By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To improve your skills to put these concepts into action and improve your life, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app
American authenticity in the year 2024 means saying what you think and what you feel, no matter the consequences. This is how one’s courage, honesty, and expression of freedom are currently being measured. You see the overflow of this idea throughout this populist phase of our culture- in politicians, universities, science, and celebrity. We’ve come to appropriate the term “authenticity” to encapsulate this way of being. However, I want to challenge this as a betrayal of a more holistic view of what authenticity really is.
An Authentic Warning:
Before I dig into today’s content, I want to remind you that my intended audience is the 90% of us who are not on the extremes. If you are on the far left or far right you will find this content disappointing, perhaps enraging, and certainly antithetical to your worldview and goals.
In this post, I’m asking you to look inside yourself and see how you are falling prey to what we will call a narrow authenticity, and how this betrays your larger system of goals and values. Push back against the impulse to see how other people do this, and try to reflect on how you yourself are subject to this phenomenon.
The Point: We (you and I) are at risk of having our lives afflicted by a narrow view of authenticity that is eroding our social commitments, our willingness and ability to understand each other, and our capacity to tolerate uncomfortable ideas and necessary conflict. Understanding differences, embracing uncomfortable emotions, and tolerating conflict are essential foundations for deep relationships and connected communities. Narrow authenticity is eroding your ability to do this.
Here is what I want you to learn: to notice and change your commitment to narrow authenticity, and to live in terms of a more holistic and true authenticity.
What is Authenticity? Authenticity is defined as the quality of being genuine, true, and real. Further expanding, authenticity in action involves aligning your behaviors with your values system and goals. In Western culture, authenticity is a core universal value that most people hold. When I assess and evaluate the values of my patients, authenticity almost always rises to the top. I have yet to meet a patient who does not fundamentally wish to live an authentic life. Narrow authenticity is defined as myopic hyperfocus on one or two areas of life or interactions with others with which one disagrees.
That said, through many years of therapy practice, I’ve seen a narrow view of authenticity as a pathway to real isolation and avoidance. Narrow authenticity occurs as a reaction to uncomfortable emotions. It leaves us feeling honest and righteous in the moment– a sense of real satisfaction to quell the uncomfortable emotions inside of us. However, responding (behaving) out of that narrow authenticity betrays our deeper goals and the full spectrum of our values. Addressing this starts with noticing and being skeptical of feelings of injustice and righteousness.
Let me explain about what a narrow, isolating view of authenticity looks like. It involves focusing on the point of disagreement and expanding that to encompass the full picture of another person or community. It relies on shrinking my view of someone, some issue, or some group to match the emotion I’m feeling. To maintain narrow authenticity, we have to reduce people and issues to dehumanized, black-and-white, good or bad, right or wrong status.
We naturally make these distinctions at big sociocultural level to refer to “them”:
- Those liberals
- Those conservatives
- Those evangelicals
- Those protestors
- Those leaders
- Those workers
- Those civilians (from first responders, healthcare workers)
We also run the risk of using this thinking at times in interpersonal relationships that matter to us when we are feeling hurt, pain, fear, sadness or anxiety
- My wife
- My husband
- My so called friend
- My neighbor
- That driver
- My boss
- My co-worker or colleague
- My son or daughter
- My pastor
- My community group member
The Problem With Narrow Authenticity
In a single day, I may experience emotions and thoughts resulting from my recognition of injustice, inefficiency, a point of conflict with my spouse, work, or in interactions with my kids, friends, church, community. When I take a narrow view of authenticity, I gather myself around any one of these emotional experiences and run the risk of centering my thoughts and reactions on that single pain point. I withdraw from deeper engagement on any other aspect of the person or disagreement.
Narrow authenticity says, “This person doesn’t think what I do about this important topic,”or, “I feel offended,insulted, and disrespected on point A, so therefore I must disengage from other interactions with this person in the name of ‘authenticity.’ ” Since this is the case, it is “honest” or “authentic” for me to respond in some way out of this fast categorization and ‘othering’ process.
The problem with this is that you hold goals and values that are betrayed by taking a narrow focus, especially on the people in your life. The expression of your narrow authenticity originates as an emotional reaction, and you justify that reaction with an interpretation of its “righteousness” or “honesty.” You have decided that your emotional response is authenticity.
