The Emergence of the Manufactured Self
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
Mutual parent-child frustration results when a child is raised by parents who are out of sync with her, or their own, emotional and developmental needs. As a result, the child is repeatedly experiencing her parents’ frustration with her. Children strive to pursue the normal, integrative, connective relationships that its blossoming awareness and physicality push it toward in the connective, exploratory celebration of life that childhood is. If the parents are not able to self-regulate and adapt to the child’s developing milestones, the child suddenly has the experience of their mother attacking them, subtly through withdrawal, simple facial gestures, embodied stress or overt aggression.
The child is dependent upon her mother for sustenance. To have her source of sustenance attack her, distance herself from her, or even stress out as she nurses, cuddles or interacts with her has direct repercussions on the infant’s development. To the extent that the mother experiences the child’s normal developmental expression as “wrong” and in need of “correction,” the child’s natural development is interrupted.
The child, instead of growing out of its inner, connective, erotic, hedonic engagement with the world, now finds itself in the strange position of having to “behave.” Instead of simply engaging, it now has to modulate its behavior so as to not provoke parents who are easily-triggered and stressed out by even its most developmentally-normal behaviors. Fear, anger and grief arise spontaneously as the child’s push into its full development is co-opted and stifled in his family dynamic. We call this “the terrible twos,” “adolescent rebellion,” and a whole host of labels that pathologize or normalize our children’s adaptation to growing up with stressed out, survival oriented humans. The child promptly learns that his expressions of fear, anger, grief and frustration only add to his parents’ stress as well as his own. Now even feeling is cut off. Life becomes an idea. The turmoil churns below the surface.
What this leads to is what I call the creation of a “Manufactured Self” or False Self. This is the product of role reversal where, instead of the parent protecting and loving the child unconditionally while stimulating its maximal, connective development and showing him how to integrate his developmental outbursts, the child has to negotiate, even coddle, the parents’ sensibilities so as to become lovable. The creation of this False Self affords the child protection from her parents’ withdrawal of love and decreases the virulence of the parents’ attacks. Instead of arising spontaneously the self now becomes a strategy, an artifice.
We become conditioned to inauthenticity, as the authorship of our life no longer resides within us, no longer arises out of our spontaneous expression of billions of years of evolving the human continuum. We adopt a fear-based adaptation to life amongst alienated humans, where threat arises from those we are closest to.
The natural evolution of humans is hedonic, rooted in the eroticism of life itself. As humans become increasingly alienated from their natural developmental continuum, the flourishing of the growing, connective self is supplanted by a lesser, restricted, stifled expression. In the expression of the True Self, nurtured through connection, the relation of the individual to the rest of the world is naturally complex, intelligent, multi-faceted and grows into wisdom. In the expression of the False Self, the individual becomes increasingly isolated within the shell of their skin and programmed thinking. The False Self operates out of a hyper-vigilance that truly precludes, while simulating, intimacy. Connection, rather than being full and joyful, is mediated and negotiated by presenting a manufactured self to society.
The individual is not fulfilled by this pseudo-self and, for that matter, self-alienated. As his skill at adapting to a poorly-adapted way of life increases, he is increasingly driven to “find himself.” The bulk of relationships become rooted in emotional commerce, commercial utility, and restrictive conformity rather than the spontaneous exchanges that are the hallmark of healthy societies. The search for intimacy is frustrated.
Where the opportunity for spontaneity arises, the individual is so disconnected to true, spontaneous desire and feeling, that efforts at spontaneity are awkward and rapidly provoke negative feedback from peers.
©2009 Olivier “O.T.” Tryba
Feel free to share the link and quotes with attribution and link back to this site. Thank you!
Tags: Authenticity, Celebration, Child Development, Children, Connection, Continuum, Developmental Milestones, Ego, Eroticism, Inauthenticity, Manufactured Self, Pseudo-Self
10 Responses to “The Emergence of the Manufactured Self”
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September 19th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Olivier,
How does this relate to Deep Inner Freedom and our profound relationship to Self? It sounds a bit deterministic, as if we are to be constantly overcoming or defending our mothers in this continuum of life. Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can create a new ending. If I have thoughts of my mother as anything but well-intentioned and a continuum of her mystery of being, i am deeply, deeply sad. She’s been dead 15 years now and I still find it sad that she failed to find any joy in being a woman or mother. I have chosen to learn to mother my self - as this is the primary relationship - Self. I had believed the story that I am an accident of the rhythm method of birth control and unwanted and was a bother when spontaneous. I still experience doubts when told it’s ok to just be ….. be what and for whom? i ask my self.
In my experience, selfish and self-centered are not honored ideas, but words thrown at me like a knife when I don’t do others bidding or behave in a manner they consider inappropriate. It’s pathetic to think of this story as “who I am”, yet neurologically what other choice do “i” have? I want deep connection to all of life, but most often i want to be held and stroked and embraced by it. My very survival depends on that embrace, not money, fame, or others. In a sense aren’t we truly alone? I’m feeling vulnerable and afraid, but i’m going to send this anyway. I appreciate your willingness to engage in conversations of connection. Truly, Pat
September 20th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Dear Pat,
Thank you for responding, once again, so open-heartedly. In my first post, on Freedom, (http://deepfreedomnow.com/2009/08/26/freedom-is-a-relationship-to-self/) I cover how we often think of Freedom as Freedom-From, rather than Freedom-For. In this light, life becomes an avoidance strategy that we cosmetize as “self-improvement.”
