Book Synopsis

In my work as a practicing psychotherapist, I’ve literally spent thousands of client hours working with people from all walks of life, most of them accomplished and high achieving. One of the biggest challenges they face is a nagging feeling of inauthenticity, and they blame themselves for it. This feeling of being fraudulent, of always wearing masks, keeps them from being everything they want to be in their careers, in relationships, for themselves, for others.

Society puts us all in boxes. These boxes have labels that define their contents. These labels tell us what we can and can’t do, who we can and can’t be. Most importantly, they tell us about our relative value in society. It doesn’t matter what we think about those boxes or the labels on them. We start hearing the instructions from birth. 

Identity-Based Trauma is what happens when we try to rip up those labels and write our own authentic narrative. It’s why we sometimes masquerade as a version of ourselves that doesn’t feel authentic. This book is about why we masquerade, and how we can remove the masks and move through life, in every space, as our authentic selves.