The problem with narrow authenticity is how it isolates and runs the risk of creating rumination on all the bad and unfixable problems out there. The emotions that lead to a gut response are actually quite valid, honest internal experiences. It is what we then do with those experiences that counts. The seed of a narrowly authentic response is these uncomfortable emotions, and we can learn to see them as valid responses as a step 1.
Pausing to Validate your Emotional Reactions
There are so many things to focus on that are wrong with the world and my own interactions within it– the things that create real emotional responses internally. It is necessary for you to see your emotional reactions as valid. The people in your life with whom you desire deeper connection…there is friction and discomfort involved in each and every one of those relationships at some level. Friction is a feature of relationships that serves as a mechanism to drive us into communication and necessary healthy conflict, which is a main means of developing depth and trust in relationships. For more on this topic, see https://wordpress.com/post/rewirerx.com/147.
So the problem is not the emotion or internal experience. Rather, the issue lies in how I choose to notice, acknowledge my internal experience, and select a resolution for those experiences. Narrow authenticity results from my automatic categorization of “good vs. bad,” “right vs. wrong,” “safe vs. dangerous.” It involves quickly categorizing or labeling others as “in or out.” And following that emotional experience, we tend to interpret this reaction as just, righteous, moral, honest. Authentic.
Narrow Authenticity Keeps us Stuck. Currently, narrow authenticity is one of the key “justifications” or supposed values under which our culture (including you) is maintaining avoidance, isolation, and withdrawal from others. An impulse towards narrow authenticity is valid because it stems from emotions and thoughts that simply exist as reasonable and objectively manifested responses. However, to act out of narrow authenticity is simply to act out of emotion, keeping you stuck in patterns of isolation, moral righteousness, low conflict tolerance, and avoidance of real engagement.
Here are some specific areas where I want to drive this point home. Feel free to take this as permission to experience feelings and have thoughts in response to the following things. The list below is populated with valid responses simply because these are the ways that our bodies are designed to respond.
It is valid to…
– Be emotionally affected and cynical about the state of the world, climate, and politics.
– Feel a sense of fear and injustice about the ways, means, and goals of the radical left and progressive politics.
– Feel a sense of fear and injustice about the ways, means, and goals of the radical right and conservative politics.
– Feel a sense of disappointment and anger at the functioning of universities and public discourse.
– Feel let down and betrayed by a profit-driven healthcare system.
– Feel a sense of disappointment and concern about the direction of the evangelical church.
– Be emotionally conflicted and fearful about foreign wars.
– Feel disappointment and hurt in your marriage.
– Feel disappointment and hurt from your spouse.
– Feel fearful about the future.
– Feel let down by friends who have diverged from your once-shared views and connection.
– Feel anxious about your child or teenager.
Challenging you to Change
If you’d like to continue living within these emotions and having your actions guided towards withdrawal and isolation, stuck in avoidance and inaction, then don’t do anything differently. If you want to stay focused on narrow authenticity, feeling protected and righteous, then stay exactly the same. Don’t see yourself in what I’m writing about here. You are justified in your reactions, and you can remain stuck in narrow authenticity if you want to. Feel free to continue taking slights and disrespect personally, and to remove yourself from deeper investment and engagement with the people in your life.
If you want to change, and be part of the solution to the polarization and thin-skinned conflict intolerance that you see around you and that is in your life, do this: Move beyond the question of whether your emotions or thoughts are “valid,” and move towards defining how you’d like your engagement in your valued roles and relationships to be. Said another way, graduate from staying stuck in your grievances against others and culture, and begin to align yourself with dialing in to living up to your roles and values as best you can. See your stuckness as a problem of narrow authenticity in your own life, catch yourself doing it, and move towards a more holistic or true authenticity.
TRUE or HOLISTIC authenticity is built on a full spectrum of values and goals. What are yours?
- Goal option 1: To live in a self-righteous, polarized state, wherever that be in your relationships, community, marriage, friendships, etc.
- Goal option 2: To be a connector, a leader in your life, a force for healing in other people’s lives, a person who can tolerate and lean in to friction, and a person who lives up to your values and achieves your goals
Steps to True Authenticity
Here are a few helpful steps to guide you in real-time towards true authenticity and away from narrow expressions of your emotions:
- Step 1: Notice when you are having an uncomfortable emotion in reaction to another person, a group, an issue.
