The Great Confusion Between Feeling and Being
In our culture, “being real” often means saying what’s on your mind, expressing your feelings out loud, and being unapologetically expressive—especially when it’s messy.
Emotion equals authenticity.
Reactivity equals truth.
And if someone can’t handle your “realness,” well, that’s their problem.
“Being real” is often just being reactive—a knee-jerk response, a nervous system pattern, a defense dressed up as honesty? What if underneath the drama, volume, or intensity is something not fully formed, not fully free, not fully you? To gain a clearer understanding of this, we need to disentangle two distinct concepts of the “true self”—one rooted in psychology, the other in timeless spiritual traditions.
Both have something vital to say about the mistake we keep making when we confuse reaction with authenticity.
Winnicott’s True Self: Spontaneous, Felt, and Formed in Relationship
British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott provided us with a profoundly compassionate understanding of what it means to feel real. In his framework, the True Self is born when a child’s spontaneous gestures—such as reaching, cooing, crying, and creating—are met by a responsive caregiver.
This attuned mirroring helps the child feel that their inner experience is real, valid, and safe to express. The result? The child grows into a person who trusts their own internal world.
- They don’t need to put on a performance to be loved.
- They don’t collapse or explode when unseen.
- They have a quiet, continuous thread of “being”—what Winnicott called going-on-being.
But when those early needs aren’t met—when the environment is misattuned or unsafe—the child develops what Winnicott called the False Self. This adaptation mimics what others want. It performs, manages, pleases, and protects. It works—sometimes brilliantly. However, it often leaves the person feeling hollow, disconnected, and unreal on the inside.
Now here’s the key: Winnicott’s True Self is not about emotional rawness. It’s not about yelling, sobbing, or telling it like it is.
It’s about feeling alive, spontaneous, and unpressured—being in touch with our emotional state without identifying with it, which brings a deeper aliveness precisely because we’re no longer defending against what we feel.
When someone is reactive—triggered, volatile, dramatic—they may believe they’re “being real.” But more often than not, they are reenacting early unmet needs, trying to feel genuine by acting out emotions. This isn’t authenticity. It’s an unintegrated cry.
Being Real Means Being No One
Now let’s look East. In Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism, the concept of the “true self” isn’t developmental—it’s ontological. It doesn’t emerge through a secure relationship. It isn’t cultivated over time. It’s already here. It is the ground of being, the silent witness, the ungraspable is-ness behind all thoughts and emotions.
In Hinduism, it’s Atman, the innermost essence that is one with Brahman. In Buddhism, paradoxically, it’s Anatta—no-self—a direct seeing that there is no fixed self at all. In Taoism, it’s the Tao—the way that cannot be named.
This “self” doesn’t need to express anything to be real. It just is. It is not the content of experience—it is the awareness of experience. Not the sadness, but the space in which sadness arises. Not the anger, but the stillness that watches it burn. Not the story, but the silence before the story begins. From this view, reactivity is the farthest thing from being real. It’s identification with the wave, forgetting you are the ocean.
Two True Selves, One Common Confusion
Winnicott’s True Self says: You are real when you are not performing for love.
The Eastern view says: You are real when you realize there is no “you” performing at all.
These are not competing truths. They are layers.
Winnicott speaks to the personal self and its need for coherence. The East speaks to the impersonal truth that transcends personality altogether.
Here’s where things go sideways. We confuse emotional reactivity with Winnicott’s concept of authenticity. Then we confuse Winnicott’s authenticity with spiritual realization.
- We treat catharsis as growth.
- We treat breakdowns as breakthroughs.
- We think being loud is being honest.
- We think being raw is being awake.
But just because something is intense doesn’t mean it’s true.
The Great Impersonator
Reactivity often feels authentic because it’s charged. It’s fast. It’s embodied. It overwhelms the system and makes us feel something—which, in a numbed-out world, can feel like coming alive. But reactivity is not grounded in presence. It does not arise from a coherent center. It is a compulsion masquerading as truth. When someone says, “I’m just being real,” it often means: “This is how it is—don’t ask me to pause, reflect, or feel beneath the surface.”
True Realness is Spacious
Being real is not the same as being expressive.
Being expressive is not the same as being present.
Being present is not the same as being identified.
Realness is what happens when we stop needing to prove anything. When we can feel our feelings without collapsing into them. When we can express ourselves without trying to convince or control others. When we can tell the truth and stay connected to silence.
A Pause Before the Performance
Next time you feel the urge to “be real,” ask:
Am I reacting—or revealing?
Am I closer to presence—or farther away? the
Am I expressing from my center—or from charge?
And most importantly: Who is the one being real? The inner child seeking repair? The adult self reclaiming aliveness? The silent witness, needing nothing?
The Stillness Beneath the Storm
To be real isn’t to emote.
It’s to be.
To contact the ground beneath the emotion.
To live from what doesn’t flinch, doesn’t flood, and doesn’t disappear.
The culture says, “Say your truth.”
The psyche says, “Feel your truth.”
But Being says nothing. It just waits, unmoved, for remembering.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to rediscover the soul beneath behavior. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.