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Hi all,
I had an important insight just the other day (partially thanks to this very forum) of just how profoundly I am still trying to maintain my facade. And I realize that if I can go straight for the heart on this BIG one, I will be a completely different (and way more loving) person.

I hear Jesus talking in the videos about speaking exactly what is on our minds, being real, being transparent etc. I have little fantasies of saying what I am really thinking about a person, but then of course I don't because the things I restrain myself about are usually judgmental or might cause anger to be directly at me (which I have been trying to avoid at all costs). But what would it be like? Could I really do that? Is that really loving?

I feel that I learned to build my facade because I was judged so early and regularly in my life, so I thoroughly believe (still) that facade is my protection. From the moment I was born as a girl instead of the boy that was wanted, and born the "wrong" way also ("bassackwards" they used to say), I began early to try to be what would get me approval: the smart, strong, industries, tough-to-the-elements tomboy that daddy wanted, and for 'God's' sake don't do it wrong! Crying and being wimpy was also not allowed without repercussions. I also used to wet the bed well into my teens, and I found it essential to hide this fact, and hide each incident lest my family attack me with their judgements, disappointment, blames, condescensions, etc. So I got really hooked on making myself out to be something other than the Truth. And now its all about avoiding emotions of feeling ashamed (like about my true emotional condition), avoiding anger projections and not wanting to do it wrong (judgement projections), among other things.

So clearly, dismantling my facade will involve feeling what seems like a mountain of emotions.

So I want to ask the group if anyone has done that experiment. Have you just decided one day to stop being in facade? Stop the fake smiles, the placating, the pretending to be what you are, in Truth, NOT?

I realize I have a tendency (learned) to push myself and now that I re-read this post, I can feel that error within it. I am certainly interested in hearing other's experiences of working through their facades, but I recognize that facades don't just disappear overnight just because we change our behavior. Certainly it is important to stop being dishonest or unloving to others if we are aware of it, and that will bring up key emotions to feel, but to imply that healing a facade which has taken a lifetime to create can be done through the use of a strong will (which I have) without the growth in Love feels like a mistake, and likely to end in failure and more self punishment.

Today I can see that more trust in God and the loving process that God created to unravel all the errors within me is the way (Way!) to go. I don't need to attack my facade. I just need to keep praying for more Divine Love to enter my soul, keep softening, and keep feeling as best I can each moment of every day.

Hi Jennifer,

I just read your thread here. As I shared in my introduction post I have been working on my facade for a few years now.

Here are a few more general things I have learned:

Working through the steps of denial, awareness and willingness to let go of our façade really does happen and does work.

Jesus' presentation about this process and his outline are a great summary of what is involved. I find that I am at various stages in that process on different issues all the time. I don't overthink it, or get too hung up on the steps, but at times it really does help to look at that stuff and realise where I am at and what I have yet to let go of in order to be truly clear of the issue involved.

I've begun to conceptualize that my façade entails anything I think, do, or feel that keeps me away from awareness of, sensitivity to, and feeling of, my real feelings.

Along with the obvious things like downplaying myself physically and emotionally, or presenting myself as happy or together when I don't feel it etc. this includes things like:
- self judgement and self punishment
e.g. of my fear as weak, of myself as crazy to feel what I feel and believe what I believe, of my softness and gentleness as weak (Basically I have a lot of nasty stuff I tell myself about being weak and stupid for allowing myself to be abused in the first century)
e.g. if I uncover my real feelings I'll discover I am at my core an immoral slut or a mean spirited person, no one could ever love me, I'm useless as a woman (Again I have a lot of nasty stuff I tell myself about sexual immorality and the death of my son in the first century)
- defending false beliefs so as to avoid feeling my fears
e.g. there is no point releasing fear, bullies always win

Repeating all this stuff to myself in a harsh way, is a technique I use to stay away from feeling my real feelings. Of course, as I connect to my hurt self some of these false beliefs are experienced emotionally but my façade is pretty adept at telling me that these things aren't feelings but rather that they are truths – and therefore there is no point feeling them.

I have also found that some of the false stuff I tell myself doesn't even relate to an emotion that I need to feel through – it is just pure distraction from my real issues.

I point this dynamic out, as deconstructing the façade involves deconstructing a lot of the tricky ways we 'live in' emotions rather than experience them.

