Dr. Spencer and Jeff explore "the two selves"—inner consciousness versus outer personas shaped by social contexts like work, family, or housing (e.g., Mark’s suppressed interests, Dave’s hidden drinking). They debate whether deception stems from shame or strategy, noting alignment between inner and outer selves improves psychological health, while prolonged concealment (LGBTQ+ closets, undercover agents) harms it. Real-life exposure triggers hostility, unlike fictional "mind-reading" feats, revealing dishonesty as a primal survival tool humans exploit unconsciously, offering insight into self-awareness and social competition. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm here today with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Oh, pretty good.
If anything we say here on this podcast is something you really strongly disagree with, I definitely want to hear from you at truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Please send all of your differences and complaints and differences of opinion to that email address, and I will respond.
Aside from that, we're going to do an interesting episode today.
It's something that I call the two selves.
Sounds kind of clunky, but here's how it works in my head.
So we each have two versions of ourselves.
The first version of ourself, the one I call the first anyway, is just the one that's on the inside of your head.
It's your actual consciousness.
It's your inner monologue.
You are the only one at this point in time, anyway.
You are the only one that really knows yourself on the inside.
And that's true for everyone.
We don't have a way to scan anyone's brain to interpret what's really going on there.
It's only you.
So getting to it right away.
The second version of yourself is the version that you tell people that you are.
And, you know, you don't tell people with words.
You represent yourself to the world.
You get dressed.
You make yourself look nice.
You shower.
You want to smell the right way.
You want to present yourself properly.
And not just properly, but in the right way to fit your social atmosphere.
Good idea, boss.
That sort of thing.
Right.
A social, a social survival suit.
Right.
So, in my opinion, we are doing this all the time.
And I think it's immediately, I think, some people, and I asked this myself.
I never took any psychology in school at all.
I immediately wonder if this is what was called the ego and superego of psychology.
I don't really know.
Someone might write in and tell me whether that's the case.
I have no idea.
But you don't need to have any kind of knowledge in psychology to understand what's happening here and that it's really happening.
I mean, if it weren't happening, then no one would understand the term inner monologue.
And when we're children, at some point, I do remember the time when I had to ask what the term inner monologue meant.
But as soon as it was explained to me, I knew exactly what it meant.
And I went, oh, there's a term.
Oh, yeah.
I don't like it's it's a pretty safe thesis.
I don't think you're going to get a lot of people calling in to argue this point, man.
I mean, it's pretty universally accepted thought that like everybody has some part of themselves that they keep from everyone else.
Like there's nobody out there entirely without guile.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
Some people do get a little upset at this notion, though, that I might be saying that they're being fake.
And I would humbly suggest that the most appropriate response to that would be the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Well, my response to that is that they should calm down.
And it sounds funny, but I'm not really being facetious.
They should calm down because everyone has the capability of being inauthentic.
Everyone has the ability to lie.
And this structure in our minds, there's a reason why everyone has this structure.
It's because it's just part of our biological makeup of our brain and how it works.
Everyone is able to do this.
It might be that some people have weird things.
You know, I mean, there's weird people who are unable to recognize faces, right?
I mean, there's oddball things happen with the brain and some small percentage of people have things.
And there might be someone who has no difference between their inner self and their outer self.
Maybe.
But for the vast majority of us, there is definitely, at very least, the potential for some difference between these two versions of ourselves.
And I humbly submit that there's always at least some air between these two things, some light that makes it through.
They're never exactly the same in anyone that I've met.
Now that we have this concept sort of fleshed out, I have some interesting questions that I just kind of ask myself.
And usually when I think about these things, I have to just answer them to myself.
And it's a boring conversation.
So I'm glad to have you here.
Fair enough.
So do you think, Jeff, that we might have, as to the outer self, the second self, we might have separate versions of this when we're in different social spaces.
Like we might be at work and we might give the people we know at work a different, slightly different version of ourselves than we might give the people at home.
Oh, 100%.
Absolutely.
But like it goes beyond even that.
Like you're going to present a different outer self to the people that you work with than you're going to share with the people that you play baseball with on after work and on weekends, and even a different version to your kid's teacher when you sit down with them for a PTA meeting, and yet another different version for your kids and their peer group.
We have, I think most of us anyways, have a whole bunch of different masks that we put on in a day.
