Living a Double Life: Why Do We Hide Our True Selves?

"We have been working here for a few months now, and I still don’t know how to deal with all the secrets of Naomi that have been revealed to me. I feel like I don't know who I married.

"It doesn’t add up for me. She is such a smart, beautiful, principled young woman, a kind-hearted, beloved mother, and an outstanding manager. How could she have done such a thing for so many years?!" said Herzl in despair.

Naomi bowed her head and said nothing.

"How can you have nothing to say? Why are you silent? Explain to me why you’ve been hiding money from our account for the past 10 years? Why did you even have a bank account I didn’t know about? You transferred thousands of shekels to your brother, and I knew nothing about it. You simply managed a parallel world, and I didn’t notice anything. I am furious and disappointed! You are not the woman I loved; you are just a monster," Herzl continued angrily.

"This is really difficult, painful, unfair, and you don’t deserve such a harsh harm, nor does anyone. All trust has collapsed, and your anger is justified. I would like to check with you if you’d like us to delve deeper today and try to understand this mechanism of hiding within you, Naomi."

"I really want to; I honestly can’t explain myself to myself. I am so sorry and ashamed. I never thought a day would come when everything would blow up," said Naomi.

"You didn’t think about it, but your soul wanted and cried out for everything to explode. You couldn’t bear that gap between the good image you uphold and the broken emotional state you carry with you."

"It’s really true; this double life has been like a dark secret within me for many years, even before I met Herzl," she said.

"Let’s take a moment to look deep within you at this world where there was a kind of internal partition, and where two identities exist simultaneously: on one hand, there is Naomi the moral, beloved one, who is both an outstanding manager and a good mother and loving wife; and on the other hand, there is Naomi the immoral, who hides money and manages secret accounts.

"As you developed, succeeded, and advanced in your life, building a family and taking on managerial roles, at the same time, the immoral Naomi grew alongside you.

"In reality, Naomi, you hold the image of a perfect mother and an outstanding manager, but inside you feel like it’s truly an abnormal performance, and this gap manifested itself in the inner world you’ve built. A very large psychological gap was created between the two identities until your soul could no longer bear it, and therefore the concealments became more and more extreme until the great explosion occurred."

"How can one live like this? It sounds like a split personality! Why does she need this? I don’t understand! She didn’t even turn to me and ask for my help about her brother. Why did she hide? I would have helped gladly; I never said no to her. I always help anyone in need. I don’t understand what I did wrong!"

"She came into the relationship with this mechanism. In your specific case, it’s not your fault, and it had nothing to do with how you behaved in the relationship or didn’t behave. The mere act of hiding itself served something within her soul."

"But why? Did I ever give you the feeling that I don’t accept the things you want? I don’t understand, what’s the issue? Did I ever say something to you or convey a message like that?" he asked in great pain.

"The act of hiding itself is the whole issue. I will try to explain. The mechanism you developed, Naomi, started as a healthy defense mechanism that turned rigid and irrelevant. If we manage to understand how this mechanism was built, we can learn how to dismantle it.

"When a baby comes into the world, he is helpless. He is dependent on the caretaker for his existence. Therefore, when his mother consistently and continuously responds to his needs every time he cries, he learns through her care that he is important and precious, and that the world is a safe place, a place with the presence of someone who loves and cares for him. Thus, as he grows, he uses this inner registration as a response to feelings of frustration and distress that he will encounter on his life journey.

"When he cries and suddenly his mom doesn’t come, he tries to calm himself through imagination. Imagination becomes a resource that gives him calm and security because he has experienced it in the past. So indeed, he says to himself: 'Mom is not coming, but soon she will come and bring me a bottle because she always comes.' He can even imagine himself drinking from the bottle because of all those times she did give him food on time.

"Let’s use another example: a girl from Sderot, living in a reality where there are alarms often, repeatedly faces great fear, danger, and intense pressure. The power of imagination is one of the wonderful ways the mind develops to cope with this, to calm down.