Yes, it DOES seem deterministic, doesn’t it? And that’s precisely the point. Neurological adaptation and the way in which we as children literally embody our world is profound and largely immune to most of the self-help, self-improvement methods out there which are working on mental models of consciousness, models that simply reconfigure the Manufactured Self, but don’t address the Embodied Intelligence.
The truth is, we operate out of a Manufactured Self in this culture. That’s not wrong. If we DON’T do that, then we’ll be drugged, institutionalized or worse. We experience that Manufactured Self as “me.” An isolate. A container. A living object that we are sure we “know” and yet which is somehow uncomfortable.
The work of Deep Freedom, Deep Connection starts with relaxing the fantasy of escape, of change and, most especially, of doing another thing TO yourself (as object, which you are NOT) or TO others, no matter how good or noble you may come off, and validating, for the first time, your experience, right now, not as something to be ashamed of, not as something to “fix,” not as something to overcome, but as something to welcome in its sacredness - i.e. respecting its totality. So, yes, the spiritual path is one of mothering and fathering This Mystery of Being that is arising in the dynamic you call “me.”
So, in your beautiful response, you say of your mother,
“I still find it sad that she failed to find any joy in being a woman or mother. I have chosen to learn to mother my self - as this is the primary relationship - Self. I had believed the story that I am an accident of the rhythm method of birth control and unwanted and was a bother when spontaneous. I still experience doubts when told it’s ok to just be ….. be what and for whom? i ask my self.”
Yes, Pat, this is profound, my friend. It is “your” experience. It is also the nurturance that shaped you, that brought you into what I call an “Embodied Premise” of welcome or unwelcome in the world. And your mother couldn’t meet you in your spontaneity, in your Brilliance, just as she was probably never met in hers, but she did the best she could. She loved you the best she knew how. Nevertheless, children KNOW deeply, existentially, bodily, whether their world knows how to welcome them or not. We Embody that welcome.
As I say, “The welcome we receive, upon arriving amongst our people, is the welcome we inhabit - until we welcome ourselves completely.”
And our neurology, our intelligences that are NOT confined to the head, but that reside in every cell of our Being, are DESIGNED for connection. But the disconnection that allows us, as a culture, to fly across space yet continue to defecate in our water is NOT a mental concept. We KNOW that we are polluting the very essence of what sustains us. We’ve all heard it. We all know it. But we do not treat the world differently than we treat ourselves, because they are NOT separate. Only the Manufactured/Fictional Self is separate.
When we grow up in a disconnective culture that uses shame and guilt to suppress feeling, we are impregnated with all kinds of commands from alienated culture. “Honor thy father and mother” is a command that already speaks of emotion as behavior. I have had the good fortune to live around people whose love, tenderness and joy in the presence of their parents was so full and complete that, if you said to them “Honor thy father and mother” they’d look at you as if you’d gone completely bonkers. Why would we say such a thing as a command? Because honor is not arising spontaneously. Now we are manufacturing it, as an artifact, as an experience that we are “making,” as another artifice of the Manufactured Self.
And Yes, there are a thousand ways to feel better. We have a whole arsenal of anesthetics - drugs, ideas, philosophies, methods, etc. They won’t allow us to Embody Welcome, but they’ll give us relief from the underlying feeling. This is not the work here.
The work of Deep Freedom FOR Deep Connection is getting better at feeling, starting at a very basic level, and then being able to FEEL beyond the Imaginary Self and in Connection with the Natural, Hedonic, Connective Arising of Being HERE.
This is the end to justifying your presence. When you feel awkward & someone says you’re ’selfish,’ you dare to feel awkward now, to relish the feeling, to invite it in. It’s the end to justifying why you at times feel sadness, even profound grief, anger, fear. All of these censored emotions are part of our medicine as human beings. They HEAL when we quit resisting them and, when we go into the EXPERIENCE of fear, anger and grief, the forbidden emotions, what we discover is NOT fear, anger, grief, what we discover is medicine; living, healing mother-father medicine, arising from our own Being. And we learn, as you say so beautifully, that the medicine that we have been waiting for, for our entire lives, for “deep connection to all of life, but most often i want to be held and stroked and embraced by it” is right here. It is a relationship to self. You can hold, stroke and embrace the totality of your experience.
It is daring to imagine that the person who shows up in front of our mirror is Truly unknown, and the invitation of Life is to embrace her experience, to embrace the appropriateness of ALL of her experience; how she has survived by negotiating a disconnected people, how she CAN connect and KNOW herself as The ONE - beyond imaginings, beyond escapes, beyond fantasies, beyond names, beyond conclusions.
