Identity Discovery: Letting Go of the False Self

so many of us are on a journey of discovering our identity learning who we really are and living powerfully out of that and i've found one of the critical stages in growing in your identity is to discover who you're not begin to identify that and learn to let it go and many times that comes through the discovery of what is often called a false self this becomes a mask it becomes a fabricated way about your life it's something that's built up that you present to the world now many of these things are not necessarily evil in themselves but what they often become is protective mechanisms to keep people from seeing the real authentic vulnerable aspect of who we are and so our brokenness drives us to wear these masks it's our way of feeling control it's our way of feeling safe it's our way of feeling like we have some healthy walls but sometimes these walls get so thick they actually become prisons and i find in heart transformational work with people many times they can get so lost in the false self they have no idea how to separate it out from who they really are it's become so much a part of them that they don't know how to just be themselves so what i find is we need to identify the false self and we got to learn to let it go because we can't connect to god through a false self and he wants to relate to us as we are but what you need to realize too is you need to connect to your world around you in more authentic more vulnerable and more true ways where you're really wired into who you are in your identity so i pray in this video we can walk through it and discover who you really are and let go of who you're not now there's a bunch of ways that the false self can manifest but here are 10 ways and 10 common ways that i see either in my own life or the people that i've helped in their heart healing journey these are when i talk about the false self they can be a mask it's a front that we carry a front that we present to people and it doesn't allow people to see the real loss and you might relate to one or more of these so find yourself in this journey the first one that we often find especially when it comes to heart healing and the love of god and authenticity is the i'm good front that we give meaning i'm good everything's good you good i'm good we're good everything's just don't rock the boat there's nothing wrong here nothing here no brokenness to deal with and this is often a form of denial it's a place where people that like to make sure everything looks good people that are concerned as i wrote in my book the heart healing journey many times we could be more concerned about how things look than how they really are so we live in that survival mechanism and shame keeps us in that place right i want anybody to know that we have any problems i don't want anyone to know we're broken and so it forms a great deal of denial and disconnect to the issues of the heart i find this is a heavy duty one and we often need to confront the second is the intellectual you present how intelligent you are how much you've learned how much data you've accumulated how much you know maybe it's how much theology you know how many things you can quote how many statistics you can give out and so many things that can impress and wow people but like jesus said he said i wish that you would turn with your heart so i can heal you we often try to mentally ascend into the things of god and what we really need to is experience them with our hearts or number three you're the spiritual one and this takes a lot of honesty it takes a lot of true just self-awareness and takes just honest assessment that you're very impressive when it comes to spiritual things and you talk about how you hear from god all the time and you talk about all the great breakthroughs and it's wonderful it's it's great but people never see the vulnerable side of you the pain the struggle the times where you don't feel connected to god or you're not sure what god is saying or you don't have all the answers you don't have all the quick things you could say the spiritual one is one that floats in their positions or floats in that kind of prestige but they're not always the people that you really want to hang around authentically because they really never let you in the fourth one's going to be a tricky one because this is the area of the helper the fixer or the server and this is you get your identity out of what you do especially in helping others so you're always responding always reacting to whatever is needed and you're always doing it and at first this seems great and many church cultures and ministries and volunteer and businesses love this because you're always with a mindset of do do do but you don't know when to not do you don't know when to say no and you can get lost in this kind of like fixer kind of thing where you're always trying to carry that pressure of trying to help or solve issues and i carried this a lot in my own life because i was able even at a young age to navigate relational difficulties and challenges and talk to people and and work it out and and maybe give some insight it was revealing what i would eventually be doing as a part of my life and journey but i had to let go of this being my identity and there were times many times i've gone through where as i let go of that being my identity i didn't know who i was behind all that and and this is difficult because the world once you fall into these roles the world relates to you as that and they don't even know how to relate to the real you so it takes a lot of courage to recognize this in your life that realizing wow it's become so attached to me i don't know how to live outside of doing doing helping helping fixing fixing always serving i serve the table but i don't know how to sit at the table and that's a real key you know how to prepare a meal but do you know how to just sit and share a meal with someone and be yourself the fifth one is the nice person now at first it seems like what's wrong with this i mean that's not bad right nice guy she's a nice lady right i'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but the nice person can have underneath it someone who avoids conflict avoids the tough discussions avoids the hard