- Step 2: Slow down and observe your gut response that you feel naturally drawn towards.
- Step 3: Remind yourself of your goals, both momentary (in this single interaction) and big picture (to live up to your roles as friend, partner, son/daughter, parent, colleague)
- Step 4: Choose a response (behavior, words) that aligns with those goals, grounded in one or more of your core values.
If you don’t know what your values are, I’ll offer you two that philosophers describe as universal: authenticity and wisdom. Not that you don’t need to have authenticity and wisdom figured out to identify them as goals…but that you aspire to work and live in alignment with authenticity and wisdom, and to notice when you are not so that you can engage in corrective actions. Moving beyond being stuck in emotional avoidance (which leads to narrow emotional expressions that we have mis-appropriated as “authenticity”) requires action towards the people and problems over which you have actual influence, rather than the people and problems over which you couldn’t possibly affect. In the science of social cognition (the ways that we think about ourselves in relation to others), we see “stuckness” and “paralysis” result from being consumed with large cultural problems that are not actually actionable for any one person. As a good example, take climate change—the scale of this problem has produced inaction and near apathy for a large portion of our population.
If you are feeling stuck and disconnected, staying entrenched in hyper-moral and pain-driven positions about the real, big problems and issues in our world today may be a form of avoidance. But…if you want to change, a true or holistic authenticity is your ticket out.
Let me ground what expressions of true or holistic authenticity may look like in an example, without being too prescriptive. Since I identify with a goal to live up to my role as a husband and friend in my marriage, how can I measure my actions and values against this goal? How do I approach my spouse about something that she did or said that hurt me and that we need to talk about?
Being guided by true authenticity involves a balance of multiple values: honesty, gentleness, and kindness. If I approach my wife with a narrow focus on my value of honesty but without adding gentleness and kindness, I am telling the truth but betraying my holistic authentic self and goals. Likewise, if I approach with gentleness and kindness but without honesty, I equally betray my authentic self and my commitment to being a friend and caring for my marriage. I betray my goal to live up to my role as a husband.
Gentleness and kindness without honesty similarly lead me further into my sense of isolation and incongruence from true or holistic authenticity. I’m letting emotions drive my choices instead of my values. If I am not balanced, I run the risk of having my own hurt and pain drive me towards harsh honesty, which I can easily interpret as “authentic” in a narrow sense. Likewise, I run the risk of letting my discomfort with conflict drive me towards gentleness and kindness without honesty, which I can also easily interpret as “authentic” in a narrow sense. But my true authenticity requires a combination of these values in concert. A deeper authenticity requires me to slow down, and ground my choices in my larger goals (to live up to my role as husband; to cultivate a healthy marriage).
My alternative is to step back, slow down, and re-ground myself in two goals, one for the moment, and one for the big picture:
- Regrounding in my momentary goal, in this interaction, in real-time: communicate honestly, firmly yet gently and kindly with my wife.
- Rooting in my big picture goal: To live up to my role as a husband and friend, and to have courage to act out of the fullness of my true authenticity, grounded in this big picture. It may hurt my wife to hear something true (e.g., that she hurt me; that I’m concerned about something that she’s doing or not doing), but to move towards my big picture goal, it’s imperative to act out of my true authenticity.
How does what I communicate (honestly) and how I communicate (with gentleness, kindness) move me towards my true or holistic authenticity and my goal to live up to my role as husband and friend? How is what I communicate and how I communicate aligned with my values? In other words, is my action being guided by my full spectrum of values?
If you are anything like me, your real-time reactions may not play out in ideal and values aligned ways. Getting the hang of this skill may require reflection, circling back to the person after the initial conversation, and trying to communicate with a clear head again. The job then is to come back retroactively, notice after some reflection where you were narrow and where you can take responsibility, apologize, and move back in with a truer form of yourself.
Take this example I’ve provided, and apply it to any interaction with any person with whom you desire a deeper relationship. Use this as a guide to ground your participation in those relationships in a deeper, more holistic view of authenticity. Here is another angle on this, and I’ll use a case example. You can plug anyone into this exercise, including yourself.