Yeah, I mean, we've often heard the expression: someone might say, oh, I knew Mark, but I didn't know him that way because this fictional person I just made up named Mark reacted and acted differently around the person who was relating that thing about him than Mark did around other people.
And so other people knew him differently than that person.
And that's, you know, it seems really elementary.
And I think social media is probably something that's kind of popped a bit of a bubble on that because it becomes a lot harder to hide either your true self or nature and or other versions of your outer self if you pollute social media with extroversion through any of those faces, right?
Like it's a common employer's recruiting tactic now to check the social media pages of people applying for work.
Right.
Common tactic of landlords to check social media.
And I don't mean to derail this off into an explanation of social media, but I think it's a good point.
There's a common tactic of landlords to check prospective tenants, social media to see if there's like a shit ton of partying posts because that might make them a bad tenant.
Yeah.
So I think as a people, maybe it would be an interesting theory to explore that we have gotten maybe more transparent because we have to, because we are just a less private society than we used to be.
And having a successful sort of nature-demeanor relationship, like inner self and outer self, for that to be successful, nobody can see your inner self.
So social media and reduced privacy is kind of anathema to that.
I think, first of all, there's, I worry that you conflated two things here.
I think you have a very strong point about social media and the ability for people to see you in other social situations all over the place.
We have an outer self, but among different social groups, we might have multiple versions of our outer self.
And I think in this day and age, what you're saying here is that all those outer selves have to match and not contradict with each other at the very least, or perhaps even be closing in on just one outer self.
At no point do I think that's really, you know, moving past to the inner self.
I think a lot of people are attempting to be honest, but that's not the same thing as like complete true and 100% honesty in every moment of your life.
That's those are different things.
But what you point out, I think, is leads to an interesting new question that I hadn't considered before.
For those of us who have sort of different versions of our outer self that we use in different social circles, is that a thing that's helping us psychologically?
Is attempting to collapse all those into just one version potentially damaging?
Is it or like give us some of us fewer defenses, if you will, right?
Because the outer self is sort of like a defense mechanism.
What do you think?
Well, I think I don't know if I would consider the behavior to be like the behavior of creating these sort of multiple masks, although everybody does it.
I don't think it's necessarily healthy behavior or even, you know, necessarily productive behavior.
But like sort of the old adage of, you know, always tell the truth because it's the easiest thing to remember.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Like I know, I know people in my life and social circles who I see like get stressed out at the pressures of having to put on different faces for different groups and look this way for work and that way for that group of friends and this way for this group of friends.
And it's, I consider it to be largely unnecessary behavior, generally bred from not being comfortable in one's own skin.
Yeah.
Like there's, there's only, there's only really a reason why you would hide who you are, and that's if you're not happy with who you are.
And before this devolves into some navel-gazing self-actualization infomercial, I will concede the point that like mechanically, the act of putting on these masks, you know, sometimes it's it's just a measured tactic.
For the previous example, like a guy who likes to drink still needs a place to live.
So obviously, if he interviews for that place and gets the impression that the landlords are not interested in renting to someone who likes to party, obviously he's going to try and downplay that.
Now, is it because he's ashamed of his behavior or just because he needs a place to live?
So he hides that as a survival tactic to get a place to live.
But I'm thinking more along the lines of like, I guess the best example would be like, and sorry if I offend anyone with a gender stereotype, but high school girls.
They are notoriously well known for social bullying tactics.
And I think probably the most prone to anxiety over trying to appear or act or behave a particular way for no other reason than the vague, unattainable goal of air quote, fitting in.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
I think high school girls probably experience more social pressures than almost anyone.
And I think like largely it's wasted behavior.
Yeah.
Like other than the handful of examples of like, you know, again, drinking's legal, but he wants to drink, go ahead.
But he wants to hide it so he can find a place to live.
Well, whatever works.
If it's a dispassionate measured tactic, then what, you know, whatever ails you.
Another more, more poignant example that maybe doesn't involve vice would be like, you know, I'm a very strong pro-union, pro-labor advocate.
I've worked union jobs most of my life and given the choice.
I'll always work a union job.
But there have been times where I've been laid off and looking for work and interviewing at a non-union contractor.
And you can bet your butt, I do my best to appear like just a general head down ass up, hardworking Joe who has no aspirations or, you know, beliefs or, you know, anything like that about unionism in the workplace because I need a job.
