by Marc on September 3, 2020

The concept that a person is either authentic or inauthentic (either a liar or not) is based on the premise that people have unitary, coherent personalities. In contrast,  IFS takes the view that people’s inner worlds are made up of parts, or sub-selves, each of which has its own distinct style, motives, and beliefs. Interestingly, this idea corresponds with the idea — quite familiar in psychology — that people’s fundamental attributes (e.g, racist or not, selfish vs. generous, flexible vs. rigid) vary hugely, depending on their social context — who they’re interacting with, whether they feel safe or insecure, what they feel is expected of them. Just having a trusted friend nearby can make all the difference in how one thinks, feels and behaves.

According to IFS, different parts become activated at different times, especially when triggered by painful emotions. When you feel threatened, your scared child self comes to the surface. You become hypervigilant and/or you retreat. When you feel like you’re not good enough, the critical part takes over. You become hard and punitive, maybe angry and controlling, toward yourself (selves?) and/or others.

So maybe the idea of having a unitary personality is just wrong. In which case, there’s no such thing as being an inauthentic person. Instead….there are situations in which it becomes necessary to hide stuff, and that’s when a distinct part comes online.

Instead of seeing someone (or yourself) as inauthentic, try thinking of them as being afraid of rejection, so that the part that takes over is the hiding part — the same part that hid the remains of the cookies you shouldn’t have eaten when you were a kid and mom was in a bad mood. The urge to hide one’s bad behaviour — or unattractiveness, or neediness, or aggression — is not inauthentic. It’s authentic. It’s an authentic effort to stay safe.

(Of course there are other ways to define “authentic”. If by “authentic” or “truthful” you mean someone who should be trusted, then we enter very different conceptual territory — territory defined by social contracts or rules. But if you think that simplifies matters, think again. No one can be trusted entirely, about everything; in other words, we all have secrets. In fact, most people can be trusted about some things and not others — try asking someone about their sex life or toilet habits! — which is why we often make a distinction between people’s private worlds and public worlds. So everyone lies or at least misleads…at least sometimes or about some things. And we end up at the same place: everyone hides what they fear will lead to humiliation, denigration, or rejection. Once you see this, you see that those referred to as drug addicts aren’t more or less “authentic” than anyone else.)

People with addictions are almost constantly struggling to stay safe — safe from other people’s opinions. So it’s not surprising that they try to hide the thing that will make the world even more dangerous.

In IFS terms, the hiding part is not inauthentic. It’s authentically trying to protect you. Whether that works well or not is a different matter.