Lauren is a combat veteran recently returned from war and comes to me for therapy. Her presenting problem: struggling with feelings of loneliness, isolation, and meaninglessness since she came back from her last tour several years ago. She says to me, “Army people are real, honest, and trustworthy. I have found that civilians don’t have a code of ethics, they can’t understand my experience, and they let me down at all turns. Civilians don’t have a code, and they pretty much let me down at all turns.” No argument from me—this is her authentic truth as she sees it, drawn from experience. Who am I to invalidate her authentic experience?
But we start to shift the conversation. If her goal is to remain validated and “right” or “correct” in her stance, then there is nothing to fix here. Goodbye, nothing to do about this. But what if her goal is to find meaning, connection, less alienation, and engagement in a community of deep connections in which she can participate in giving her gifts and experiences in support of others? Within her key relationships, with her husband, kids, parents, siblings, and friends from before who are not combat veterans (because, remember, her ‘out-grouping’ of civilians also includes the people in her life that she loves the most). If we can expand to her larger goals, we can begin to shift towards a more expansive view of what authenticity might look like in her relationships beyond responding out of her disappointment and pain.
Here, we have subtly shifted the lens, from nameless, faceless “civilians” (them in an “us vs. them” mental calculation) to real humans that she cares about and with whom she can rediscover true or holistic authenticity through opportunities to live up to her multiple roles as wife, daughter, mother, friend, sister. To move away from a narrow focus on what divides and where we feel let down or threatened, towards a holistic view of how to engage for goals around connection and depth.
True Authenticity and You
Are you trapped in a narrow authenticity mindset? Are the people and opportunities around you all wrong for some reason? Is there an opportunity to have the courage to expand to a true or holistic authenticity mindset that focuses on how you can live up to your multitude of values and goals—locally, within your existing relationships and community? It starts there and builds inertia towards a sense of connection and belonging that is sorely missing from many of our lives.
In your friendships, family, community—what would it look like to step back from a narrow view of authenticity towards a truer view that involves living up multiple goals and values simultaneously.
· Struggling to reconcile political differences with family members or friends?
· Dealing with a parent who voted for Trump or a child who voted for Biden (or vice versa)?
· Having an anti-vaxxer or a Palestinian protester in your friend group?
· Struggling to see eye-to-eye on a specific problem in your marriage (e.g., work, finances, sex)?
Feeling divided with people on politics in your church?
· Worried about the lack of connection and wisdom you see emanating from your teenager?
· Concerned about the way that your small child’s emotional volatility reflects on your parenting?
We tend to focus on what divides us rather than what we share. This is a truth of our biology, driven by deep systems inside of us that are designed to help us survive. One of the foundational plagues of our time involves moralistic positions of division. I invite you to join me in leading us back to a truer form of authenticity built on gathering around our shared experiences. We share history, values, goals, loss, and the fundamental human experience of living and suffering for which we all agree and deserve compassion.
True authenticity looks like maintaining commitment to big picture goals and being guided by multiple values. It looks like not burning bridges after a disagreement or unresolvable point of tension. Rather, it looks like going back for difficult and anxious conversations, because you hold your role and the relationship above ideology. True authenticity looks like weighing your full range of goals and values, and finding a way to stay true to yourself by flexibly shifting the lens to a point of shared connection, history, and love.
Narrow authenticity looks like magnifying points of departure or separation, and doing so in the name of a small view of your own authenticity. When we do this, we wound ourselves and are propelled into a future of withdrawal and isolation when conflict or friction arises. Loss and division beget more loss and division, and you find yourself living in a position that feels morally righteous but lonely, and ineffective, and stuck.
Catch yourself disengaging from people who you’d like to have connection with. Find a point of shared values. Build a relationship that can tolerate differences.
If you feel compelled to ‘out-group’ this writer, I am indeed not advocating for a fluid view on right and wrong. Rather, I am teaching you about realigning with values and goals instead of emotional reactions about your sense of right and wrong. Your opportunity to effectively make change requires you to tolerate, understand, and hear other people from an authentic place. And, for people who have the goal to feel more connected and deeper meaning in social relationships, you may want to consider times that you are flexibly putting down your moralism and move towards a different set of goals and values. True authenticity means holding your highest goals above your emotional reactions and choosing not to allow emotional reactions to usurp or undermine those goals. True authenticity requires inhibition of some “gut” reaction or way of fast thinking so as not to get sucked into acting in small ways that undermines your larger goals.