There are times when it happens, I think, dispassionately and tactically, but when the motivation is more generalized social anxiety or FOMO, I think it's largely wasted and unhealthy behavior.
I mean, I'm thinking in that regard, I'm thinking you'll have Mark.
I already used Mark as a fictional character.
So Mark has a home and a family.
He's a good dad.
He's close with his kids.
He does all the dad stuff.
He watches shows with his wife that his wife enjoys, you know, whatever they are.
And then he goes to work.
He works construction and everyone there is blue collar, hardy, manly man.
And it's easier for him to just put on a different persona that more easily allows him to fit in at work without having to, you know, relate all the things that they wouldn't appreciate about his home life than it is to try to make them conform to respect him for his home life.
Even though that's kind of sad, it is just easier for him.
You know what I mean?
And that's.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And that's, again, one of those like dispassionate, tactical.
Yeah.
You know, I'm not emotionally invested in these people, but I want, I need to earn a living and I want to get along with the people around me.
Yeah.
But like that, that also sort of leads to that herd mentality thing and all the nastiness that goes with it that we talked about, I think, in another episode.
Yeah.
So that brings me directly to my next question that I ponder with in myself when I'm thinking about this topic.
When you take the collection of things, like if you take your inner self and your outer self, let's say there's only one version of yourself.
It's not, there's not multiple versions, but there's just one.
And there's differences between the inner self and the outer self.
Let's call it something simple, like your guilty pleasure.
Mark's guilty pleasure is Justin Bieber songs, and he never lets anyone know that he likes them.
Right.
So his inner self really likes Justin Bieber.
His outer self would never admit it to anyone.
So my question about this is, if you take all the things that are different between your inner and outer self in the same way that in that example, Justin Bieber's songs for this fictional person, Mark, if you took all of those things, would that be the entire collection of all the things that would embarrass you or make you feel some kind of shame?
Like, could you make it an equation?
The equation would need, I think, some outliers because there are certain universal things that cause almost all people shame, like say being caught about naked in public.
Right.
Right.
Or like physically soiling oneself, right?
Nature or demeanor, everybody would be embarrassed if they messed their pants.
Yeah, that wouldn't be a voluntary thing.
You're right.
That would be, yeah, right.
Something you couldn't control.
But of all the things you could decide.
Don't think that the collection of all of the differences between one's nature and one's uh, the face one shows the world.
I don't think the collection of all of those things is all of the things that cause embarrassment, but without question they do all cause embarrassment.
Like there would be nothing on that list that would not cause shame.
In the venn diagram, the difference between your inner and outer self, all those things would cause embarrassment.
But then the collection of things, total things, that would cause embarrassment would be a larger circle around that circle right away, even include other things that aren't just that different.
And again, some of the stuff would just like, like you know my example of uh, you know, Dave the drunk, like he doesn't necessarily have any shame about the fact that he likes to be, likes to party all weekend, but he's going to hide it if it means he won't have a place to live, that doesn't mean he feels shame over it.
Right same thing with with my unionism.
I would hide that from any non-union employer job interview.
Yeah, because I know it would ruin my chances of getting that job, but I feel no shame over the fact that i'm a proud union worker.
Excellent point yeah okay, all right.
All right.
So that one.
I think we've put a spear in that one.
That was, uh, that was a thought I had, but you've thoroughly debunked it.
I think it's a valid thought, I just think it's it's not a thought that can be expressed in absolute terms.
So in the venn diagram, there's the two circles, and they're partly overlapping each other yeah right, okay.
And then there's another circle that overlaps both of them, that is, things which cause us shame, and that circle's position in relation to the other two varies based on that particular individual's proclivity for shame.
Yeah, because that's another variable in that equation, that that you didn't touch on.
Aren't shame and embarrassment just the same thing?
Well yeah, but like there are lots of people out there who have very minimal shame but have no problem with putting on fake faces for people if it gets them something.
Oh, I see, so they would be inauthentic for gain.
Yeah, I see, exactly.
Okay, all right, I guess that covers your case of, uh, Dave the drunk yeah, lying to his landlord yeah, and then probably partying his ass off anyway once he's in.
Yeah okay yeah, Dave the drunk, or Urkel the union man, I don't know.
It's getting complicated.
We might need a chart at the at the end of this.
Okay.
So next question I have on this topic is, is there some kind of like Overton window here?
