How to Bring More of Yourself to the Table
Are you good at sensing and meeting people’s expectations, but not great at bringing the truest version of yourself to a relationship?
Do you know what you really think or would you rather focus on figuring out what other people want from you?
How to balance pleasing people with bringing our true selves to a table?
Kathleen Smith’s True to You frames people pleasing as a part of being human, as something that arises from our deep need for connection. Rather than seek to eliminate it, she instead urges readers to balance this human impulse to belong with another distinctively human trait: our ability to think for ourselves. She challenges people like me to go from being “mind-readers” to “mind-knowers” —to become people who know who we are and bring more of our true selves to relationships.
Murray Bowen’s family systems theory provides the conceptual core of the book. Arguing that our behaviors emerge as ways of managing stress in the family, family systems theory challenges us to step back and observe the patterns that unfold in our relationships. She prompts readers to shift their focus from blaming to being curious and asking questions. If patterns can be observed, they can be changed.
Through narratives about her own patient’s lives, Smith tells stories about people who are seeking to change relationship patterns. This blend of theory and storytelling, combined with Smith’s conversational tone, makes a book that is mostly about theory into a compelling read.
Smith divides her book into two halves. In the first, “The Relationship Patterns that Keep Us Stuck,” she outlines common reactions that people fall into as we try to manage stress in our relationships. In the second half of the book, “How We Find Ourselves,” Smith offers strategies for challenging these patterns and building new ways of relating to the people in our lives.
Our Best Thinking
For Smith, the problem with our habitual responses is that they don’t require us to bring our authentic self to the table. They are reactions rather than reflections of what she likes to call “our best thinking.” Smith explains the difference: “A decision with less self is automatic and rooted in emotion. One with more self has a heartbeat or two’s worth of time when you can ask yourself what is my responsibility here?” (22).
One major way that people try to accommodate is by trying to step in and do too much for others — what Smith calls “over-functioning.” When one member of a relationship over-functions, the other tends to under-function and become passive. In this dynamic, Smith explains, “The over-functioner lends self, and the under-functioner borrows self” (70). Over-functioning grants a sense of “pseudo-maturity” (72) but also leads to burnout and resentment.
Smith’s book might handle vocabulary to talk about the relationship’s dynamic. As we explore what over-functioning and under-functioning look like in our relationships, we become more able to step back and observe patterns in a more objective way. We are both learning to let go and let the other help us.
Relationship triangles are another pattern people use to diffuse stress in relationships. In these triangles, an anxious couple may focus on a child rather than address the tension in the marriage. A stressed-out employee may gossip with a coworker rather than talk to their boss about workplace concerns. People offload relational stress using triangles on a third person rather than address their concerns directly. Triangles are ultimately a way of managing stress by distancing ourselves from others.
These patterns tend to arise in systems where people are more “relationship-oriented,” a term Bowen uses to refer to what happens when we “let other people’s reactions, real or imaginary, affect us” (15) to an excessive degree. Being relationship-oriented leaves less time and energy for people to “think for themselves or pursue their own direction in life” (16).
In families or groups that are highly relationship-oriented, however, we can easily lose our true selves. Identities we adopt in order to fit in are “pseudo-selves” (56). These pseudo-selves contrast with the “solid self” — the part of us that holds our truest beliefs and values (57). While it’s normal to pick up and discard pseudo-selves to adapt to our environment, the solid self ideally remains constant and firm, even in the face of pressure to change.
Smith urges readers to examine themselves and consider which aspects of themselves reflect pseudo-selves and which reveal who they really are. As I considered my own life, I realised how much of myself I’ve borrowed from the communities around me—religious communities, academic communities, friends, acquaintances and family members.
It’s never too late to bring more of your true self to your relationships
Smith demonstrates this through the story of a patient of hers — an older woman named Margaret who is concerned about fitting in and making friends as she moves into a retirement community.
For Smith, living in tune with our solid self requires asking questions to help you get in touch with what we really think. In Smith’s words, she encourages us to spend less energy trying to figure out what others want and more time getting to know our own mind (Smith 60). While a relationship-oriented person would ask what someone wants from them, someone with a stronger sense of self would ask “who do I want to be in this relationship?”
This mental shift proved powerful for me in dealing with my three-year old daughter’s tantrums. Instead of focusing on controlling her behavior and getting her to calm down, I applied Smith’s ideas and asked myself, “What kind of parent do I want to be during her outbursts?” I realised that I want to be calm, present, and hold firm boundaries. By redirecting my focus from my changing daughter’s behaviors to my own reactions, I was able to parent more calmly and effectively.
Smith calls the process of shifting our focus from anxious management of others to honest self-expression “differentiation,” which she defines as “the ability to stay in contact with others, while thinking and acting for oneself” (37). Throughout the book, Smith urges us to see differentiation as a process that takes lots of work and practice. She encourages us to reframe moments when we fail to gain others’ approval as opportunities to develop a more solid self, as chances to “teach our brains that distress, disagreement, and disapproval are not just survivable — they are the crucible where we fashion who we are” (7).
Part of differentiation is willingness to speak one’s mind, even when we know that others may think differently than we do. Keeping silent about our real beliefs, sticking to small talk, and hiding in a group are forms of distancing — ways of managing stress by not letting others get too close. Smith challenges readers to take the risk of opening up.
Through the story of Shriya, a woman who wants to go beyond superficial conversation in her relationship with her father, Smith explores what it might look like to open up more in a relationship. Reflecting on who she wants to be in the relationship, Shriya begins writing out what she wanted to share before calling her dad. Instead of passively accepting a surface-level relationship, she began to work at building the kind of connection with her father that she wants.
Of course, changing our own behavior doesn’t guarantee that we will get the response we want. Smith argues, however, that changing others is ultimately not the point. Rather, the goal is to bring more of ourselves to the relationship, which ultimately opens up new possibilities, bringing more of what Smith calls “flexibility” to the relationship. Above all, by focusing on who we want to be rather than on changing the other person, we change by breaking free of the need to please others and becoming more ourselves.
In her last chapter, Smith broadens her lens and considers how we can bring our true selves to bigger conversations in our community and country. She challenges us to do some “sitting down for our beliefs” by thinking them through before taking a stand (248). Rather than just go with whatever people on our side of the spectrum think, she urges us to do our own best thinking about issues and develop more nuanced views.
Ironically, as an author of self-help books, Smith asks readers to consume less self-help content, arguing that reliance on this kind of material is just another way to borrow self. Instead, she ends her book with a list of “growing questions” for us to consider in various domains of our lives — romantic relationships, family, friendships, parenting, and work. For Smith, figuring being “true to you” involves asking hard questions and having the courage to answer them for ourselves without borrowing the answers from anyone else.
