Why Authenticity Is Essential For Your Health
How suppressing your true self takes a toll on your body
Over decades of research, medical researchers have found a surprising connection between many people with chronic illness: a tendency towards emotional suppression.
In his new book The Myth of Normal, physician Gabor Maté explores the link between this suppression, rooted in trauma, and its effect on our bodies.
Maté defines suppression as a “conscious inhibition of one’s own emotional expressive behavior while emotionally aroused.” This could be suppressing anger, sadness, even joy.
Various medical studies have shown that suppressing your emotions can have a negative effect on your body and leave you prone to disease and chronic conditions — everything from autoimmune disorders to migraines to cancer.
Maté has seen this connection in his own practice, as well::
“Time after time it was the ‘nice’ people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed. It struck me that these patients had a higher likelihood of cancer and poorer prognoses.”
He created his own list of personality features he sees most often present in people with chronic illness, including “an automatic and compulsive concern for the emotional needs of others, while ignoring one’s own” and “repression of healthy, self-protective aggression and anger,” among others.
Suppression Is The Result of Childhood Trauma
A tendency to suppress one’s emotions or a compulsion to put others first to one’s own detriment — these traits often come from messages we received in childhood. Maté explains, “Children often receive the message that certain parts of them are acceptable while others are not—a dichotomy that, if internalized, leads ineluctably to a split in one’s sense of self.”
In other words, there’s the self that does exist and the self that would exist, if allowed. We can think of these two selves as the inauthentic or “false self” and the authentic self.
When children are trained that only certain parts of themselves are acceptable, it leads to a clash between what Maté defines as “two essential needs: attachment and authenticity.”
We know that children need a strong sense of attachment to their caregivers, just like adults need attachment to a loving support network. But, he argues, that the need to be our whole vibrant selves is just as vital. And the clash between maintaining healthy attachment to others and being our authentic selves “is ground zero for the most widespread form of trauma in our society: namely, the ‘small-t’ trauma expressed in a disconnection from the self even in the absence of abuse or overwhelming threat.”
Suppression Is A Form of Inauthenticity
“At its most concrete and pragmatic, [authenticity] means simply this: knowing our gut feelings when they arise and honoring them.”
Dr. Gabor Maté
“To be authentic,” Maté explains,” is to be true to a sense of self arising from one’s own authentic and genuine essence, to be plugged into this inner GPS and to navigate from it.”
Think back to your childhood. Were you told you were too much? Too angry? Too effeminate? Too selfish? Over time, these messages result in a stifling of our true nature or emotional expression. They lead us away from our inner GPS.
An example of this is Ned Flanders, Homer Simpson’s quirky neighbor who touts nonsensical words and seems perpetually stupidly positive.
Remember the episode where Flanders finally snaps? He goes off on everyone, jumps in his car, and drives straight to the mental hospital. He’s incapable of expressing true emotions without it leading to a break down.
It’s fitting that Flanders’ character is written as a fundamentalist Christian — a background which often conditions individuals to stifle their true selves. It’s this strict conditioning — to not show anger, not get too excited about anything “worldly,” and so on — that leads to a lifetime of suppression.
But this conditioning can be undone.
Becoming Aware of Long-Held Trauma Can Lead to a Crisis of Self
I recently had a conversation with a friend who was coming to terms with a childhood full of religious conditioning. As she did this work, she became unnerved by the understanding that she didn’t know what aspects of her personality were natural and what were conditioned.
When you’ve been raised with such severe personality training, how do you know who you really are?
“It is sobering to realize that many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when,” Maté writes.
First of all, when you are not brought up in an environment that allowed you to be your full, true self, that is something to grieve. It’s okay to grieve who you might have been and the pain your childhood self suffered. But it’s not the end of the story.
You now have better understanding of how you were shaped, and this deepens your self-agency. Now, you get to decide what aspects of your personality you want to own.
As Maté puts it, “The onset of inauthenticity may not be a choice, but with awareness and self-compassion, authenticity can be.”
Acknowledging Suppression is Not The Same As Blaming Yourself for Being Sick
This connection between illness and suppression can be seen or lead to victim-blaming, which Maté fervently rejects. Instead, he encourages folks to “understand the bigger picture for the purposes of prevention and healing—and ultimately for the sake of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.”
Once we begin to acknowledge the a tendency to suppress our emotions or aspects of our personality, we can do something about it. We may even be able to prevent future health issues.