"She may play with her doll and calm the doll as if it is the mother, or imagine that she and her doll are in some imaginary land without alarms, filled with balloons and candies.

"As much as imagination allows, the space created through play allows the girl to be simultaneously in reality and in imagination. This is called the intermediate space. This is the space of play, a space where the girl exists simultaneously in two dimensions: reality and imagination.

"The escape into imagination helps her bear the harsh reality of the alarms. Her play world with the doll gives her a sense of security. It is a world in which she controls, manages, and determines which feelings will be there and what will happen and when. In this way, she reclaims control in a place where she has none, and thus levels of anxiety and uncertainty decrease. This mechanism protects her soul, and therefore this mechanism is very precious and important.

"In your case, Naomi, something additional happened. This mechanism, which developed at a young age, turned on itself. It became no longer a defense mechanism but rather a destructive mechanism.

"Naomi, you shared with me that you became an orphan from your parents while still a toddler. This means that at a very young age, you were left alone in the world. In one moment, you were abandoned from everything familiar, stable, and known; this is a very severe trauma. At such a young age, the soul has no tools or capacity to contain, understand, and bear such a reality.

"Therefore, very quickly, a world developed where imagination became an alternative to such a harsh and painful reality.

"The solution to the pain was escape; this is a survival mechanism in the soul that had no other alternative. You didn’t learn another way to cope with frustration, pain, and difficulty. Therefore, every time pain arose, her response was escape and disconnection.

"As you grew, instead of this mechanism turning itself toward healthier and more effective coping patterns, it solidified and entrenched itself within you, becoming an integrated part of your personality."

"So? Why didn’t she keep playing with dolls? Or watch imaginary series... Why did it turn into constructing an immoral world?" asked Herzl.

"This mechanism remained, but its performance, or its way of expression, changed. In her imagination, she tried to play with dolls, but it was no longer enough. The soul was no longer satisfied with that; therefore, to feel the secret world more strongly, she gradually engaged in more and more immoral actions.

"As that imaginary promise succeeded and provided a response, once the influence wore off, and she had to deal again, she had to seek a stronger response. That’s how a moral decline occurred more and more severely.

"At first, she wandered through shopping sites without realizing it; later, it turned into small purchases without her knowing, and they kept increasing so that she could feel her hidden, personal place, which was just hers. This hidden world of hers became an addictive world. The more the pit 'received' a response, the deeper and larger it became.

"When you shared that you were little and stole things from the store, which you didn’t even use, that was already an experience and illustration that this imaginary world can be very tangible, that you can also feel it in some way in reality. This way, you developed an external and visible world where you were a good child, everyone was pleased with you, and you received love. Meanwhile, there was another world that only you knew about. The more absurd the things you hid were, the better it served your psychological purpose."

"Why? What did it give me that I did more and more immoral things?" she asked.

"Because then the inner world manages to be a world without boundaries and logic. And then everything is truly possible; the feeling of liberation receives a better response."

"This sounds like hell, living in two worlds. What’s the problem with just blowing up this world?" asked Herzl in amazement.

"She doesn’t have the tools to bear her emotional world in reality, so she constantly escapes into an imaginary world. This is something existential. It’s like a room that protects her from the emotions that the world brings simply by existing. These are normal feelings like frustration, fear, anger, and pain, but for her, they are feelings that are impossible to bear."

"Finally, I managed to understand something I couldn’t explain to myself. I feel so lost; how can we even treat this?" Naomi asked in pain and despair.

"It’s important first to stand firmly against this mechanism of concealment in detail and see how it has served you throughout your life until today. We’ll gradually learn how to cope in a healthier way with emotions. How to develop a sense of presence in the inner world within you so that you no longer need to hide from yourself."

"I admit, it really scares me to confront myself truly."

Hanna Dayan [email protected]

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