decisions relationally avoids confrontation they live as peacekeepers just don't rock the boat not peacemakers peacemakers dive in and are able to have the difficult conversations or maybe confront issues that need to be confronted and so what happens is you hide behind this because it doesn't rock any of the status quo and you can hide in that and it keeps you in the background and it keeps you from saying anything keeps you from maybe stepping forward into some deeper relational things that are available for your life or number six you're the surface dweller now the surface dweller is somebody that maybe they're funny they can be great to be around they can be great business people they can have those like introductory conversation how's the weather how's life and they can go right into it and they can have great conversations with you but you never really get deeper with them you could sit down and talk with them for a few hours but when you walk away you never really felt like you actually bonded with them which you bonded with was just the fabrication was just the surface dweller maybe they're really funny and every time there's an attempt to go deeper the surface dweller pulls you back to the surface with a joke pulls you back with a distraction pulls you back with some kind of mechanism to keep you from going deeper and they can often push you away through that a big one is very challenging in many ways as the achiever meaning that you get your worth and your value through your portfolio through what you perform and what you achieve the problem is is you have two roads that this often goes down one road is where the achiever crashes they lived out of performance trying to achieve trying to earn their belonging prove themselves they feel like you got to prove yourself and it crashes and they often realize okay help god in that crash they go god help me then there's the second pathway where you achieve and it quote-unquote works for you you produce results your business grows your church grows numerically so now you're in this cycle where you actually get back to number one which is i'm good everything's fine because my achievements are great so when achievements are going great we equate that that means everything in my heart light must be going great and it's very very deceptive so you live as accomplishments being how you feel good about yourself the problem is is what happens when accomplishments aren't there because you don't bat a thousand in life you don't ever you're not perfect and life isn't perfect so what happens there also what happens when things go so well but you get lost in it some of the greatest achievers in our world are some of the most challenging people to actually be around relationally you may appreciate what they produce but you wouldn't want to be their friend because deep down the achiever is a way that they hide and they don't allow you to truly relate to them it's performance based it creates all kinds of pressures number eight is similar to number two but it takes on a unique pathway and that is the knowledge overloader and what i mean by that is that you recognize your need for heart healing you recognize that you need some help in areas number two the intellect they're they're blocking your their heart from receiving healing and trying to impress you with their intellect so the intellect becomes a block it becomes a guard a protective mechanism here you recognize your heart healing but you think you gotta it's more information that you need you gotta get all these books so you have a thousand books you have a hundred courses you have all these videos and you're just ingesting and ingesting and ingesting information but you're consuming it like fast food and what you really need to do is slow down and that's why i tell people even when they read my material go through anything that i produce you've got gotta marinate on it you gotta slow crock pot and when something jumps up don't go oh that's a great thought and rush to the next thing you gotta pause ponder it and slowly walk through it and give room for vulnerability because knowledge alone will just puff you up you have a lot of information that maybe you can look up and quote or share with someone but it's got to take time to have a root system in your heart number nine is one we all have to confront and that is the trap of the busy life it goes like this hey how are things going oh busy hey how things been happening i haven't seen you in a while i've just been busy trying to stay busy gotta keep busy am i right and we all agree yeah gotta keep busy gotta stay busy right keeps the devil out right where's that in the bible well it's not because oftentimes the enemy wants us to stay busy because the busier you are the less room you have to deal with the issues of your heart and your life and i realized in my own journey i had to let go of this as a part of my identity and a part of my way of life and like you know what living busy is not a badge of honor so let's let that go or maybe number 10 you live in a world of just right i got to do everything just right and you may take pride in i make the right decisions i do the right thing and you run into problems with god because you go god i do what's right and this is what happens to me hmm you see you relate to god through a self-righteousness or maybe you relate to god or to your world with the pressure of perfectionism maybe come up you become a type a or it's difficult for you to relate to people or have fruitful relationships because everything has to be done just right and your standards are so high no one can relate and really it's a protective mechanism because no one can really get access to the real you the vulnerable you the growing you the child of god that's learning at each stage how to just be yourself so where do you see yourself in these ten maybe one maybe three maybe a bunch i encourage you jot them down and let god lead you in some discovery of how you can identify them and also learn to let go so before we get into some more application we got to get to the why why the false self to begin with well you go back to the story of adam and eve and you can discover it right there they begin to hide they hide from god they cover themselves they come