Who's In Charge (Our False Self Or Our True Self)? Part 1.

Can laughing at our fear help us to find joy?

Author’s note: I apologize for sending this one out two days late. I got fairly sick Thursday and Friday, and the draft just wasn’t coming out right. Ultimately I decided that this is an important topic, and I would rather send you all my best thoughts even if they were a few days later rather than send out something that was only halfway there.

Every spiritual tradition worth its salt recognizes that we humans are composed of two selves. Different spiritual traditions call these two selves different things. The Ego and the Spirit (Ekhart Tolle). The Flesh and the Spirit (or God) (Christianity). Self 1 and Self 2 (Timothy Gallway, and my spiritual mentors at The Undaunted Man). The Lower Self and the Higher Self.

I'm a huge fan of my friend Jamie Winship, and so I use his terminology of the False Self and the True Self. But what we call each part of ourselves doesn't really matter. Suffice to say that there's a part of us that is defined by fear, guilt, shame, and anger; and another part of us that is defined by peace, love, joy, and an infinite sense of connection.

I think all of us want to spend more time in that second self. Whether you call it a connection to God or just a deeper sense of experiential joy and love and peace, we all realize that our lives would be better if we spent more time in that self.

But how do we do it? It's not like flicking on a light switch. We can't just say, "I'm done living out of fear, guilt, shame, and anger; and from now on I'm only going to live a live characterized by joy and peace and love and connection" and have that stick in the long-term (or maybe you can. I can't). Instead, I think of it like that old story about two wolves.

"An old Cherokee was teaching his grandson about life. 'A fight is going on inside me,' he said to the boy. 'It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.' He continued, 'The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.'

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, 'Which wolf will win?' 

The old Cherokee simply replied, 'The one you feed.'"

(There are many versions of this story. This one comes from my friend Alexandria Hudson's amazing book The Soul of Civility). 

Learning to live out of our True Self rather than our False Self is like feeding the right wolf. We can't just feed it once—we have to feed it day after day. It's a practice.

So how do we do that?

That's the question we'll try to (partially) answer in this new series. I'm by no means an expert on living out of my True Self, but I'll be exploring different lessons I've learned that have helped me to go from a life characterized by suicidal depression and endless rage to one characterized by a good amount of love, peace, joy, and connection on a day-to-day basis. I'll also be working to solicit guest posts from spiritual and psychological experts whom I respect, including my two spiritual mentors; so that we can learn from their insights.

Each post in the series will cover 1-2 tips that I think we can use to live more out of our True Self and less out of our False Self.

Tip #1: Laughter

I think laughing at our False Self is an incredibly underrated tool for helping us live more out of our True Self. Two stories from my past illustrate why I think this.

Story #1: In 2020, all the abuse that I dealt with when I was younger got unrepressed at once, and my mental landscape went to hell. I became terrified of EVERYTHING. A partial list of the things that terrified me included: getting out of bed in the morning, work, exercise, dating, intimacy, spiders, water, and going to bed.

I was so scared of work that I would find myself putting it off until 10pm at night. One night I was on a call with a friend who was pursuing a PhD in clinical psychology. I told him that I was prolonging our call because I was terrified of starting work for the day. He asked me how much work I had to do. I responded that it was about twenty minutes.

He told me he thought I could do twenty minutes.

"But what if it's TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES!?" I wailed.

At that point, my friend did me a favor so enormous that it still stands out clearly even four years later: he burst out laughing.

After an incredulous moment, I joined in. It really was pretty silly, I realized. Here I was, a grown man who had meditated in a swimsuit during snowstorms and had run up mountains, and I was paralyzed with fear at the prospect of…what? Five minutes of messing with Excel? It was absurd.

That laughter broke the fear's back for a few precious moments.

Here's how Viktor Frankl, the legendary psychologist who survived Auschwitz internment camp and later founded a school of psychotherapy, describes the value of humor for the prisoners in the camp: "Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds."

