The pseudo self, the masks we wear, and the simple science of taking them off.
byCHRIS15 min read
pseudo selftrue self
The short answer
We hide behind a pseudo self: a mask built to stay liked, stay safe, and never be the problem in the room. Psychology has named it for a century. Carl Jung called it the persona. Donald Winnicott called it the false self. Murray Bowen called it the pseudo self. The research says the mask costs more than it protects. People like us more than we think, notice our flaws less than we fear, and feel the strain when we hide anyway. You take it off with three keys: assume good intent, lead with what lights you up, and let the people who don't share it go in peace.
Key takeaways
The pseudo self is a protective mask, not a flaw. It becomes a problem when it never comes off.
Most people believe the true self underneath is good, even people who distrust humanity (De Freitas, 2018).
People notice your awkward moments about half as often as you predict (Gilovich, 2000).
After a conversation, people like you more than you think they do (Boothby, 2018).
Hiding your emotions raised blood pressure in the hider and in the person across from them (Butler, 2003).
Mistakes followed by feedback are one of the strongest ways the brain learns (Metcalfe, 2017).
Caring for others is healthy. Caring for others while erasing yourself is linked to distress (Fritz and Helgeson, 1998).
You laugh at the joke you didn't find funny.
You say "no worries" when there are worries. You agree in the meeting, then argue with everyone in your head on the drive home.
Nobody asked you to do that. Not out loud, anyway.
We all want the same three things. We want to be seen. We want to be heard. We want to be respected. So we build the version of ourselves that feels safest to see. Polite. Agreeable. Perfect for every room.
Here's the catch. A mask can be seen. Only a face can be known.
So let's lift this veil. What are we actually hiding behind? Why did we build it? And what does the science say happens when we take it off?
01 of 10
The mask has a name
What if the mask was built to help you?
The word persona comes from the Roman theater. It meant the mask an actor wore on stage. That same word later gave English the word person.
Sit with that for a second. The word for who you are began as the word for what you wear.
Carl Jung borrowed the term in the 1920s. To him, the persona is the face we show the world so we can function in it. A nurse's calm. A teacher's patience. A host's smile. It's useful. It isn't evil.
The trouble starts when we forget it's a costume.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called this the false self. In his model, it forms early, as a caretaker. A child learns which parts of them get a warm response and which parts get a cold one. So the child shows more of the first and hides more of the second.
Smart move at five years old. Exhausting at thirty five.
Now here's where the title of this transmission comes from. Psychiatrist Murray Bowen used the exact phrase pseudo self. In his family systems theory, the pseudo self is built from borrowed beliefs: whatever the people around you need you to think, feel, and be. It bends under pressure. Its opposite, the solid self, is made of beliefs you've examined and own. It holds steady when the room disagrees.
ModelThree names, one pattern. Jung's persona, Winnicott's false self, and Bowen's pseudo self all describe a protective layer that keeps the real you safe underneath. Therapists who use Internal Family Systems describe it the same way: as a protective part doing its job, not an enemy to destroy. Some of it is healthy. Manners are a mild mask. It becomes a problem when the protector replaces the person it was protecting.
You may have heard that persona comes from per sonare, "to sound through," because the actor's voice sounded through the mask. That story is about 1,800 years old, from the Roman writer Aulus Gellius. Most modern linguists lean toward an older Etruscan root, phersu, a masked figure. Both roads end in the same place: a mask.
The mask was never the enemy. It was a bodyguard you forgot to dismiss.
02 of 10
What the mask is protecting
What are you so afraid they'll see?
Most of us assume we're hiding something bad. The research says it's stranger than that.
Psychologists draw a sharp line between two feelings. Guilt says, "I did a bad thing." Shame says, "I am a bad thing." Guilt points at a behavior you can fix. Shame points at you.
Shame is the one that builds masks. If the problem is who you are, the only fix that seems to work is hiding who you are.
But look at what people believe is underneath.
In 2018, a research team led by Julian De Freitas asked people in the United States, Russia, Singapore, and Colombia to judge what a person's "true self" is like. Across every group, people said the true self is morally good. Even people who openly distrust humanity believed it.
So we aren't guarding something rotten. We're guarding something we believe is good, and we're terrified it'll be rejected anyway.
And there's a second fear hiding behind the first.