into agreement with a false covering and they hide in fear they hide in shame they hide in a whole bunch of stuff and so let's get into the why well the first why we have to realize is fear wherever there's vulnerabilities or areas of our life that we don't feel safe in or we don't feel like we've grown in there's a driving force of fear to cover it up and so fear and shame work together now the two driving fears are the fear of rejection and i do a lot of work in the rejection route because where we're not loved properly and told who we are and mentored in our identity rejection is a root system that will come in and so the rejection will lead to issues like abandonment lead to issues like unworthiness i'll get to those in just a second but the fear of rejection says if i show you the real me and i just let myself be myself where i'm at in my journey growing each day got flaws weaknesses and i'm okay with it letting myself grow and you reject me i don't have a plan b i don't have another me to pull out now for many people that have in our fabricated journey where we have a mask sometimes what we can do is when a mask isn't working we can shift it to another mask you know so if you're you know the server and the helper and you feel like that's not working you shift over here to the being a super spiritual one or you shift over here and you keep trying different masks in different places right well behind it is if i show you the real me you won't love me and deeper enough is the fear of failure which says if you see the flaws in me i don't just have failures i am a failure and this is what invites the language of shame because shame says you are those things it makes you one with them and shame creates a driving force to hide at all costs keep things in the dark keep things concealed don't let people get to know you because they're going to look down on you and many of us have had those experiences you ever had that experience where you shared your heart the real you and you got the weird look you got the weird stare or you got that condescending kind of thing right it's so painful at times so excruciating especially if you're not loved in who you really are that shame can be a real killer so the third reason is abandonment abandonment says you're gonna leave me at some point so i can't let you see the real me because then you're gonna leave me it's fueled by the root of rejection and so i find at the root system if we drill down to the bottom of our hearts and look at what's really there in the brokenness and pain and emptiness is this usually some form of abandonment usually some form of unworthiness unworthiness says i'm not deserving of being loved so when true love comes to you you go well if you really knew who i really was you wouldn't love me in this way if you knew about my history or knew my sins or knew my issues you wouldn't really love me so it keeps us from receiving god's love it keeps us from receiving people's love when they come because god will send people in your life to love you but it doesn't land because there's an unworthiness there it doesn't allow you to let that love enter your heart and heal you and nurture you and fulfill the areas of your heart that are longing for love unworthiness says i gotta prove myself i gotta prove that i have worth i remember when i first began church ministry and was placed in a pastoral role i felt like everywhere i went and everything i did i got to prove myself because deep down there was an unworthiness that i didn't feel the worth of being loved so what happens is we become performers and we live a performance-based life and so what performance does is performance is behavior focused right you have a bunch of behaviors you want to do that you're not doing so it's like let's get those behaviors going and then i'll be somebody and then i'll be loved that's what performance says or you have a bunch of behaviors you don't want to do and so you're looking you go i'm going to stop doing those behaviors because then that'll help me to know who i am and then i will be loved so we become behavior focused because we think that's how god will love us god will love me more when i behave better many people say this yeah i'll do i'll i'll serve god or i'll i'll go there when i get my act together because we're behavior focused we move from behavior to identity i'll find an identity i'll know who i am i can rest in who i am once my behavior changes move into there and then i'll feel loved and god says you know what i'm changing the whole pattern of this it actually starts here you first learn to be loved unconditionally by your father in heaven the work of jesus christ brings to us the ability to receive the love of the father out of his love number two is where you learn who you are the love of the father says this is my beloved son and who i'm well pleased so in your identity when you get a hold of who you are then your behavior comes under the influence of that so you move in this direction love identity behavior if if you want to see a different manifestation in your behavior get to know who you really are because when you get to know who you really are behavior starts to change how do you get to know who you are you can't learn who you are through performance you got to learn through receiving total unconditional loving acceptance from your father in heaven right now because when you receive that love the only way you can receive that love is out of being his child sons and daughters you cannot receive love and identity through performance through trying to be worthy enough through shame and fear none of that none of those pathways are going to lead you to experiencing love it's right now right where you're at and you can only do it as a child that says all right i'm going to open my arms i'm going to open my heart and i'm going to say yes to it and how do you be a better son or daughter right it's like uh how does my son be a better son how's my daughter be a better daughter you just learn to receive what's already there for you so these are some of the whys and this will start to move us into some of the transformation that god has for you where do you need to move towards a love and out of that love learn who you are and let identity this is who