How Do You Hide from Yourself?
Hint: You do it all the time.
We all hide in one way or another.
But here in the United States and most of the developed world, we’re not hiding from lions and tigers and bears anymore. We’re not hiding from other tribes coming to take our land. The landscape of threats has altered but the survival mechanism of our brain remains hardwired and could use some updates. Physical threats have been supplanted by mental threats and these are manifested as stress, anxiety, and other mental health problems.
Modern Hiding.
In this new world of abundance, instant gratification, constant connection, and virtual identities, anxiety and other mental health problems are becoming the norm, whether you’re a couch potato or a workaholic. 1 in 5 adults experiences some form of mental illness in a given year, 40% of working adults experience “persistent stress,” or “excessive anxiety” that affects their work and well being, and 2018 showed a 39% increase in anxiety among Americans from just one year prior, up still from 36% between 2016 and 2017. This is staggering.
We now hide from friendlies and we now hide from ourselves. We engage in what I’m calling “modern hiding”- the act of doing or using something to avoid what it is you really need to do. It’s basically hiding in the open or hiding through activities, substances, or relationships. It’s using avoidance to subvert anxiety, but unfortunately, avoidance only prolongs and feeds the problem.
Sure, people have avoided their own needs and callings since the dawn of mankind but we now have more ways to escape than ever, whether it’s one-click shopping, binge streaming, mindless scrolling, gaming, VR, working remotely, in addition to the more traditional routes of substance abuse and codependency. There are countless ways to avoid yourself and you’ll probably do it today if you haven’t already.
Everybody does this and sometimes it’s necessary, although I’d call “necessary hiding” retreating or recreating. Meaning, just because you watched a Netflix show last night doesn’t necessarily mean you’re hiding from yourself. You may have just worked all day and that was a healthy way to unwind. However, if you’re binging Netflix daily or weekly, midday, with all the curtains drawn on a regular basis, well… you’re hiding. Recreating or retreating becomes “self-hiding” when it is a coping mechanism to deal with a lack of self-worth or appreciation, a lack of self-care, without any intention to “come out,” instead of a brief reprieve from daily life.
Self-care is not easy. It’s not something we’re really taught in school or even by most parents. I can’t speak from the female perspective, but as a male, we’re definitely taught, albeit indirectly and socially, that expressing or acting on a need for self-love is a sign of weakness.
There are many forms of self-care, and we all (hopefully) do it some, but we can all use more. The self is constantly shifting and adapting; what you need today may be different from tomorrow. You may need more today than tomorrow. Plus, everyone is different so what you need will likely be different than what someone else needs.
Anecdote: What I needed and what was causing me to hide.
For me, self-love or self-care has most recently meant learning when and how to be vulnerable with myself and others. Vulnerability is not cool in the traditional hetero-male social scene (or most scenes?), and it’s something I’ve avoided (hidden from) for years and had to work on quite a bit. The inability to acknowledge, express, or act on the need for self-care could easily be defined as hiding from your own feelings and needs. It took me many years to acknowledge I wasn’t providing myself adequate emotional care, especially since I didn’t even realize I needed it. I had absolutely no idea. It was my blind spot. I thought I was strong and fine, clever and entertaining. Little did I know I had been ignoring an important side of myself, and hiding from it, for perhaps decades.
The idea that I might need to practice vulnerability as a form of self-care was first brought to my attention when I was 33 during a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with an experienced yoga teacher named Craig. In short, he took my yoga class, then gave me honest, direct, and sensitive feedback in front of 40 other advanced yoga teachers. It was terrifyingly honest, real, and revealing, and a pivotal moment in my career as a yoga teacher and in my adult life. While I learned a good bit on some of my teaching patterns, what I really walked away with was the idea that I could be more vulnerable, that this would not only make me a better teacher but a better human.
