"False-Self" is a term with clinical roots and discipleship outlets. It's kind of hard to get a quick one line explanation of what it is, but if you trust the process you'll find a piece by piece discovery of what we made that's other than what God made our self to be, which opens for you a deeper journey of surrendering your whole self to him.
"False-Self" is a term with clinical roots and discipleship outlets. It's kind of hard to get a quick one line explanation of what it is, but if you trust the process you'll find a piece by piece discovery of what we made that's other than what God made our self to be, which opens for you a deeper journey of surrendering your whole self to him.
Cammie: All right, well, we are talking about false self here on the shape of the Circle podcast. Just a light topic.
Brian: I don't even know the words coming out of your mouth. What on earth do you mean, Camie?
Cammie: Yeah, I think. Well, that's what's having to do with discipleship. That is the. That is the big question today, I think. And what is it, and how do we explain?
Brian: So we're going to kind of muddle through some of the. What is it? How do you get it down to a short, little concise description? I do think it's a useful concept. It's not just clinical terms.
Cammie: And even if it is just a clinical term, if we can use clinical knowledge and how faith practice and Jesus go into the clinical knowledge that's out there, I mean, bring all the worlds together and see what this does. Yeah. So I think if we really think about what the false self is, we were created. Does everyone have one? Yes, everyone has one, Ken.
Brian: Yeah, we all have it. We are not bad humans if we have it. Right. I think that sometimes the perception is, I've done a bad thing if I've created this false self. But generally, you are created a certain way.
Cammie: And because of sin and separation from God, we live in this world, and we've put up a protective barrier, essentially. Right. We've protected ourselves from the world, from unsafe things in our world, in our community, in our people, relationships, and that has become who we are because we've created this defense mechanism, essentially. Right. And so it's protection.
Brian: It's self preservation. It's a way to keep us safe. And the more you and I have been using this word, commonly in the discipleship and disciple making we do, it seems to be hard for people to get their head around this and how to make it a useful concept. Yeah. I think because it feels like something that they should be able to identify quickly.
Cammie: Maybe it feels like something that. Well, you talked about it, so now I should be able to go home and apply it quickly, and that's just not the case. Yeah. I think a lot of us want to know. Here is the end goal.
Brian: Here is my current status on how far off I am from the end goal. Hand me the tools to get from a to z here, where I think what this is really just opening up for people is the tools that are out there are to make you aware of the false self you're not aware of. So all the tools are, like, for diagnosing the problem, and then by the time you get to the problem, it's not this quite snap of an answer of that's wrong, this is right. So make the switch.
Cammie: I think it's just like, from here on out, I will journey at a deeper level with Jesus, not just fixing behavior, not just practicing better prayer, scripture, other disciplines. But I'll be aware of the soul issue that I carry that needs God's salvation, not the surface issue that I carry that needs to have God's salvation.
Brian: Yeah, it's kind of that idea. I think it kind of humanizes the verse of dying to yourself.
Cammie: What am I trying to say? That idea that we are self made. Like, right. Our false self is a self made self, and our true self, we're told to do right. And so our true self is who God created.
Brian: We've made this other version of ourselves out of self preservation or protection. And now it's almost like the verse about dying to yourself or the old is gone, the new has come. It's not a flip of the switch. It's a muddy wrestling match.
Cammie: Yeah, the new has come and continues to come, and you got to move with it.
Brian: And for me personally, the identifying of a false self, just make sure that as I mature in Jesus, as I grow as a disciple, that I'm opening up bigger issues, deeper issues to him. It's not having this prayer at the end of the day. It's having surrendered the core issue that needed to be prayed at the end of the day.
Cammie: Do you think anyone knows what we're talking about as we're going through? I don't know.
Brian: It's a lot. It's a lot. But I think that it's like an onion, right? I think that when you're starting the journey, it feels hard to get as deep as maybe you and I are talking because we've been doing this for a couple of years now, right? We're on maybe the other side of where people are that are listening to it.