Researchers who study social anxiety measure something called the fear of positive evaluation. It's discomfort with praise, attention, and standing out. If you shine, people expect more next time. If you shine, you get noticed. So some of us don't just hide our flaws. We hide our gifts.
If you've ever played down a talent so nobody would think you were showing off, you know this one.
MeasuredTwo fears, one mask. The fear of negative evaluation keeps your flaws hidden. The fear of positive evaluation keeps your strengths hidden. Researchers measure them separately, and both track with social anxiety.
Tangney, Stuewig and Mashek, 2007. De Freitas et al., 2018. Weeks, Heimberg and Rodebaugh, 2008.
Honesty flag
The true self studies measure what people believe about the self underneath. They don't prove everyone is good. They show that almost all of us assume it, which matters for how we treat each other.
You're not hiding because you're bad. You're hiding because you're afraid good won't be enough.
03 of 10
Empathy or erasure?
Is it a deep sense of empathy that gets in the way?
This is the question I kept circling. Do we hide because we care too much? Or is something else wearing empathy's clothes?
Science draws a clean line here. It's one of the most freeing lines I know.
Neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki separate two responses to someone else's pain. The first is empathic distress. You feel their pain as if it were yours, and your system wants out. The second is compassion. You feel warmth toward them and a pull to help, without drowning.
In their training studies, practicing empathy alone raised people's negative feelings. Practicing compassion afterward reversed that and raised positive feelings. Same people. Different skill.
Then there's a third pattern. Psychologists Heidi Fritz and Vicki Helgeson named it unmitigated communion: focusing on others to the exclusion of yourself. From the outside, it looks like kindness. Inside, it runs on a quiet fear. If I stop being useful, I stop being worth keeping.
Their data split the two apart. Ordinary care for others wasn't tied to distress. Care that erased the self was.
Psychologist Dana Jack gave the daily version a name: silencing the self. It's swallowing your thoughts, needs, and anger to keep a relationship calm. Her scale for measuring it has been linked to depression across many studies.
Three ways to care
Tap each one. Watch what happens to you in the picture.
Compassion
What it feels like
Warmth toward the other person. Steady inside.
Where it leads
Helping that lasts, because you are not drained by it.
You in the pictureFully
Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard and Singer, 2014
Honesty flag
Online, people pleasing is often called the "fawn response." That term comes from trauma therapy writing, not from a formal diagnosis. It can still be a useful mirror. Hold it as a lens, not a label.
Caring for others was never the problem. Forgetting you are one of the others is.
04 of 10
The rules nobody wrote
Whose rule are you following right now?
In 1993, Princeton psychologists Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller asked students how comfortable they were with the heavy drinking culture on campus. Then they asked how comfortable they thought the average student was.
Almost everyone believed they were less comfortable than everyone else. The whole campus was privately uneasy. Each student thought they were the only one.
Psychologists call this pluralistic ignorance. A room full of people follows a rule most of them don't believe in, because each one assumes the others do. In the study, male students even shifted their own attitudes over the semester toward a norm that wasn't really there.
That's how a lot of masks get made. Don't talk too much about what you love. Don't disagree. Don't be "too much." Nobody voted on these rules. We each assumed the rest of the room did.
I know this one personally. I spent years in healthcare, first as a nurse and later in nurse practitioner school. The pressure I felt was to stay quiet about the system. I eventually surrendered my nursing license so I could speak freely about what I saw without fear of losing it. That rule was never written anywhere. It lived in the silence.
Now, boundaries are real. Other people's boundaries deserve respect. But we don't have to limit ourselves to rules that never had our highest interest in mind. A boundary and an invented rule are not the same thing.
A boundary
Belongs to a real person.
Is stated out loud.
Protects someone's well-being.
Can be asked about and respected.
An invented rule
Belongs to a fear.
Is assumed, never said.
Protects your image.
Can't be checked, because nobody made it.
A boundary protects a person. An invented rule protects a fear.
05 of 10
Nobody is watching like you think
How many people do you think noticed?
The spotlight check
Picture walking into a room of peers wearing a shirt you find embarrassing. What percent of the room will remember it?
Your guess0%
Wearers guessed50%
Actually noticed23%
In 2000, Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his team had students put on a T-shirt with a big photo of Barry Manilow on the front. It had been pretested as embarrassing. Then each student walked into a room full of peers.