(When we 'live in' emotions we allow them to direct our actions and reactions to life. When we experience our emotions and false beliefs we no longer let them direct us, we feel them instead. When we 'live in' emotions about a certain subject we completely avoid God's Truth on that matter).

When I first started to think about my façade I thought about it as something that I used only with others in order to get love and approval from them. I saw it as a mask that I presented only to the world.

I have since felt two important things that contradict my original thoughts:
1. My façade is built (by me) to keep my hurt self away from view and notice not just from others but from myself.

I can't emphasise how important it was in my progress to recognise that I was maintaining a whole bunch of untruthful stories and statements – to myself, about myself – in order to avoid feeling my emotions.

The investments in this are clear. That is, when I deny what I really feel then I don't have to feel it. For example, if I can tell myself I'm not angry and that I really want truth, then I don't have to feel my anger or resistance to truth.

Also, when I'm dishonest with myself, it is easier to be dishonest with others. I don't feel like such a faker with others if I have convinced myself that what I am presenting to others is what I truthfully think and feel.

Another big 'moment' in progression was to feel just how dishonest, and therefore unloving towards others, my façade actually is. This truth remains a big motivator for me in deconstructing my façade.

2. While my façade might gain me shallow, meaningless approval in some situations from people who aren't interested in the real me and only want things from me, it doesn't get me love! In fact, in my façade, even when a person does really love me, I don't receive.

I wrote more about that in my intro thread:

Jesus has been talking with me lately about how I often falsely believe that it is safer to detune from myself and my feelings in the company of others and try to be what I think they want me to be. I think that this is 'safer' because I believe that it reduces the risk of being attacked or rejected. He has wisely pointed out that people who want to love and accept me will do so without my façade, and those who have unloving, attacking emotions within them are still going to have those projections at some point until they deal with them – regardless of how I try to manipulate them and the situation with them by using a façade. By detuning from my own feelings in order to create my façade I also diminish my sensitivity to other people's emotions and so I place myself in potentially dangerous situations where I can't accurately tell what people's true intentions towards me are.

I am still working on feeling just how unloving it is towards myself when I hold onto my façade. I still have the false belief that staying trying to control situations in order to away from fear makes me safer. I am not yet soft to how much danger I expose myself to in my façade. I'm also not yet sympathetic or compassionate towards my own errors in love or what drives my facade. I resist loving my body and my emotions. I recently began to feel that many of my desires to punish my body and my lack of regard for my own worth and safety relate to memories of sexual abuse and rape from the first century that I haven't processed.

Hope all that is of some help.

Love
Mary

HI Mary,
I am really touched by your care and your willingness to let us in to your process. Thank you. Yes, it is very helpful.

So many awarenesses have come, mostly in this last year, about how much denial I have been living in. Each time it happens, I am amazed at how I could have so completely believed the lie. My resistance is far more powerful than I realized. Jesus would say that I typically responded to 'challenge' (my word, can't remember his) with rage or avoidance. The extent of this truth has revealed itself over and over since then. Mary, you brought up at the US assistance group how I let spirits manipulate me, and that too has become more and more noticeable to me. Even now I can feel the pressure of them which makes it hard to write. They tap into my belief that what I have to say is (and I too am) not valuable. Here come the tears.

I do feel that the time I spend praying and feeling with God has helped me to become more and more sensitive (to everything it seems!), and I believe my desire is growing too, so, slowly, the tricky multi-facets of my facade are one by one showing themselves. I have to be careful, though when I do see my facade in action that I don't go into self-judgement and the pushing myself to 'get rid of' the 'wrong' stuff in me.

The truth is, I am NOT a happy person most of the time. I am NOT very loving much of the time. So, I do want to discover who I really am under all this fear. Everything else God made is amazing, wonderful, beautiful, brilliant and full of love, so why not me too? (ooh that's hard to say).

I will watch Jesus's presentations on facade again too. I am starting all over again to revisit all his lectures. I am STUNNED at how I am hearing things and connecting the dots in totally different ways than the last time I listened to them.

And one last thing I want to say is that I am realizing that the arrogance within me (also lovingly pointed out to me by the two of you) has been like a great capping/'protecting' shield, so I don't have to see the Truth about myself. Yet the Truth keeps poking through that barrier, showing my beliefs to be false--so many times now--that even that arrogance feels more transparent and flimsy--like I am starting to see the emperor without his clothes. And that's pretty darn uncomfortable.