Cammie: So, yeah, it's not necessarily that the goal is to find the false self as much as it's. The goal is to learn the tools, to dig into that place, to be able to surrender yourself.
Brian: Yeah, I think the goal is to surrender your full self to Jesus. Yes. All that is true, all that is false, all that's in process, all that's aspirational.
Cammie: By the time I started realizing that there is a difference here that I'm not fully aware of, it's worth becoming more aware of what this thing is and how Jesus saves it. And that's the most important part, is that your savior does not just save you for heaven, nor does he just save you for the fullest life here on earth. Your savior saves you from yourself.
Brian: How many days do I wake up? And that's all I want is just save me from what I'm going to do to me and from being me and the part of me that I just wish I could change. And I do not know how.
Cammie: I think one of the other. In the course of you and I pastoring this out in some people's lives, some people are frustrated that we're not quickly getting to the now, label yourself. Do you have any thoughts on why is it so hard to quickly get your snapshot of who your false self is? Let's call it false self.
Brian: Camie, she is out there doing everything wrong. And if I could just know who Camie is and what her issues. Like, why does it take so hard to name and understand what a false self is?
Cammie: Yeah, I think it's a process, right? I don't think it's something that you can just one day wake up and say, oh, that's a false self. Part of me. I think it's continually going back, starting at that outer layer of the onion and taking that to God and then letting God peel off another layer and then digging up a little bit deeper and then letting him peel that next layer. And it's a process and it's messy and it's confusing because there are times where you hit a point in that peeling. Then you're like, well, crap. That just breaks apart everything I know about life and myself and, well, if that's not okay, then why is it?
Brian: It is truly a wrestling. And I think that as a people, we want that instant. Like, here's your answer and here's how you fix it. And that's not this thing.
Cammie: I like your onion picture for a lot of reasons.
Brian: That layer, first of all, but also for the potency of an onion and the fact that you keep crying.
Cammie: Yeah, I think that's your analogy. Great. So great. I just want to back up for just 1 second to what you said.
Brian: You kind of said it in passing, but that this practice of surrender that we're talking about, it's not just your false self. We have focused a lot on the false self, but it is surrendering your entire self. It is surrendering your true self. It's surrendering all of you. And I think as humans or maybe as Christians, we want to identify the good and bad and we want to put them in camps and we want to be better people, but it is truly that surrender of your whole self, not just the false self.
Cammie: Yeah, that's good. Well, why don't you go here, too? Talk to me about the true self a little bit. Because I worry that sometimes when people hear, okay, we got to be our true self in Christ. Is this just the Christian continuation of the everyone's got to find and live their own truth? Kind of bit.
Brian: Short answer is no. The long answer is our true self is who we were made in God. Right. It's who God made us to be. It is that verse from psalm 139.
Cammie: When they talk about, you are knit in your mother's womb. I knit you in your mother's womb. I saw you before you were even created. That is your true self. And I think living into that isn't just the phrase is living your truth and being unapologetically you or whatever it is.
Brian: Living into your true self is living into who God says you are. And I think that's the difference. Right? Like, living your truth is living your truth. There's emphasis on the self made.
Cammie: That's just another false self. It's the self made version of you. Whereas living into your true self is who God calls you to.
Brian: Yeah, from a couple of different angles. I think you get some Jeremiah and David Angles of, when I was in my mother's womb, you knew me. You made me for a reason. You called me to the nations or whatever the calling is on someone's life. I think the idea of calling very much fits into understanding what a true self is. I also think the place of being loved by God is very much a true self issue. John, at the very end, writing the last gospel, I'm just fixated on this idea of God loves me. I'm the one Jesus loved. And I think we all need that journey into that deeper place of I'm the one that Jesus loves, not just when I'm not sinning, not just when I'm doing what he wants, not just when I'm fulfilling my calling. Even my sinful self is a love self by God. And in that sense, it's good. That sense. You're practicing a true self even when you're not being consistent to it, continually opening yourself to love. God is a true self issue. That's really good.