Afterward, the wearers guessed that about half the room had noticed. The real number was 23%. They named it the spotlight effect. We feel lit up. Everyone else is busy managing their own spotlight.
It gets better.
In 2018, Erica Boothby and her colleagues paired people for conversations, then asked each one two questions. How much did you like them? How much did they like you? Across five studies, people kept underestimating how much their partner liked them. They called it the liking gap. It showed up with strangers, with college roommates over months, and with members of the public at a workshop.
One more. Anna Bruk's team ran seven studies on showing vulnerability: admitting a mistake, asking for help, confessing feelings. When people imagined themselves doing it, they saw weakness. When they watched someone else do it, they saw courage. The researchers called it the beautiful mess effect.
23%
of the room actually noticed the shirt. Wearers guessed about half.
MeasuredGilovich, 2000
5
studies where people underestimated how much others liked them.
MeasuredBoothby, 2018
7
studies where our own vulnerability looked like weakness and others' looked like courage.
MeasuredBruk, 2018
Put those three together and a picture forms. The audience you're performing for is smaller, kinder, and more forgiving than the one in your head.
The spotlight lives mostly in your head. Step out of it and you'll find the room was rooting for you.
06 of 10
The mask leaks
Does hiding actually protect anyone?
This is the part that surprised me most. Masks don't stay sealed.
In 2003, Emily Butler, James Gross, and their colleagues paired strangers to talk about an upsetting topic. In some pairs, one person was secretly told to hide their emotions. The hiding disrupted the conversation. It raised blood pressure in the person hiding, and in their partner too. Rapport dropped. People were less interested in becoming friends.
Read that again. When you hide, the other person's body feels it.
So what works better? Gross separates two ways of handling a feeling. Suppression means feeling it fully and hiding it on your face. Reappraisal means changing how you read the moment, so the feeling itself shifts. In his research with Oliver John, people who habitually suppressed reported less positive emotion, weaker relationships, and lower well-being. People who habitually reappraised did better on all three.
The mask also follows you home. Columbia researcher Michael Slepian studied more than 13,000 secrets. The average person was carrying about 13 of them. The surprise was where the cost came from. It wasn't the moments of hiding in conversation. It was how often the mind wandered back to the secret when no one was around. That mind-wandering predicted lower well-being.
A review of 137 studies on self-concealment points the same way. The more people habitually hide personal information, the more distress they report.
Now flip it. A 2020 meta-analysis of 75 studies and more than 36,000 people found a solid link between authenticity and well-being.
13
secrets the average person carries. The cost comes from replaying them.
MeasuredSlepian, 2017
137
studies linking habitual self-concealment to more distress.
MeasuredLarson, 2015
r = .40
link between authenticity and well-being across 36,533 people.
MeasuredSutton, 2020
MeasuredWhen the mask isn't a choice. For many autistic adults, masking means forcing eye contact, scripting conversations, and hiding natural ways of self-regulating. Researchers call it camouflaging. People describe it as exhausting, and autistic adults link years of it to autistic burnout: deep fatigue and lost skills that rest repairs, not pep talks. Many ADHD adults describe something similar. If that's you, your mask may be about safety, not insecurity. Take it off where it's safe first.
Hull et al., 2017. Raymaker et al., 2020.
Honesty flag
The authenticity link is a correlation, and it may run both ways. Feeling good can make people feel more like themselves, and being themselves can make them feel good.
You may also read that hiding emotions causes inflammation. Some studies have tied habitual suppression to higher inflammation markers like C-reactive protein. Others found no direct link. Culture matters too: the social cost of suppression shrank among people who held Asian cultural values, where holding back can signal respect rather than fear. The honest summary is that hiding costs most when fear is driving it.
Hiding doesn't make you safe. It makes you hard to reach.
07 of 10
Mistakes are the curriculum
What if every mistake is a lesson with your name on it?
We all make mistakes every day. It's human nature. And the fear of making one is the glue that holds the mask on.
But look at how your brain is built. In 1993, a team led by William Gehring described an electrical signal that fires within about a tenth of a second after you make an error. It's called the error-related negativity. Your nervous system has a built-in alarm for mistakes because mistakes are information.
In 2017, Columbia psychologist Janet Metcalfe reviewed decades of research on learning from errors. Her conclusion: making errors and then getting corrective feedback improves learning. The errors people made with the most confidence were corrected best. She called it the hypercorrection effect.
