Some people cultivate being “pretenders” much of their lives. How they present themselves as on the outside doesn’t equal who they are on the inside. Sometimes we see this in businessmen who are not very successful but like to appear so. “$600.00 Armani suits with a $100.00 Waterman pen in his pocket, but he hasn’t made $10,000.00 in years”, this is how a client of mine described her pretentious husband.
Emotionally and spiritually it’s dangerous to let oneself drift into becoming a pretender. Doing so impedes your progress toward personal development, and what’s really alarming is that the person will tend to believe in his own delusions after a while. When that happens, it’s difficult to determine what’s truth and what’s fiction.
At a deeper level, what is the significance of this process, and how does it come to pass? During the maturation of a young man, his challenge is to eventually assume the mantle of patriarchy from father and take it on himself. This is a difficult task, scary and ominous sometimes, certainly no simple feat. It means the young man comes to peership, and beyond, with his father. The father cannot give this mantle to his son. That would only continue the dependency. The son must acquire it on his own.
In therapy I often see young men who have never stood up to their parents. A most glaring example happens when the parents criticize the son’s wife, for at that point the son has to choose. Will he side with his parents, or his wife? If it’s correct to stand with his wife and he does not, due to fearing upsetting his parents and gaining their displeasure, then he fails to grow. What is he to do? In this I am not simply advocating being rude to parents as this is only partially about standing up to parents…..it’s much moreso about standing up for self.
At this point the pretender aspect has the opportunity to gain a foothold in the young man’s personality. The young man knows that he cannot adequately “get on” in the world not being grown-up, authoritative. A the inner level he knows he is not authoritative. But he is in a conflict; he has to be authoritative to function in the outer world. So he learns to pretend. He acts the part. His acting has a certain ring of inauthenticity about it, but he deafens himself to noticing this reality. And the longer this goes on, the more entrenched and difficult to reverse the pattern becomes. This is just one possible genesis of the pretender.
What’s the antidote to this situation? As simplistic as it sounds, learning to be yourself. Trusting your instincts, sticking to your principles. Giving up trying to be something other than what you are, something bigger than who you are. When this happens, it can be a time of real crisis in one’s personal life…but it can also be a tremendous opportunity. Many people enter therapy to “find themselves”, having lost themselves by going down a road that really wasn’t them.
Chase E. Kneeland, M.Div. LMFT 