So why does laughter work? And how can a regular habit of laughing at our False Selves help us to live more in line with our True Self? I think there are two reasons.

First, laughter gets us some distance from our False Self. I think one of the most dangerous things we can do is identify with our False Self. When we identify with it, all of the cognitive distortions that it trades in become real to us. The fear of trivialities that can grip us, each time lying to us and saying that this time the danger is real; the petty angers we have towards people who we think wronged us, but who often have no idea that we're nursing a grudge or why; the shame and guilt that whispers in our ear and tells us that we should feel awful about ourselves because of what our parents said to us or because of mistakes we made decades ago; all become entrenched in our thinking. They become dominant; and they start to become us. When we identify with our False Self, we start to lose any sense of distinction between our cognitive distortions and who we truly are.

But when we laugh at our False Self, we can get some distance from these cognitive distortions. We can recognize them as ridiculous, and we can stop identifying with them. We can create that first crack of daylight between our False Self and our actual perception of the world…and in that crack we can find joy and peace.

To be clear, I'm not saying that these negative emotions (fear, guilt, anger, and shame) can never be accurate indicators of the world. Sometimes something really is dangerous. Sometimes someone truly has wronged us, and a basic respect for our own happiness says that we should stand up to them—or at least impose some limits on the relationship. Sometimes we truly have done something terrible, and we should feel guilty or ashamed—at least, for as long as it takes for us to change our character so that we wouldn't make the same decision again. But in my experience, most of the fear, guilt, anger, and shame that we feel isn't necessary. It's often trivialities dressed up by our False Self into something nightmarish, and we take these emotions far more seriously than we really should. Laughing at our False Self can help us to find a healthier balance.

I think the second benefit of laughter is that it can show us the truth about our False Self, our True Self, and which one is really in charge.

Story #2: I struggled with suicidal ideation for over a decade; and a few years ago, things got worse and I spent two weeks on active suicide watch. I remember breaking down crying in front of my men's group one night—we were due to meet again in two weeks, and I confessed that unless I got help I wasn't sure if I would be there to meet them. I got the help I needed, but for months afterwards those two weeks haunted me. My brain had tried to kill me. Worse—far worse—it had almost succeeded.

That's the stuff of which existential crises are born. I started to really wonder—could I actually beat my depression? Maybe it was stronger than me. Maybe it would win in the end, and all I was doing was buying time.

Laughter was one of the keys that got me out of that crisis. I watched Dave Chappelle joke about suicide. I watched that The Office episode where Michael almost kills himself pretending to kill himself. And I laughed my ass off.

And the laughter helped. It's hard to laugh at something you feel threatened by. But at the same time, I found that it was hard to feel threatened by something that I was laughing at. My laughter told me, on a visceral level, that I was stronger than my depression.

It reminds me of that old Seinfeld episode where Kramer takes karate. You think he's in an adult class—but then at the end of the episode it's revealed that he's in a kid's class. The comedy comes from the role reversal. You think Kramer's this courageous man passing on sage wisdom to his friends to help them live their best lives. Then, at the end, it turns out he's just a coward beating up kids.

I think the battle between our True Self and our False Self is kind of like that. For years, I thought my depression and my rage at the world were stronger than me. I thought I was the 6-year-old kid in the ring, and my False Self was the fully grown adult. I thought I was powerless.

But when I learned to laugh at my fear, at my rage and my depression, something happened. My perspective flipped. I realized that I wasn't the 6-year-old in the ring; my False Self was. I was the fully grown and trained adult. My False Self could huff and it could puff, and it could lash out with its tiny fists—but it couldn't actually hurt me. The only power it had was power that I gave it. And I could take that power away.

And because it was powerless, when it tried to lash out at me, I didn't have to feel afraid. I could laugh. And with my laughter, I could show it who was really in charge.

So here's our action item for the week. Next time that fear flares up inside of you that you know isn't rational or reasonable, take 5 minutes and laugh at it.

And then notice, afterwards, if your fear seems just a little bit smaller.

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