Cammie: And that kind of touches on the romanticized version of true self that we see this, well, if I just achieve the true self, then I will be free and I won't have any worries at all. I'll just be the best version of myself. But there's no truth in that. Like, living as your true self, you are still a human on an earth. Don't you feel like there's still sin, there's still all the things? And don't you feel like sometimes, like, the fashionable version of a true self just kind of, like, puts a middle finger up to the rest of the world?
Brian: Yeah. I am who I am. Yes. And don't you tell me otherwise. You can't influence. You can't get in. And for me to be me, I'm a fight the rest of you. And it's like I. I don't know. That's the me I want to. Want to find.
Cammie: Yeah. Like, I should be sure enough of it, settled enough in it, confident in having a divine footing under it so that I'm pushing off. I'm pushing with the full weight of the created being. I am, by God, not this angry image of. I'm tired of being judged, so I'm going to get a little nasty while I declare myself to everyone.
Brian: Yeah, that's good. That's really good. Okay, so we talked about what exactly is the false self? And before we pushed play on this, you had some really good examples or pictures of what it looks like because we kind of decided you can't really get it into one sentence. Right.
Cammie: Well, that was it. Someone was trying to press on. What is the one definition itself? One line. And almost frustrated with week by week amongst our disciple making at this church, we're covering new layers. It feels like that little bit like that gemstone. You got to keep turning it a little bit, and you get a new reflection and a new piece of it.
Brian: In that regard, there's no one sentence, no one picture. The false self is a mask in the sense that it's the version that we want to present to other people that we think will look best to them. But the false self is also a fig leaf. I just want to cover my vulnerability right now, my exposure. Like Adam and Eve in the garden of how do I hide this?
Cammie: I think the false self is a metric. If I can get my worth down to a quantifiable result of what I do and what I have, at least I have control over that. False self loves turning it into a metric. False self is a lie, a deception. Like going back to the Garden of Eden again. It was Satan that cast doubt on who God is to you, and then you cast doubt on who yourself is as a being. It's a turning of a truth into a lie that needs to be corrected later.
Brian: I think the false self is kind of like scales and fire on a dragon. Probably the more aggressive picture, right? But I got burned before, and so now I am going to thicken up my skin so that I can't get burned next time I can defend myself. And I also learned to breathe some fire back. Like our ruminations do this. We are just getting ready for a fight all day long. False self can be a wound. What is that pain point that's not healed? A wound that's just not done being a wound. False self is a coping mechanism. As long as this thing is there for me to make me feel better, then I know who I am and how I get back to get through another day. False self is a non-innocence, a non-childhood. Whoever you were when you didn't worry if people were mean or if you were going to be accepted, that childhood innocence version of you, whatever the opposite version of that is that you've now become, because you did learn that the world is not always a safe place for you. And so it's like I'm kind of listing all these off. I hope it creates for you an appreciation of. There's so many different angles on identifying what is this false self that is very real to your life right now? I think for a lot of us, the false self is the only real self we know. We just think it's self.
Cammie: But to take the time from all these different areas asking, where am I protecting my vulnerability? Where am I presenting what I think others want to see? Where am I trying to create a measurable self worth? Where am I leaning into coping mechanisms? Where have I lost my innocence? And I'm now just a skeptic and a critic of the world. You can start piecing all these together, like, oh, now I got all the angles on which I think I'd be able to know my false self and therefore to surrender that to the salvation of Jesus, this is not what you made, right? This is what I made of myself in the cruel world as it is. Jesus, can you save me back to what you made in the first place?
Brian: Yeah, that's really good.
Cammie: So what I'm hearing is trust the process, right? Trust the process. It's not a quick, like, I'm going to sit and journal one day and it's going to just, aha. Moment is going to come at me and I'm going to understand everything. It's layers and layers and layers and it's muddy because it's just when you peel back one layer, you might find that that actually opens up a whole different set of issues or false self patterns that you didn't even know you had under that layer.
Brian: That's really good. That's really good. Trust the process.