The psychology of self-concealment

The most perilous form of solitude is not being alone.

It is being surrounded by people while portraying a persona that none of those around you would recognize if they saw you at home on a Sunday morning.

We may be perceptive thinkers, or even very accomplished. We may be the most well-traveled among our group of peers, with a network of influential contacts and surrounded by interesting individuals, but if we harbor the following thought in the back of our minds, it may be a warning sign: “I have been performing this version of myself for so long that I believe I no longer can remember what the original is like.”

This is one of the psychological conditions that has been studied the most, and it is the most corroding and dangerous form of loneliness.

Loneliness that doesn't seem like loneliness

When most people hear the word “loneliness,” they immediately associate it with being physically alone. With being isolated. An old man alone in his house, lost in a remote village with half a dozen inhabitants. A university student displaced more than 300 km from home, in a rented room eating a slice of cold pizza. This is the most common image, and the one most associated with the word “loneliness.”

But this type of loneliness, although real, literary, and better documented, is not the most corrosive and deleterious, or harmful in the long term.

The existential isolation

The intense feeling that our inner experience is not fundamentally associated, related, or connected to the people around us, even when we are surrounded by them on virtually all sides, is the most subtle.

The issue, then, is not the absence of people around us. It is the absence of being known.

The psychology of self-concealment

An active effort to keep significant personal information hidden from others.
Part of this concealment may stem from a state of anxiety, depression, or even physical symptoms related to an illness.

Self-concealment is not the same as privacy. While the latter concept is the establishment of a boundary, self-concealment is an act, a performance. It is a continuous and deliberate effort to present a “self” that I think is more easily accepted by those around me, while simultaneously concealing the version that is considered less acceptable or appealing, hiding it “under the rug”.

The problem does not arise from the secret itself, but rather from the continuous and deliberate cognitive effort to maintain the distance between the represented “self” and the real “self.” The conflict does not lie in what we are hiding, but rather in the very act of hiding.

Sometimes people who deal more with professional environments such as conferences, networking, or even industry dinners, or public or political positions, those who appear to be more at ease, are the ones who pay the highest cost.

They effectively learn to regulate others' emotional responses through their performance, and it is effective. And the loneliness continues to escalate.

The difference between the Sunday self and the public self.

The real question is whether the people who think they know you would recognize the person you become when there is no one to perform for.

If the difference between who you are “on Sunday” and the person who shows up at the office on Monday morning is significant enough, what you are feeling is not just social conditioning. It is a chronic disconnection from your own life. And the people around you—no matter how much they like you, no matter how much they invite you—are connecting with someone who does not really exist.

At some point in life—often early on—and frequently in environments where emotional honesty was somehow risky to assume, where fitting into the social environment required constant effort—the “self” that was represented achieved better results than the true “self.” People responded more positively, and more sympathetically, or we simply got more “likes” on a simple social media post. Conflicts were appeased. And opportunities arose. The brain records that moment as an effective strategy and quickly automates that process.

People learn to overcome their authentic selves, often in response to environments that punish honesty in some way.
This suspension is not pathological, but rather adaptive. It solves an equation, a problem, or a conflict.

What makes this form of solution particularly dangerous is its invisibility—not only to others, but to the person experiencing it.
Loneliness does not correspond to external evidence. And so it takes on another name, such as “stress” or “burnout.” It becomes a vague uneasiness that cannot be named, and as such, has no easy solution.

This is, in fact, the process that remains for many people, and which resembles a disinterest in happiness. Not as a dramatic collapse, but rather as a natural consequence of an accumulation of adjustments to actions taken in life in response to the environment.

Expectations are reduced, avenues for sharing are narrowed, and one accepts the simple fact of being appreciated, believing that this means being known. The erosion is commutative.

^{Free image from Pixabay.com
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Original text written by me in Portuguese and translated with DeepL.com (free version)}