Where did the time go? I was thinking this blog post on The I’m Right Mask would be published in July! It’s all good, I detoured a little bit in August but am back at it. It has been an amazing summer. I traveled, laid by the ocean, played in the lakes, hung out with my incredible group of friends, and enjoyed lovely times with my family. Now we are heading towards the beautiful season of fall and with it comes a bit more structure and continuity.
For this blog, I want to focus on The Mask of The People Pleaser. I believe the People Pleaser is one of the most common masks and very easy to relate to. It was a mask I wore during a period in my life when I was questioning my talents and value with my job.
Do you remember the first time you felt like you were something different than love? The time that your perfect vision of yourself came crashing down and you realized that someone or something was telling you that you are not perfect?
I remember feeling so confident as a little girl and loving myself completely. That came crashing down at age 4 when I was being made fun of on the playground by a group of children. It was the first time I doubted myself and wondered what was wrong with me.
We all have walked down a path with different circumstances and situations that have affected who we are. I call it my own personal story or “personal drama”. We can use our personal drama as a way to learn and grow or use it as a way to stay stuck, hide and create more of the same. We tend to hide when we feel embarrassed, ashamed or are afraid of judgment from others. One way we learn to hide is by wearing an emotional mask of what we want the world to see (If you haven’t read the first blog in this series, stop here and check it out). In this blog, I am going to focus on the “Poor Me” mask. I am sure most of us have worn this mask before at times and some of us love to hide in this mask and wear it continually.
In our day to day lives, we all wear masks or personas we project in the world. We wear them to be fun, for protection, and we wear them to hide parts of ourselves. Our masks start to take form at a young age due to the circumstances we faced growing up and the beliefs we formed about ourselves or beliefs imposed on us by others.