However, I have to say, it is sad that this sort of thing required a “once-in-a-life-time” experience, especially for someone like me who is already on the “open-minded” end of the spectrum, a yoga teacher, small business owner, and musician, who studied cultural anthropology and educational psychology, and yet this was the case. I guess the darkest place in the room really is under the lamp…
While this session did reveal the idea and importance of vulnerability as a practice, I had no idea what that meant. It was terrifying. It was paradoxical and counterintuitive to me. I thought to myself things like, “why on earth would I want to be vulnerable? If I’m vulnerable, I will get hurt. People will take advantage of me. Vulnerability is a liability. It is a weakness. It is not a good quality. Vulnerability is for people who are not strong and don’t know how to protect themselves.” Nevertheless, I knew that I had some “unlearning” to do, that Craig was right, that I needed to practice being vulnerable, I just didn’t understand why, what that meant, or how to do it!
So naturally, and this is not to discourage anyone from self-discovery or vulnerability, I overdid it. Because I lacked proper coaching in this department, or didn’t do enough reading, or just because I’m stubborn and had to learn the hard way, I ended up going way too far in the other direction, allowing an emotionally manipulative person into my life, in a very serious way, through the entry point of unchecked vulnerability, made worse by an isolated work environment, and my own self-doubt.
I mention this because it was real and it ended up being my path. I made mistakes and you’re going to make mistakes. We all have our paths. This was my path and I fumbled but recovered. I learned the importance of trusting myself, something I had lost somewhere along the way, and I learned especially how self-doubt does not mix well with vulnerability. This may be why many of us choose to hide instead. It’s hard to be both confident and vulnerable, and yet, this is the way.
How I hid and how you hide.
I hid from my vulnerability and self-trust for years and I was really good at it. I hid in all kinds of ways, drinking, smoking, non-commitment, adventure, volunteering, service, to name a few. I chalked it all up to being a musician or a rebel or unique. It never occurred to me that I needed to “go deep” with myself, that I might be running from something instead of towards something. It never occurred to me to ask myself questions like: What do you really want? What do you really need? What is missing from your life? Why is it missing? What are you ignoring? Why are you making the choices you’re making? Could you be wrong? What consequences will your actions have? Short term? Long term? How are you hiding from yourself? And, of course not, right? I thought I was fine and happy.
A more realistic gateway to self-discovery might have been the more “real” versions of these questions for me, questions based on various behaviors in which I engaged throughout my adult life such as: “Why do you drink alcohol?” “Why do you have trouble with relationships or committing to a relationship?” “Why do you smoke?” “Why do you have trouble settling down in one city?” “Why do you play music?” “Why are you not making lots of money?” “Why do you never cry?” “Why can’t you commit to a plan or project for longer than two years?” “Why do you need other people to make you feel better? Why do you have a hard time being alone?” These kinds of cognitive-behavioral questions can help outline patterns of hiding but require honesty and intuition.
For you, reader, these questions might be different but the point is to find questions that help you learn how you hide. Beware of your first response. It’s easy to make up a quick, defensive, or dismissive response and this will likely be your go-to. Be curious instead. I suggest picking a few of the questions in the paragraph below (or from mine above) that might be relevant to you, writing them down and spending a minimum of 2 minutes on each question, answering them with pen and paper. This will get you closer to your truth. If you’re honest, there’s no wrong answer. Trust yourself.
Some questions to ask:
Why do you overeat or eat junk food?
Why do you binge watch TV?
Why do you get angry so often?
Why do you refuse to try new things?
Why are you obsessed with sex or watch porn?
Why do you have a hard time being alone?
Why do you have trouble letting others be in charge?
Why do you work 80 hours a week?
Why do you run even though you have terrible knees?
Why do you smoke pot every day?
Why do you never cook for yourself?
Why do you love your illness?
Why do you work at the job you hate?
Why do you need so much makeup?
Why do you keep checking your phone?
Again, there’s no wrong answer. Just answer honestly and see what happens.