i am and that is what shifts your behavior all right so this is where the rubber meets the road this is for your freedom and this is for your transformation in your journey and the first stage after we begin to recognize the false self is we got to work out the process of letting go now why is letting go of it so challenging well it's easy because we're used to surviving on it and god will often go okay we're going to get these out as crutches that you rely on and we're going to develop a new foundation and at first it's scary it's frightening right another reason why it's so hard to let go is that it's become so much a part of us and so it's like peeling it off it's like taking super glue off it's just painful it's just it's become so much a part it's like a surgical incision that's made to remove a mass from you that's become a part of your organs and that's why surgery creates a lot of pain right because that becomes a part of the body and it's now being cut off and god is removing it because it's not who you are but it's become a part of what we think is who we are so letting go where are we letting go we're letting go of the false self we're letting go of who we're not we're letting go of the the idea that i need to perform for love that i need to prove myself that i need to earn love from the people around me you know when jesus was tempted in the wilderness the the enemy came and he said if you are what the son of god the three temptations he brought to him if you are if you are if you are the son of god and what was satan seeking to do challenge his identity but he was also trying to get him to prove himself come on if you are the son of god then do this in other words perform so we're letting go of the false self we're letting go of having to perform for love we're also letting go of the pressure the pressure of what trying to be somebody i see so many people out there trying to be this and trying to be that not just be yourself and just let the road unfold before you we're so busy trying to find something that we do or trying to be somebody somewhere over the rainbow instead of flipping that just learn who you are and just let that open up the beautiful doors that god will open up in your life take the pressure off jesus made this statement he said what should a prophet a man to gain the whole world and yet lose your soul now think about that for a second we talk about losing your soul sometimes what that can mean is losing who you are i know it can mean other things to me in other um you know pathways but just look at it from this angle was it profit you've to gain achievements performance notoriety gain some type of recognition and lose who you are what's the point right and so many of us are losing who we are on the altar of trying to achieve and trying to pursue all these things i'll give you another passage of scripture jesus said if you want to save your life you'll lose it but if you lose your life for my sake you'll find it part of me saying you know if you're going to wrap your arms around this thing of trying to preserve your identity and try to try to get a sense of belonging and acceptance in the world you're going to lose who you are you're going to lose it anyway it's all going to crumble fall apart so instead let it go for my sake and you'll discover who you really are let all that stuff go the notoriety what people think trying to please all those things that you carry on as pressures just let it go and for many of you that's causing stress it's causing pressure and exhaustion because you're holding on just let it go and jesus says in that process then you're going to discover who you really are so letting go let it go let it go this is going to be a big stage for your life it's going to be a big part of the transformative journey now as i let it go what's the mindset well the mindset is not i'm this minister or i'm this great person or i'm this businessman i'm this great achiever no i'm gonna get back to the fundamentals because all healing leads back to the fundamentals i'm going to get back to what it means to live childlike people say what's the kingdom of heaven like jesus says bring that kid over here put him on his lap say this is it if you don't learn to come as a child you're not going to be able to enter that trust because when you're childlike and i put these words here when you learn childlike trust you learn love you learn grace you learn to open up your heart to humble yourself i trust you dad i trust you daddy i trust you father because of what i'm a child and i'm cared for right now and i learned to be loved to receive love my kids don't do anything to earn my love love's there they just they have to learn to receive it so are we with our father in heaven we need to learn to receive it and it puts us in the frequency of grace now for those of you that have lived in the false self for so long grace is frustrating because grace is relational it'll lead you into vulnerability it'll lead you into looking at your weaknesses and being and being uncomfortable at times grace throws aside all our formulas and our ways we control because it's god's power it's not our reliance on all the things we can hold together grace many times will be very disruptive because you want god to work over here but he's working over here because he's working on your identity you want to put pressure on yourself and god said there's no pressure you want to hide your weaknesses and he goes now i work through them i work through the whole package of who you are so what does it mean for you to get back to a childlike state jesus said to nicodemus who was a very high level person in the religious time that he lived in jesus said you got to be born again now it's the new birth speaks of um being spiritually awakened salvation coming to us but jesus is also saying you want to live according to the kingdom of heaven you got to start all over you got to know what it means to be born as a child to live as a toddler to live as a kid i've got a reboot so if you want to know who you are i got to reboot you because you have areas in your childhood areas in your teenager years your areas of your adolescence that weren't loved and mentored and nurtured properly so we're going to reboot this whole