I had to create two false selves to survive as a child. They served me well but were at their core manipulation of everyone in my life and I had some work to do when I realised this.
A religion followed the death of my mother and my home became a hell on earth for me because I questioned then rejected then rebelled against it. By 14 I was adept at keeping my true angry self bottled in and I hid my curious and scholastic self from my father and stepmother who were brainwashed into thinking anything other than the teachings of their false prophet were of the devil. At 14 I left home and started in again working a false persona that got me couches to sleep on and older friends to take me into their homes and eventually a circle of "friends" that had no idea I was so young and in need of their aid. I never slept under a bridge, got arrested or molested, but I had no outward indicators for anyone to know the true self I was hiding.
The skills it took to first create then maintain the persona I was living would have served me well in a normal life, I could have devoted myself to learning and achieving an educated life. I could have "knuckled under" in the service and done well, I could have entered a trade and learned quickly. Instead I was a devoted drug dealer and user, I learned to play music and live the life of a 1970's borderline criminal. I fit in with the people I found that would accept me into their ranks. I learned to lie and make up stories, I became skilled at sensing how I was being perceived and acting on it in ways to maintain my facade.
As I became able to rent my own places to live and earn my own health care I could have left it all behind and gone back to school but I was too invested in the false life and I lived it far too long, not returning to school and starting a career until I was well into my twenties. Even then, it was often too easy to earn a place at the table by telling a good story or adapting to the group and my skills at being a chameleon and my ability to sense the way I was being perceived were wasted on cheap acceptance by false friends I was manipulating. Only after years of wasting energy on it and reaping the harvest of it did I start to see that I was still easily drawn into reaching for that false acceptance and it was ahabit I had to break.
It is hard. It becomes denial of self, it starts a search for a true core that is not easy, it brings a lot of self doubt and self loathing when you realise you are cheating, again and again. It requires a strong will to get a goal that is easily lost in the struggle. And it requires a clear view of the fact that all of us do it to some degree, we all try to create an outward appearance that will keep us in good graces with our group.
I have come to think of it as a superpower, this ability to remember a thousand lies and pick up on subtle clues about how they are being received. And I have accepted that I abused it. It took a lot of energy to learn these skills, it took a lot of determination to first hate myself for them then accept them as what they were: well developed tools I needed and luckily had available when I needed them, first for avoiding the brutal home I escaped from and then for surviving in the environment I found myself in outside of it.
I hope I haven't gone a different direction than the original poster of this thread had in mind, but it has helped me to know that what I was so ashamed of and hated myself for was just an unfortunate necessity I was unfortunate enough to need at the time. We are only human and our desire to be in a group for survival is a strong instinct. It can overpower our basic core beliefs and lead us into total denial of self and even take us to places where that self is lost and seems unretreivable. But knowing that we are not alone or somehow a hopeless case that doesn't deserve understanding is always a good thing so I offer my experience up to say that no one who has adapted and falsified themselves to this level is alone.
