Conscious Living by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-31T22:57:31+00:00

The Persona Problem

As you grew, you adopted personas to survive in the family and place where you were born. Personas come in two flavors, adopted for two very different purposes. The first set of personas we adopt are largely benign and positive, because they are designed to get recognition from people around us. I call these your A personas, because they were usually adopted first in your life. Entertainers have their A material, the stuff they know works. I read an interview with Jerry Seinfeld in which he revealed his A joke, the one he always used when he felt he was losing a nightclub audience. I laughed out loud just reading it (and wish I could remember it so I could share it with you).

We all have our A personas, which worked early in our lives to get our needs met. An A persona is Cute Kid or Quiet Baby or Mom’s Helper. One child may be Daddy’s Girl, while another is the Class Clown. Your A personas are learned early on and added to later in life for the purpose of getting recognition from the world around you. In a state I once lived in, there was a politician who was earnest, fiscally responsible, likable, and conservative. I happened one day to meet his elementary school counselor from long ago. The counselor said that the boy’s personas were identical to the man he would become later in life. As a youngster, he was always elected class treasurer because of his fiscal acumen, and he could be counted on as a playground monitor to keep the peace. He even wore a bow tie. As you can imagine, teachers loved him.

Our B personas are not so nice. They are adopted for a very different purpose. We usually resort to B personas when our A’s fail to work. Faced with the pain of no recognition, we fall back on painful personas to get us through. B personas include Rebel, Sick Kid, Accident Prone, and Slow Learner.

The problems caused by these personas become especially evident in adult life. As we grow up, the need for these personas decreases. They were put in place to help us survive childhood; they are often not useful and even downright costly in adult life. There is a trend in adult life for your personas to separate from your essence; in adult life you increasingly wonder, “Who am I distinct from my programming?” This question begins to invite essence to come to the fore in your life. Then a battle begins between the forces of essence and the forces of persona in your life. Your essence wants enlightenment, your personas want survival. Most of us go back and forth many times before essence becomes a permanent backdrop of life.

The conservative politician I mentioned earlier had a classic problem with his A persona. At midlife, he unconsciously (I assume it was unconscious, anyway) set up a major crash of his A persona. He was caught in a scandal and forced to resign in public disgrace.

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