So the mistake you were sure about may be one of the best teachers you'll ever have.
Trial and error is how a child learns to walk. It's also how an adult learns who they are. You cross a line. You notice how it feels. You adjust. Without the error, there's no data. Without the data, you keep wearing the costume because you never found out what fits.
Honesty flag
You'll see claims online that people make a set number of mistakes per day. There's no reliable count. What's measured is the error signal itself, and how errors plus feedback drive learning.
You may also hear about the "pratfall effect." In Elliot Aronson's 1966 study, a highly competent person became more likable after spilling coffee on himself. A 1970 follow-up found the bonus held only for people already seen as capable. So the lesson isn't "be sloppy." It's "be good at what you do, and be human about it."
Every mistake is a data point about who you are not. Collect enough of them and the real you comes into focus.
08 of 10
What we actually want
If we want to be seen so badly, why do we hide?
Go back to the three things. To be seen. To be heard. To be respected.
Psychologists Harry Reis and Phillip Shaver mapped how that actually happens between two people. They called it the interpersonal process model of intimacy. It works like a loop.
You share something real. The other person responds with care and understanding. You feel understood. So you share a little more.
When researchers tracked people's everyday conversations, closeness grew from exactly those two things: honest disclosure, and feeling that the other person really got you.
Here's the hard part. The loop only runs on the real thing.
If someone loves your mask, you can't fully feel it. Part of you knows they're responding to a character. That's the strange loneliness of being loved for a costume.
The internet makes this harder. Researchers studying the "Facebook self" found that people who presented a false version of themselves online also tended to report lower self-esteem and a weaker sense of being authentic.
I see this every day as a creator. The algorithm rewards a polished version of you. Then the culture says "be authentic," and people start performing vulnerability for views. That's just a new mask with better lighting.
MeasuredThe intimacy loop. Self-disclosure plus a partner's responsiveness predicted feelings of closeness in daily diary studies. Disclosure alone wasn't enough. Being received was the piece that made people feel close.
Reis and Shaver, 1988. Laurenceau, Barrett and Pietromonaco, 1998. Gil-Or, Levi-Belz and Turel, 2015.
You can't feel loved through a mask. Connection needs a face to land on.
09 of 10
The three keys
So how do we take it off?
Start with where you are. The audit below takes about a minute. Then use the three keys. They're simple on purpose.
The mask audit
Be honest. Nobody sees your answers but you.
0 of 8 answered
Your reading appears here
Answer all eight to see where your mask sits and which key to start with.
A reflection tool, not a diagnosis. If hiding feels tied to fear or past pain, a licensed therapist can help you take the mask off safely.
1
Assume good intent
Default to believing people are for you, until they show you otherwise.
MeasuredReading hostility into neutral moments is called hostile attribution bias. A 2019 meta-analysis of 111 studies linked it to more aggression. A 2024 meta-analysis found the habit can be retrained, with medium shifts toward kinder readings. And remember the true self studies: almost everyone already believes the person underneath is good. This key just extends that belief to the person in front of you.
ModelMy first draft of this key said "always assume everyone has your best intentions at heart." The research supports a better version. Assume good intent as your starting lens, not as blind trust. Keep your boundaries. Let people prove you right.
Try this todayThe next time a text feels cold, write down two kind explanations before you reply.
2
Lead with what lights you up
Do what you love, and talk about what energizes and excites you. That's your signal.
MeasuredPeople spend 30 to 40% of their speech sharing their own experiences. Harvard researchers Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell found that sharing about yourself activates the brain's reward system, and people even gave up money to do it. The reward grew when they knew someone would hear it.
Try this todayTell one person about the thing you can't stop thinking about. Watch who leans in.
3
Respect the not-for-you, follow the for-you
Some people won't care about what you love. Respect them. Then keep paying attention to the ones who do.
ModelThis is my working framework, built on the research above. If people like you more than you think, and many of the rules you fear breaking were never real, then being yourself costs less than you expect. It also works like a filter. The people who light up stay close and complete the intimacy loop. The people who don't drift away without drama.
Try this todayNotice one person who asks a follow-up question about your passion. Invest more time there.
