Letting go of old ways of being

'Sometimes our life becomes a matter of simply playing the various roles for which we've been scripted... playing them out perfectly, in the right sequence, in full costume and mask.'

Sue Monk Kidd

Letting go is not only the struggle to silence those voices in our head that diminish us. It is also the struggle to disentangle ourselves from particular ways of being in the world that we have adopted in order to make life work. These ways of being are in a sense roles that we learn to play. They are patterns of thinking, feeling and relating to others that we fall back on from time to time in our effort to survive. Some of us may, for example, adopt the role of the people pleaser or conformist, always focused on meeting others' needs, wants and expectations and agreeing with others' perspectives at the expense of our own. Some of us may play the role of the workaholic, over-achiever or perfectionist, always seeking to to be the best that we can be in order to secure others' seal of approval. And some of us may choose the role of the long-suffering martyr, aways giving of ourselves unceasingly to others, no matter what the cost to ourselves.

These roles are not character traits that we are born with. They are not failings to lament or weaknesses to punish ourselves for. We do not consciously choose to adopt them and most of the time, we are unaware that we are playing them. The truth is that if we are being entirely honest with ourselves, all of us will recognise that at times in our lives when loving acceptance of who we are has been hard to come by, we have played our own unique version of one or more of these roles. In her book, 'When the Heart Waits', Sue Monk Kidd talks of a time in midlife when she came to the painful realisation that too much of her time was spent in living the life others had scripted for her rather than living out the truth of who she is. This led her to embark on the difficult process of 'naming' what she calls her 'false selves'. It was an undertaking that led her to spend many weeks 'dipping into the soil' of her life and identifying the particular roles that she had learnt to play. Amongst the false selves she discovered in herself were her people pleaser who was always trying to be what others wanted her to be, her perfectionist who sought to outshine everyone else in everything she did and her martyr whose determination to be 'the dutiful wife, sacrificing mother, and ambitious career woman' led her to lose sight of the woman she really was.

She writes of how difficult and painful this process was at times, of her struggle to come to terms with what she learnt about herself and to forgive herself for the roles she had become trapped in, both to her own and sometimes others' detriment. She speaks too, however, of how enlightening and liberating the journey was. The process of sharing her false selves with others taught her that she was not alone, that others shared aspects of her own experience. In naming the roles she had been playing, she came to know and understand them better and eventually, she found her way to embracing them. 'In naming the many patterns of our false selves', she writes, 'that's exactly what we need to do: bend down to the broken, horrible faces in ourselves and kiss each one.' She had discovered that it does not help to judge, chastise or blame ourselves, that it is important to look with compassionate eyes at our survival selves, recognising that they were simply doing what they needed to do to make life work when it felt as if the odds were stacked against them.  And she had learnt that it is only through naming and embracing our false selves in this way that we can empower ourselves to begin to let them go.

From death to rebirth

For us to make way for a new way of being to emerge, the old self - what I call our survival self - has to undergo what Monk Kidd calls 'a sacred disintegration'. It is in a sense a rite of passage, a time of transition in which this old self begins to fall away. The psychologist David Elkins uses the metaphor of death and rebirth to capture something of this experience of disintegration. He writes of having to face the death of his old self:

My old identity, my old way of life, was dying. In therapy I faced its death, mourned its passing, eulogized it where I could, conducted its funeral, and buried it.  

Facing the dying of this old self can be difficult. Even though somewhere deep within us, we know intuitively that it is stifling our growth, we may be strongly attached to our old way of being. It is so familiar and to leave it behind can feel like entering an abyss. We are no longer who we were but are not yet who we will be. At times, it can be an emotional roller coaster. Feelings of disturbance, anxiety and grief alternate with glimpses of excitement, joy and liberation as we come to understand that the gradual dying of our survival self is already making way for the birthing of a newer, larger and truer self. 

©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2025

Bibliography

David Elkins (1998) Beyond Religion. Quest Books Sue Monk Kidd (1990) When the Heart Waits: Spiritual direction for life's sacred questions. HarperOne

Kaitlyn Steele

www.insearchofsoul.co.uk

kaitlynsteele16@gmail.com