ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the ways to hide aspects of one’s emotional complexity from each other and from themselves. People often begin therapy when some secret behaviour has been found out and found unacceptable. The drugs, infidelities, thefts, or gambling have been seen from outside in rather than from the inside out and judged as destructive and immoral. Often there is conflict between a subjective experience of behaviour as positive and enabling and guilt-ridden identification with wider family and social reactions. There is a wonderful soliloquy by Prince Hal in Henry IV which expresses this subjective fluidity. Something of the woman’s experience of authenticity was part of her teenage sexual behaviour: sex gave her a good feed, a sense of being held, and emotional intensity that she hungered for and had never had sufficient off from her mother.