Honesty flag
After you finally say the real thing, you may wake up the next morning thinking, "I said too much." Researcher Brené Brown calls this a vulnerability hangover. It's a popular term, not a lab-measured one, but most people know the feeling. It doesn't mean you made a mistake. It means you did something new.
When we stay open, we can always learn something new. About them, and about ourselves.
10 of 10
Stay open
Here's the thread that runs through every Lift the Veil transmission. The unseen shapes the seen.
Your hidden self isn't gone. It's still broadcasting under the mask, and people feel it, the same way the partners in the Butler study felt the suppression in their own bodies.
The mask made sense once. It kept you safe in a room that may not exist anymore.
You don't have to rip it off in one day. Lift it an inch. Say the true thing once. Share the passion once. Make the mistake and stay curious about it. Then do it again.
The world doesn't need a better mask. It needs your face.
Questions people ask
What is the pseudo self?
The pseudo self is the version of you built to be accepted rather than to be real. Psychology calls it the false self (Donald Winnicott), the persona (Carl Jung), or the pseudo self (Murray Bowen). It forms as protection, often early in life, by showing the parts of you that earned approval and hiding the parts that did not.
Who coined the term pseudo self?
Psychiatrist Murray Bowen used the term pseudo self in his family systems theory. He described it as a self built from borrowed beliefs and the pressure of the people around you. He contrasted it with the solid self, which is made of beliefs you have examined and own.
What is the difference between the true self and the false self?
In Winnicott's model, the true self is your spontaneous, felt sense of being alive and real. The false self is a protective layer that complies with what others expect. Some false self is healthy, like manners. It becomes a problem when it replaces the true self instead of protecting it.
Why do I feel like I wear a mask around people?
Usually because some part of you learned that being fully yourself was risky. Research shows we overestimate that risk. People notice our flaws less than we think (the spotlight effect) and like us more than we think after conversations (the liking gap).
Is people pleasing the same as empathy?
No. Empathy is feeling with someone. Compassion adds warmth and a desire to help. People pleasing looks closer to what researchers call unmitigated communion: focusing on others to the exclusion of yourself. Ordinary care is not linked to distress. Care that erases the self is.
How do I stop people pleasing without being rude?
Start small and stay kind. Assume good intent, say one true preference a day, and talk openly about what excites you. Respect people who do not share your interests, and invest in those who do. Honesty delivered with warmth is not rudeness.
Do people really notice my mistakes and awkward moments?
Far less than you think. In the classic spotlight effect study, students wearing an embarrassing T-shirt guessed about half the room noticed. Only 23% did. Other research shows people often see your vulnerability as courage, not weakness.
What is masking?
Masking, also called camouflaging, means hiding natural traits to fit in. In autism research it describes things like forced eye contact, scripted conversation, and hiding ways of self-regulating. Studies link long-term masking to exhaustion and autistic burnout. Everyone masks a little, but for neurodivergent people it often costs much more.
Is it ever healthy to wear a mask?
Yes. Work roles, manners, and discretion are normal and useful. Jung saw the persona as a necessary interface with the world. The goal is not zero masks. The goal is knowing when you are wearing one, and being able to take it off.
How do I find my authentic self?
Pay attention to what energizes you, then share it out loud. Make mistakes in low-stakes places and learn from the feedback. Notice who leans in. Authenticity is not found in one moment. It is collected through trial, error, and honest conversation.
The receipts
MeasuredReplicated researchModelA working framework, clinical or mine
Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., and Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211 to 222. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., and Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742 to 1756. doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
Bruk, A., Scholl, S. G., and Bless, H. (2018). Beautiful mess effect: Self and other differences in evaluation of showing vulnerability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2), 192 to 205. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000120
De Freitas, J., Sarkissian, H., Newman, G. E., Grossmann, I., De Brigard, F., Luco, A., and Knobe, J. (2018). Consistent belief in a good true self in misanthropes and three interdependent cultures. Cognitive Science, 42(S1), 134 to 160. doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12505
Weeks, J. W., Heimberg, R. G., and Rodebaugh, T. L. (2008). The Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale: Assessing a proposed cognitive component of social anxiety. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22(1), 44 to 55. doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.08.002
Butler, E. A., Egloff, B., Wilhelm, F. H., Smith, N. C., Erickson, E. A., and Gross, J. J. (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion, 3(1), 48 to 67. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.3.1.48
Gross, J. J., and John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348 to 362. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Butler, E. A., Lee, T. L., and Gross, J. J. (2007). Emotion regulation and culture: Are the social consequences of emotion suppression culture-specific? Emotion, 7(1), 30 to 48. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.30
Appleton, A. A., Buka, S. L., Loucks, E. B., Gilman, S. E., and Kubzansky, L. D. (2013). Divergent associations of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies with inflammation. Health Psychology, 32(7), 748 to 756.