thing so you learn from scratch god is not interested on building on a faulty foundation he says we're going to build this from scratch so how many of you you want to learn to discover who you are you got to get back to what it means to have a child-like heart and that often brings you back to memories as a kid or areas where your heart was broken or where you began to shut down or areas when you were a child and you took on that false self and it kept growing ever since and god's going to reboot that the third thing we need to do and this is this is one that i circled here because it's going to be really important is we got to face the emptiness that you're going to feel in this process why because when you let go of the false self you look and you realize i've never my identity's never really been tended to and you're going to feel this emptiness and this is where this is where most people turn away go back and keep the fabrication keep the mask keep the false self going because they're like this is too painful but god has to teach you who you are at a deeper level in that empty place you see that emptiness can also be called like the wilderness that dry area where things aren't just happening remember when i talked about jesus when he was baptized the father says this is my beloved son in who i'm well pleased so the father communicates love identity and acceptance and value three needs that we all carry in our life i've talked about that in other videos but after identity is bestowed the father's approval and love is bestowed where does he head to next the wilderness to be tempted what does satan tempt him with identity what does he use try to prove yourself prove who you are by giving into these temptations but what's also happening in here what god bestowed upon jesus was now being tested so you have to understand many of you will go man i'm learning who i am and all of a sudden bam you come up against some heavy walls you come up against resistance you hit the wilderness what's happening your identity is being forged in the arena of temptation in the arena of testing because if satan came to jesus and said if you are the son of god he's surely going to come to you and i and say come on is he really your father look at it look what's going on in your life through avenues of suffering through avenues of trials through perseverance and tribulations who you are will be tested and nothing of the kingdom of god is going to show forth the true glory unless what is deposited in you gets tested so see this empty place as a wilderness where you can delve deeper into the things of god like never before these areas become the defining moments they become these pivotal areas where who you are gets forged seared deep in such a way that no one can steal it so lean into it you let go of the false self and you realize i'm empty lean into it and invite your father to meet you in it in a way where this becomes a stage where only he can fulfill that place in your heart where you see i don't have the tools i don't know how to receive well that's all the materials and stuff that i produce is all about helping you learn how to receive that loving grace to develop those trust muscles to rebuild that child of god that you are and so in it number four i invite you to practice this every day to wake up and say what does this day look like if i'm truly loved by my father in heaven and he says i'm his son he says i'm his child what does my day look like when i start with that now start with all the pressures the things i got to do i'm going to start with being loved and learn to be what does it mean what does my day look like if i am confident and the love my father has for me now in applying practicing these two areas are important there's moments where learning to be vulnerable is going to be powerful where you're going to sense that cue from the holy spirit use vulnerability this is the strength and in that it's gonna give an invitation for others to interact with the real you in a powerful way and if they don't that's their loss two is those moments where you celebrate make an allowance for weaknesses for flaws and realize you're in process and allow yourself to celebrate all aspects of your life paul the apostle said this he said i boast in my weaknesses i don't know if we're at that stage are we to brag about your weak areas well we're on a journey where god wants us to realize he's using the full package of who we are and all the stuff in our lives that has accumulated he'll even use your past sins and struggles and failures he'll use that for his glory he'll use that to touch other people's lives he'll use it in a way you never could imagine you never can understand so part of learning to grow in your identity is practicing in the journey and allowing yourself to be okay with where you are in that journey it's okay that i'm at this stage i'm not perfect i've not arrived and i give myself permission to take the journey because i'm practicing there's two resources i want to encourage you in if this video has been a blessing to your life one is experiencing god's love as your father this book is around or less than 100 pages you can get it in hardcover it's a great gift a great gift to put at somebody's coffee table where they can begin to take their journey of discovering how to relate to the love of god as their father and very practical there's also a video online training course available as well it's available in audio and also the second resource i want to recommend is exposing the rejection mindset because it's going to help take you further in understanding what comes in and steals the ability to receive love to walk in who we are and have powerful relationships please take this video and share it like it subscribe go to marktajesus.com consider a one-time donation and please consider a monthly donation to help support the resources and materials that we're seeking to spread to the hearts of people who are ready and who are hungry for it god bless you i'll see you in future resources

Channel: Mark DeJesus

Views: 5,162

Rating: 4.8896551 out of 5

Keywords: Identity, False Self, Transformation, Heart Healing

Id: RuxBTRF2ONk

Length: 34min 28sec (2068 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020