We don’t enter adulthood as a “blank” self — we arrive as a self that once kept us safe.

As children, we all learned what parts of us were welcomed, and what parts of us were not. We learned what got connection, what got attention, what kept us out of conflict. We built an identity around that. That identity was adaptive — it was survival.

The problem is: once we grow up, we don’t update the operating system — we keep running the same old scripts. We confuse what feels familiar with what feels like love. We seek recognition through strategies that once protected us but now limit us. And without realizing it, we hand the same unconscious patterns down to our children.

This talk is about three things:

1 — how the “false self” is formed

2 — how it keeps running our adult lives and our parenting