Ospina, L. H., Beck-Felts, K., Ifrah, C., Lister, A., Messer, S., Russo, S. J., Gross, J. J., and Kimhy, D. (2022). Inflammation and emotion regulation: Findings from the MIDUS II study. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity: Health.
Prentice, D. A., and Miller, D. T. (1993). Pluralistic ignorance and alcohol use on campus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(2), 243 to 256. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.2.243
Singer, T., and Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875 to R878. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054
Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., and Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873 to 879. doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060
Fritz, H. L., and Helgeson, V. S. (1998). Distinctions of unmitigated communion from communion: Self-neglect and overinvolvement with others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 121 to 140. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.121
Jack, D. C., and Dill, D. (1992). The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of intimacy associated with depression in women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 16(1), 97 to 106. doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1992.tb00242.x
Slepian, M. L., Chun, J. S., and Mason, M. F. (2017). The experience of secrecy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 1 to 33. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000085
Larson, D. G., Chastain, R. L., Hoyt, W. T., and Ayzenberg, R. (2015). Self-concealment: Integrative review and working model. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 34(8), 705 to 729. doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2015.34.8.705
Sutton, A. (2020). Living the good life: A meta-analysis of authenticity, well-being and engagement. Personality and Individual Differences, 153, 109645. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109645
Rivera, G. N., Christy, A. G., Kim, J., Vess, M., Hicks, J. A., and Schlegel, R. J. (2019). Understanding the relationship between perceived authenticity and well-being. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 113 to 126. doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000161
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., and Mandy, W. (2017). "Putting on my best normal": Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519 to 2534. doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., and Nicolaidis, C. (2020). "Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew": Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132 to 143. doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
Gehring, W. J., Goss, B., Coles, M. G. H., Meyer, D. E., and Donchin, E. (1993). A neural system for error detection and compensation. Psychological Science, 4(6), 385 to 390. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00586.x
Aronson, E., Willerman, B., and Floyd, J. (1966). The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 4(6), 227 to 228. Followed by Helmreich, R., Aronson, E., and LeFan, J. (1970). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16(2), 259 to 264.
Reis, H. T., and Shaver, P. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal process. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of Personal Relationships (pp. 367 to 389). Wiley.
Laurenceau, J.-P., Barrett, L. F., and Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1238 to 1251. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1238
Gil-Or, O., Levi-Belz, Y., and Turel, O. (2015). The "Facebook-self": Characteristics and psychological predictors of false self-presentation on Facebook. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 99. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00099
Verhoef, R. E. J., Alsem, S. C., Verhulp, E. E., and de Castro, B. O. (2019). Hostile intent attribution and aggressive behavior in children revisited: A meta-analysis. Child Development, 90(5), e525 to e547. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13255
AlMoghrabi, N., Verhoef, R. E. J., Smeijers, D., Huijding, J., and van Dijk, A. (2024). The effects of cognitive bias modification on hostile interpretation bias and aggressive behavior: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Cognitive Therapy and Research.
Tamir, D. I., and Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(21), 8038 to 8043. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1202129109
Baumeister, R. F., and Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497 to 529. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
ModelWinnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. Reprinted in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965). Hogarth Press.
ModelJung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works Vol. 7.
ModelBowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.
ModelSchwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.
ModelBrown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. Gotham Books.
Chris Douglas (byCHRIS) is a Creative Technologist in Austin, TX. He built Unify the Self, a personal brand ecosystem that helps multi-passionate people unify who they are into one brand and a practical business, and he designs the content, web, and software to run it.
He holds a life sciences biology degree from Ottawa University and a nursing degree from the University of Saint Mary in Kansas. He worked in hematology, oncology, and pediatric transplant care, then trained in advanced pathophysiology and pharmacology in nurse practitioner school before leaving to build his own ecosystem. Lift the Veil is where science, technology, metaphysics, and AI meet, explained with research and simplicity.