And when we reconnect, when we venture beyond the confines of the manufactured self, the self as idea, as object, then we begin to see truly that we are not just sensing a micro-individuated experience, Love. Then we begin to understand that the mother-daughter wound you carry is not just “yours.” In connection we begin to understand that you could travel that wound ancestrally in your lineage. You could travel that wound horizontally through culture. And it is easy to try to distance ourselves from that wound - to believe that somehow we can walk away from it- and forget that when we walk away, we leave a piece of ourselves behind WITH it: our Innocence!
So as you validate your sadness along with your joy, then at last that sacred Sadness is finally acknowledged, not only in you, but in the world that you are - ALL of it. And the Beingness that brought that sacred sadness to you as your mother is acknowledged in Its wholeness.
This is where we are as a civilization, Pat. We are a civilization that is destroying Life at every turn and trying a thousand different ways to avoid feeling the sadness. We do not need to change. Our efforts to change is what tears the world asunder. Our solutions generate a whole host of new problems because they come from the same place of “performing,” or “behaving” out of disconnection.
We are invited to come into Deep Freedom For and Deep Connection With the Totality of Our Experience. Then a greater Knowing than cogitation arises, and we allow Her to make medicine inside of us, with ALL of us.
In Deep Freedom & Deep Connection FOR Being,
O.T.
September 20th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Olivier,
I am moved to tears and sighing a deep breath after reading this. Words cannot begin to express my gratitude.
P.J.S.
September 22nd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Wise words indeed!
I know what you mean about the manufactured self and the lack of spontaneous uprising….even though I know in my heart and mind this truth…. and I have quite strong desires to ‘be spontaneous’……I still moniter myself…hold back and then it all comes blurting out in some inappropriate kind of a way…..or it all just happens on some other level in my imagination and I watch it all pass by in my mind……either way……..not very satisfying!
I actually think this is my authentic self’s way of being pure……because I simply don’t want to ‘manufacture’ anything…..it has to be REAL!!
maybe 30 days……no……..make it 7 days……..in the desert are in store!
R
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Thanks Rachael for your comments. Yes, we monitor ourselves, hold ourselves back, then seek to be spontaneous. Where there is seeking there is also refusal. Not good. Not bad. Just so. Aside from “desiring to be spontaneous,” something is here. Something is arising in this Beingness - and we are conditioned to “fix” it; this is the relationship to self that is imprinted by much of Western child-rearing - so the child learns to anticipate the parent and self-correct and NOT self-connect. As we become adult, we learn fancier ways, methods, etc. of self-correcting, we can even self-correct “spontaneously,” still largely oblivious to what is arising here, all-on-its-own. This is the beauty of life.
The modality of the synthetic self is thought. But you are not a thought. We have a thousand ideas about ourselves and the world. Yet we are not thought, nor is the world. Arising is here. Being is here, spontaneously. Whether we think or try to not think, whether we try to be controlled or spontaneous, being is arising here with a grace and perfection that surpasses any effort on our part and any perceived awkwardness.
We can live our lives with perception largely confined to the neural loops in our heads that we have been conditioned to believe are us, largely oblivious to our already-alive and functioning embodied intelligences AND we can begin to be curious about these neural loops and what lays beyond. This is the adventure in Deep Freedom Now - it is Freedom FOR this. ALL of it. It is Freedom FOR Connection. It is an adventure beyond correction.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:47 am
There is more then just the example of parent(s) being at “fault” for a manufactured self.
The society we live in is structured in creating this false-self.
I do not view this right or wrong. It just is what it is.
Namaste’
October 13th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Hello Giavanna,
Thanks for taking the time to visit and comment.
Agreed, there is no one at “fault,” this is a survival mechanism in disconnective culture which replicates itself at all levels of social functioning. It’s neither right nor wrong - simply a cultural form that has profound impact at all levels of life. It is what is. When we begin to embrace what is then we can reconnect to our experience beyond the manufactured self, without a need to get rid of it or pursue the myriad forms of self-violence that proliferate under the label of self-improvement.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Grazie for your reply. Playing Blame-Game is Ego with monkey chatter.
Si we are on the same page of LOVE NOW.
IN JOY
Gia
Namaste’
October 13th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Bella Giavanna,
Grazie per tu risposta sulli paggio del Amore Ora!
But please, Please, PLEASE consider not blaming the monkeys for all the chatter on the top shelf! Okay? ; )
Grazie mille di cuore!
Olivier
July 10th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
This for me is a great summary and covers most of the major “hooks or points” of exploration regards our general modern society, and is a helpful “negative/inverse” pointer towards experiencing freedom…
It is a little like rewinding back through the self-made prison and going “ah, I see, that is how it was done, wild!”
My thought all the way through reading his was; if people could take this “rightly”, that is, non reactively, and simply listen to the content of it, be stimulated by it however they are, then it and similar “pointers” by other “plain seers” would be the perfect thing to read out on the daily news, say for thirty days, as an experiment, to gently yet clearly strike a chord of awareness, an antidote to blame, self delusion, and the general madness that is generally expressed and used to gain the people’s attention…
Thanks Olivier!