Like an Overton window is is when the social mores change from one time period to another.
Yeah, so if you had a thing that you did when you were a teenager and you weren't in any way you know a shame by at the time, but then now, looking back on it, you're kind of ashamed of doing it, is this a sign that you have changed either one or the other of your inner or outer selves on this?
Does that make sense?
That that question it felt kind of clunky.
Uh, I think phrasing it in terms around teenager to adulthood transition uh, would set it would set up a lot of false positives.
Because well okay, let's say, let's say it wasn't teenager, let's say you were in college and you did things in college.
At the time you were totally fine.
So let's say it's simple and it's about Mark.
Mark used to do drugs all the time.
He did cocaine when he was in college.
He was rich and he could afford cocaine and he did cocaine and he had no problem with that at all.
But Mark has changed.
He's graduated college, he's moved on in his life, he's got a family and he's working now and he's and he moved past that he doesn't do drugs anymore and he looks back on that time of his life.
He doesn't really admit to it, he doesn't talk about it.
He maybe he made some terrible choices then, I don't know.
And he feels that.
I mean, he still recognizes himself when he has memories of himself having having done those things, but he's ashamed now of a thing he did then.
Right, and so is this a case where we have two selves and both of those selves are changing through time and maybe they're even changing at different rates.
I mean literally, in mathematical terms.
We're doing calculus, multivariable calculus, on two different things and they're both changing at different rates, not even necessarily in the same direction.
Yeah, and I would.
I would hazard a guess that like, the one of the biggest variables to rate of change would be like the level of security of their social environment.
Like a person who's got laid-back, open-minded friends who don't ask a lot of them right, who has an open and welcoming home, that's always happy to see them get home from work, you know, a loving spouse, loving children, a job that doesn't suck, this person has very little reason to hide who they are, if they've surrounded themselves with people who who are supportive, who are supportive but also uh, perhaps understanding yeah, and and maybe um,
similar like we had a previous episode about tribalism and I didn't want to use the word tribe, it's my noun there, but it's the only one I can think of if you've found friends who think similarly to you and on points where you disagree, they respect your right to disagree and it doesn't get heated, then you don't need to hide yourself from those friends.
If you've got a job where you're valued for your work as an employee and nobody asks anything about your personal life, or you know you're surrounded by, you know co-workers whose company you enjoy, who you're also friendly with, and everybody gets along, you don't have to put on a lot of faces at work.
And same thing holds true with your home life, like if you're, you know you got a good thing going with your spouse and good relationships with your kids, then there isn't any real need for social subterfuge.
Unless you know you're like a serial killer or something right, but like most well-adjusted people who find themselves in a well-adjusted environment, I think, have little need for this survival skill.
But those situations change vastly over time right, so uh.
So yes, absolutely.
Like long story short?
Yes, I agree, absolutely.
They have different rates of change and I I can state rather equivocally from personal experience that one very easily can bleed into another.
Like if you pretend you're something for long enough, you will become it.
Right.
It's, it's one of the reasons why I believe that it's really important that we should never be silently complicit in issues when we witness examples of like actual bigotry or racism.
Yeah.
Because if enough people don't do anything about it, someone's going to become it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This transitions nicely into the next question I have, which I think I probably already know the answer to from your perspective, but that's okay.
We'll still ask it.
Do you think we as humans are more psychologically healthy when there is very little difference between our inner self and our outer self?
You know, like I'm thinking about the potential for a very big problem for a person to have to keep a very big secret for a very long time about themselves.
Like, you know, we hear about people who are living in the closet with their sexuality or their gender even.
Yeah.
And they feel like they can't tell anyone.
And they feel it on the inside that they are one way and then they have to act a completely different way on the outside.
And I'm wondering if this is just a thing that's always going to be psychologically fraught.
I agree completely, 100%, unequivocally.
Yeah.
Yes.
We're way, we're far more psychologically healthy when our inner and outer self are closely aligned.
Right.
Your example of like sexuality and gender identity issues, I think is probably the most poignant example of that.
But there's been stories of spies and police officers who had to go undercover for a very long time.
And they don't always come out of it the same as they went in because they were putting on a persona that was so drastically different than what they were feeling on the inside.
Yeah.
And that's, that's another example.
That's.
Well, and the other, like, the other thing is like in the example of the high school girls that we talked about.