Actually there is more... ... I am glad you mentioned about realizing how dishonest and unloving the facade really is. That is something I have not given attention to and need to. I remember hearing the two of you say that we cannot heal an error if we do not feel the truth of the error first, in other words how unloving it really is to others as well as to myself. I do feel how yucky it feels when others do it to me, but not the other way around yet.

Thanks again,

Jennifer

Hi Mary and Jennifer,
Thank you for your comments and Mary a huge thank you in regards into your insight:

"I recently began to feel that many of my desires to punish my body and my lack of regard for my own worth and safety relate to memories of sexual abuse and rape from the first century that I haven't processed."
love Denise

Hi Jennifer

thank you for creating this thread and for sharing your realisations, and thank you to Mary for the insights you have shared. I have had two light bulb moments around my facade and co-dependent spirit addiction yesterday and today, after listening to some feedback sessions Jesus and Mary have recorded for us. I am very heavily addicted to spirits giving me feelings of power and control over others and I am physically aware of it taking place. I have been analysing when it happens, and it seems to occur when what I feel and how I act is in contradiction to each other. So when I am angry and use polite words to get my demand met, spirits hook into this facade and I attack the person with them.

I am starting to see that my denial is often the first point of contact behind my spirit co-dependence. Also that whenever I judge people's behaviour, I attack them along with the spirits, but the reason why I judge people and attack them is to deny my own exact same agreeing, emotional beliefs that drives their behaviour.

I am beginning to see now, how denial is the first step in deconstructing out facade. It is the recognition of the difference between what I think I believe and what I actually believe, as evidenced by my actions/thoughts/judgments/feelings and treatment of people, that has brought me to start seeing my denial and facade. Recognising that the intellectual copying of what I have learnt from Jesus and Mary in my mind, and subsequent adoption of those intellectual representations of what is loving, is actually not what I believe, and in fact I truly believe the opposite to be true. For example, God's Truth is that punishing children is wrong, while I believe that children should be punished, despite my denial of this belief. My soul-based beliefs are actually the exact beliefs of my family, which I judge so much and therefore avoid acknowledging within myself.

I have been filling in 3 columns, with a list of my facade beliefs (what I think I believe, intellectual beliefs that I adopted from Jesus' and Mary's teachings and think I believe in them), vs my actual beliefs (which I can see through my unloving actions/thoughts/behaviour) and which are actually my family beliefs, vs what I think God believes might be (which are the same as in the first column, so perhaps no need for this column, or to be filled if or when I actually learn from God, God's Truth on the subject). This has been suggested by Jesus and Mary so many times, but I am only just attempting the experiment, to experiment with it after 5 years.

This is so confronting to do, until yesterday I have been in complete denial of my actual soul-based belief on the subject of treatment of children. Now I see what Jesus has told me at the AG, how I use spirits to help me manipulate people and how I use DT teachings to achieve that. Wow, it is incredible to see this and even begin to feel it as a truth about myself. I am recognising that I have been lying to myself and others my whole life.

Sandra

Yes. I have been doing so. To what magnitude or degree, I don't know as I'm not looking to measure it. More as a do it as it comes. I've been looking at the façade as a machine and asking two questions. One at a time. Do I create a space that allows someone to act so as I can react, or do I engage emotionally in a situation that has nothing to do with me but which requires a certain mask. I'm taking a step back. I was looking for the mechanics of the façade. My façade requires a victim so I need to interpret in order to label a person or a situation as an opertunity to get into my façade. Honestly I don't know if I'm getting anywhere but I'm attempting to shut down my "need to interpret" and my theory is that I will gain awareness where I would have in the past jumped into role. So far I feel I'm not acting or reacting in another's space or pleasing their façade to gain worthiness in their eyes. Lastly when i begin to tackle aspects of the facade it's easy to stray away with the chosen task and hard to remember that mission, I do many times get sucked in. I'm thinking maybe I could put a red elastic on my wrist to remind myself to not get caught in the rapids. When I fully feel the emotion I can place a green elastic on my wrist to remind myself to hit the next error. Thanks for the topic everyone.

Darragh