The truth is there are lots of ways to hide from ourselves or our emotions or our true needs: Drinking, smoking, eating, exercising, sex, clothes, shopping/consuming, watching movies/tv/entertainment, working, socializing, sleeping, are just a few. Heck, even slouching is evidence of hiding. Additionally, and perhaps obviously, these are not necessarily ways to hide. You can engage in all of these things in a healthy way that gives you what you need, as mentioned above. There’s a difference between hiding and retreating, it’s just that any of these can easily go south…
True needs are those based in and around love, like kindness, closeness, kinship, friendliness, patience, calm, gratitude, generosity, nutrition, affection, care, respect, honesty, truth, balance, as well as the essentials: security and safety, clothing, a home, healthy food, a healthy body/lifestyle, a reliable income, community, and a purpose.
Modern hiding is a natural reaction to a lack of these basic needs, an auxiliary, and ultimately ineffective effort to cope with a lack of self-worth.
Protection vs Hiding
There are times when you must protect. Protection is a conscious response to a lack of self-worth, internal or external trauma, conflict, or imbalance. It is essential you protect yourself from attacks of all kinds, be them in the form of physical or emotional violence, UV rays from the sun, or from your own self-doubt. Like hiding, sometimes you must protect yourself in order to survive. Protection is the opposite of vulnerability. However, like anything else, it can be overdone. For me, for a while, I was in constant protection mode. You don’t need to protect all the time. You’re not always at war or even in danger, in fact, you’re probably often not. Yet due to some unrecognized issue, you may have developed protection as your default. If you continue to protect, to assume the position of full-time “survival mode” your protection can become calcified and eventually over-protecting becomes hiding from your own vulnerability. Protection works best only as needed.
The Value of Vulnerability (or whatever you’re hiding from).
I was hiding from the inability to be responsibly vulnerable. But why be vulnerable then? I never really answered this above. For me, vulnerability has become a way to release my ego and truly empathize with others as well as allow myself to acknowledge that I have struggles and needs. Otherwise, I’m hiding, I’m being inauthentic, I’m pretending everything is gravy all the time, and I’m ignoring a crucial part of myself. It’s ok and normal to go through moments of sadness, grief, despair, weakness, fragility, or surrender because that is part of living fully. To deny these emotions or qualities is to deny the full range of the human experience. If you can’t be vulnerable, it means you don’t have anyone you can trust. If you don’t have anyone you can trust, you isolate yourself and begin some sort of self-calcification or cannibalization.
At the same time, caveat, you must trust yourself, your intuition, you must have what Ana Forrest calls a “warrior’s heart.” You can’t just empathize willy nilly with everyone and subvert your own needs nor can you calcify your heart and declare you’re tougher than everyone and emotions in general; these are both dangerous. The warrior’s heart opens and closes with control and intention, and as needed. You give love when you can and whenever you can. You protect your own love, your self-love, whenever you must. Your intuition will tell you which is which.
Moving Forward
I realize this is a pretty heavy blog post. But wait it gets worse… or better ;)
The road is long. You’re not going to figure this out in your next yoga class or just from answering a few of the questions above. You may fit some of it together and those answers may change in a couple of years. This sort of self-care, addressing your true needs, finding the courage to step out of your patterns of hiding, whatever they may be, requires constant work and reflection. What worked yesterday may not work today.
I recommend signing onto a process, a methodology, beginning a practice, and seeing where it takes you. Everyone is different, so you do you, but do something.
It might be starting a regular yoga practice, meditating every day for a month, committing to seeing a therapist for 7 sessions, going to church for 3 months, or who knows? You know. Great accomplishments don’t happen all at once but are rather the result of persistent effort in the form of small victories. The important thing is that you try something and try it several times before making a reactionary judgment on whether or not it is working. Participate and Observe. See what works. Choose something and choose a set number of days or classes or sessions that you can and will commit to attending or doing. I recommend a minimum of 3 of anything. You’re trying to find out what makes you feel more like you, what makes you feel alive. Three trips to the gym won’t kill you.
Additionally, you’ll know an effective methodology because, usually, it will be hard or uncomfortable at first. This type of work, the work of self-discovery, requires patience and an adjustment period. A methodology (practice) is a methodology because it works over time. We don’t exist in a vacuum and it takes consistent effort to establish new patterns of behavior and undo years of past patterning.
Come out, come out, where ever you are. The world needs your talent, your gift, your skill, your magic, your effort, but mostly, the world just needs you.
