Q: With last question you pointed me to I have come to see it’s my performative self that believes I'm responsible for maintaining a fiction so others can feel secure. Is it possible

to minimize damage to relationships when this is being deconstructed? I still feel so guilty for changing.

A: You’re asking about minimizing damage, but I think you really want to know whether dismantling the performative self makes you a bad person.

The guilt you feel isn’t evidence you’re doing something wrong. It’s evidence that the identity built around relational management is dissolving.

There’s an assumption here (trained in since early childhood) that the stability of your relationships is something you are responsible for maintaining. That the version of you others rely on is somehow an obligation you took on, and are now breaking. That’s where the guilt is coming from.

I’ve used the play/actor/stage metaphor a lot lately, but it’s just so relevant, especially when speaking about the performative aspects of the false self. So here we go.

The performer believes it has abandoned the stage mid-play. But the audience didn’t hire you, and the play was never agreed upon. The role simply formed because that’s what children do to survive relational environments. That’s the mechanism now being dismantled and the guilt is part of the collapsing.

Things can get dodgy when one can no longer convincingly perform the life that once felt normal. But dismantling the false self isn’t a negotiation with the environment. It’s demolition. Not of relationships necessarily, but of the structure that required you to maintain them through performance.

Some relationships deepen when the performance ends, some dissolve and some may even crash and burn completely.

None of that can be controlled.

Guilt is often the last defense of the false self. It parrots things you may be hearing from people around you. Things like: You’re hurting people. You’re selfish. You should go back to who you were.

But that voice is almost always protecting the continuation of the role. Maybe it’s the role of stabilizer, or caretaker of everyone’s emotional equilibrium, or the role of any number of reliable identities.

During Deconstruction all roles are hauled out into the light and exposed. And, when a role dissolves, guilt floods in because the structure that produced it believes it has failed. But failure isn’t what’s happening; it's the obsolescence of functions you can’t keep (and won’t need) where you’re headed.

So, instead of asking how to minimize damage, look one layer deeper.

What part of you believes that you would become dangerous if you stopped trying to manage everyone’s emotional response to your dismantling?

You’ve successfully exposed the performative self. Who’s behind the next door?