Some children go so far as to construct a “false self” that they operate from to please us and begin to lose track of the “real me” under all the disguise. It can take years of therapy to untangle the false identity from their true identity.
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The desire to be good is one of the loveliest things in the world, but in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need to be (by the standards of the good child) fruitfully and bravely bad.
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But this repression of more challenging emotions, though it produces short-term pleasant obedience, stores up a huge amount of difficulty in later life.
As one author put it, “Being a good child is one of the loveliest things in the world. But in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need to be – by the standards of the good child – fruitfully and bravely “bad”.”