Like if you're, if you're bouncing between multiple social circles and putting on a different mask for everyone, like setting aside the emotional implications of basing your self-worth on how well you can mimic and provide a mirror to a group of other people to convince them you're just like them.
Yeah.
It's just a physically and mentally exhausting exercise.
Yeah.
Like constantly having to flip between different demeanors and keep track of how you're supposed to think with this group of people versus how you're supposed to act, think and act with that group of people.
It's just exhausting.
It's taxing and it's wasted resources for your body and mind.
Right.
Yeah.
I have an interesting thought myself about when I look at other people with this inner and outer self dynamic in mind.
I'm always very careful.
I've always found it to be somewhat detrimental to be able to sort of see things about a person that they didn't tell me themselves.
It's not something that people normally take well.
You know, I mean, we read stories, you know, Sherlock Holmes could read people very well.
He could see all the little clues about a person.
He could see them.
Another character, more modern that was based on Holmes was on a TV show called House.
Oh, yeah.
And I think on the show house, they demonstrated this much more aptly than it's ever demonstrated in Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes.
Everyone is devastatingly impressed by Sherlock Holmes and his ability to find out the truth about a person.
And even the person he's seeing into is impressed.
But on the show house.
He just pisses people off.
They hate him for it.
Almost no one is impressed.
They don't, you know, they made the difference between their inner outer selves for a reason and they're not happy that someone saw past it in any way, even a little, because that is a curtain that they drew across a part of themselves and they have another view on the curtain that they're meaning people to see.
And anyone who sees past it that they didn't purposely let in, it's almost like an intrusion.
And I've felt this a long time in my life that knowing something about a person that they didn't tell you is like some kind of intrusion into their life that they, you know, I should, I should wait for them to volunteer that info before I acknowledge that I know it kind of thing.
I might be able to tell, but it's not that I should start talking to them about it because they might not want anyone to know or what have you, right?
Our media, our television shows and movies, they do this all the time where one character will sort of read another character and just see past all the things.
And they don't do it because that's a real thing people do.
They do it on those shows because they need to get everyone on board and know everything about everyone.
And they have to tell the audience what's true as well.
Yeah, exposition is required to get the audience on side.
Right.
But it's, I think, in seeing it so often in our popular media, we sometimes get the impression or get fooled into thinking that this is a thing that, you know, is okay or really occurs or something like that.
I always find those moments to be just fake character moments.
I see right through them.
It's obvious that they're just trying to tell us that character B is hiding something and character A knows what it is or whatever.
And then now they both know and they can talk about it.
And in talking about it, they tell us more of the plot or whatever.
Exposition, exposition.
What I see in this and what I remember from my youth, most of my memories of experiences with bullies were from my youth.
I don't know if any of the bullies were attempting to do this on purpose, consciously, but it seems to me that a common tactic for bullies was to purposefully try to see past this to some version of your inner self, because to the person they're bullying, that made that person much more vulnerable.
If you could point out to everyone and then ridicule you for it, the thing that's really behind you.
If you were attempting to put on a front of that you were just one of the guys or whatever, and then they try to point out that you're not or that you're different in some way that you were trying to hide.
That's a win for them.
And it's very difficult for especially a younger person whose self is still kind of in flux and forming to completely recover from that.
They don't have the wherewithal to continue to fake it usually.
So with that, I think we're pretty much done with this topic.
Once again, we've talked about a thing.
We have no firm results of almost anything.
But I will say that this is an interesting thing for me because it almost describes sort of the mechanics of dishonesty, if you will, right?
In almost every moment that we're dishonest, this is playing a role in that dishonesty.
And it's really the mechanics inside us that allow us to be consciously dishonest.
And so, I mean, it's a powerful survival tool.
Everyone understands.
Well, maybe not everyone, but most people, for sure.
I think that by now, all the biologists have done enough work to show that dishonesty is part of the toolkit for survival.
And all the animals do it.
Every single one, they participate in dishonesty in some way or other.
And humans are very good at it.
And of course, at the point where we became the top of the food chain, the thing that was allowing us to better survive was the thing that allowed us to be more effectively dishonest with each other rather than just lying to the other animals that would be preying upon us.
And that's the reason why we've developed such an efficient method of doing it.
It's a method so efficient that many of us don't even realize how or why we're doing it.
But hopefully this helps people to kind of see a little bit more about themselves and other people in this context to try to understand them a little more.