For many people I work with, there is a disconnect with public success and private reality. Persistent low self worth, relational instability, or past trauma may be disrupting your day to day. On paper everything looks great. You have a successful job in which you are a leader. You are respected by your peers and are known to be driven, capable, and composed. You may be married and have a seemingly perfect home life. You have everything together.
But underneath, you feel like you walk around with a mask on. On the outside, holding everything together. On the inside, you struggle with your self worth, feeling lost, anxious, and fearful of exposure. Getting through the day at your well respected job keeping up with your mask exhausts you. Your personal life is riddled with conflict with your loved ones that makes you feel like a failure as a partner, child, parent. You are so afraid that someone will understand you are not as perfect as you seem to them. When that armour comes off, you hate the person underneath.
The Mask Of “Having It All Together” At Work
Our society often associates success with work and financial gain. This means that for many individuals, these become the most important places in your life to show up well. At work, holding up your mask of success is a defense that shows up in a few common ways.
The Workaholic Defense: Channeling all of your energy to work allows you to distract yourself from the emotional turmoil underneath the surface. Work allows a place for you to feel seemingly adequate.
Performance As Survival: Being perfect might be a survival mechanism, especially if you grew up in a space where safety, approval, and success depended on being perfect. You may feel that performing allows you to be liked and gets you the validation you seek.
Imposter Syndrome: No matter how successful you are, your internal voice is always questioning whether you belong in the space you are in. You are fearful that someone will catch you behind the mask– the real you that is not enough. This doubt drives the way you interact both with others and yourself.
How Did The Mask Come To Be?
The mask is a sophisticated defense to keep you safe. It likely originated from a variety of factors but below are some of the reasons clients typically identify as triggers for the development of their personal mask.
Self-Reliance: The mask likely originated from the need to rely on yourself as a child or young adult and feeling like you can't trust anyone but you to keep you safe or to get things done. It may feel like if you don't get this thing done, nobody will. This kind of extreme self-reliance is often the first tenent of your mask.
Emotional Distance: Perhaps you feel a lot of anger, frustration, or numbness. This comes from a place where you never learned to express how you feel or when you did express how you feel, those feelings were met in a way that felt threatening. Now anger, frustration, and numbness are an easier place to land. These feelings are truly the tip of the iceberg in terms of the emotionality that lies underneath them like guilt, shame, and fear. In that, your mask helps to maintain your emotional distance from the world around you where feeling anything other than anger, frustration, and numbness, is too overwhelming and exposing.
Over Performance: This protector is rooted in the idea that 100% of your success is tied to income, assets, and productivity. You are defined by the things you do and therefore you fail based on the things you do. A mindset like this protects you from needing to take into account your environment, your history ,and your relationships as part of what is creating struggle in your life.
Boundary Violations: The mask of having it all together is also frequently a product of points in one's life where boundaries were crossed and so you felt the need to protect yourself by becoming self sufficient and defended. These boundary crossings may look like relational trauma, toxic masculinity environments, sexual trauma, or other forms of violation.
The Cost At Home
While the mask works in the workplace, when you come home and the armor is stripped away it leaves you feeling exhausted, lonely, angry, and overwhelmed. Many people find that this has a toll on their interpersonal relationships causing conflict in their marriages, finding that they're struggling with their children, struggling in the dating space, or finding that their friends are distancing themselves from them. The chronic emotional fatigue that is created by constantly sustaining this mask makes it really difficult to be in relationship with those around you. Furthermore, there's often a core feeling of fraudulence or a lack of self-worth in these relationships that you may feel like you don't deserve the love and care of others. It may feel like if the people around you really knew what was going on, they may not respect you.
Taking The Mask Off Safely
This is where therapy enters into the conversation. Together we can work to take the mask off slowly and safely. We can talk about how the mask came to be, how it protects you, and work to understand the fears and anxieties around letting it down. You'll practice first with me, opening up and being vulnerable in therapy, and then we will work together to take it outside of the therapy space at a pace that feels right for you. Together we can mend the relationships that have been impacted by the mask at home and help you find an identity in the workspace that feels more authentic to who you are. We can get you closer to your emotional experience in a way that is safe and not overwhelming but that allows you to be in relationship with the people around you in a non-threatening way. We will do all of this together in a space where you will be validated, challenged, directed, and understood. If you would like to explore what working on this with me in therapy might look like, I would love for you to reach out to me via my website so we can talk more!