, I still have to mask to make it seem right. After all this time, I doubt any true sense of acceptance is in the cards for me.
She talks about mourning for the acceptance you didn’t get, and that freeing you to finally be yourself.
It’s not a terribly long or hard read, go ahead. But without a therapist by your side it might prove not very helpful. It’s not a self-help book, it will show you the problem with clarity, but solving it is through bespoke therapy.