Our Masquerade: Time to Take off the Masks, Get out of Our Hiding Places, and Learn to Live with Confidence

By Ruth Hartman MACC

Do you find yourself caught up in comparing yourself to others, performing for acceptance, or held captive to perfectionism?

You are not alone. We all currently live in a world that seems to demand an acceptable identity, especially exaggerated by social media. It seems to drive us to compare how we look, what we have, and how we perform (or fail to perform). This leads us to question ourselves: What if I fail to measure up? What if I don’t have what it takes? What if I’m not enough?

It seems logical to hide in safety behind clever masks or high emotional walls created to avoid the judgment of others or the feelings of inadequacy, guilt, fear, or shame. Yet that means you’re trapped in hiding who you are, often questioning your value and worth.

Our Masquerade invites you to confront your hiding places. You can discover how, why, and where you’ve learned to hide and once you’ve done so, you can say goodbye to tormenting thoughts and feelings that steal your confidence and your peace. You can leave the past behind and find the pathway to escape into a life transformed.

This book will guide you to examine the ways in which life has induced you to hide and offers the inspiration to take off your masks, escape your hiding places, and learn to live with confidence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664255319

Ruth Hartman MACC

Ruth Hartman holds a Master of Arts in Christian Counseling from Luther Rice College and Seminary. While studying there, she also received advanced discipleship training for Exchanged Life Counseling. She is a member of the American Association of Christian Counselors and has been an inductive Bible study teacher for more than twenty-five years. Her passion is to see women live confidently in a true identity anchored in Christ. She and her husband, Larry, live in the Pacific Northwest.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Learning to Hide

Part 1: The Games We Play

Chapter 2 Learning to Hide

Part 2: Inner Identity and Brokenness

Chapter 3 Learning to Hide

Part 3: On a Journey, but to Where?

Chapter 4 Where We Hide

Part 1: Out of Slavery into the Wilderness

Chapter 5 Where We Hide

Part 2: Burdens/Life Choices

Chapter 6 Where We Hide

Part 3: Burdens/Life Choices

Chapter 7 Why We Hide

Choices: Independence or In Dependence?

Chapter 8 My Hiding Place

Part 1: Knowing His Name

Chapter 9 My Hiding Place

Part 2: Songs of Deliverance: The Treasures of Grace

Chapter 10 My Hiding Place

Part 3: Songs of Deliverance: An Inheritance of Righteousness

Chapter 11 My Hiding Place

Part 4: To Live Is Christ

Chapter 12 Out of Our Hiding Places

Part 1: Liberated by Grace

Chapter 13 Out of Our Hiding Places

Part 2: Renewing Your Mind with Truth

Chapter 14 Out of Our Hiding Places

Part 3: Renewing Your Mind with Truth – Forgiveness

Chapter 15 Out of Our Hiding Places

Part 4: Transformed

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Recommended Resources

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

For Janell, Kelly, and Emma

…and generations yet to come

I will sing of the goodness and lovingkindness (hesed) of the Lord forever;

With my mouth I will make known Your faithfulness

from generation to generation.

—Psalm 89:1 (AMP)

Introduction

Image1smallmask.jpg

Our Masquerade

What do you wear to a masquerade? Elegant ball dresses, elaborate costumes, and of course, the mask—the façade, the disguise, the deception—all there to prevent the revelation of the identity of the party guests. Can you see yourself all dressed up for the masquerade, ready for the pretense? But what is behind your clever mask?

Where Are You Hiding?

My hope is that it will become evident to you in this book that the meaning of the word masquerade is not about a party. The meaning of the masquerade here is about learning in life to cover and hide. And we girls are really proficient at hiding and covering who we are. How do we do that? In our choices and behavior patterns. Here are a few I would like to suggest:

• comparing ourselves to others

• performing for acceptance

• being captive to perfectionism

• dealing with issues of control

• being stuck in idealism

Could any of these be in your life? If so, I want to assure you that you are not alone. These are behaviors we may not want to admit we succumb to, yet we can find ourselves entangled in their trappings, hiding who we are.

How do you see yourself?

I hope to help you come to understand your hiding places and why I call them the heavy burdens of a woman’s soul. You see, I can write about them with insight because I have experienced and carried all these burdens in my life. Why did I do that? Because I have fears of inadequacy and rejection, and I live in the same demanding places you do. We live in a world with endless pressures on a woman to find an acceptable identity: how we look, what we have or don’t have, and how we perform or how we fail to perform. It’s all about our thoughts of who we think we truly are and how we think others see us, leading us to question our value and worth. What if I am not enough? What if I don’t have what it takes? What if I fail to measure up? Fear and shame are lurking in those questions, and that motivates us to cover and hide. We create masks and live behind the emotional walls we have built around ourselves for protection from the probing thoughts of others, and maybe even our own thoughts of ourselves. Do I have worth? Can I be loved? Am I adequate? As I look at social media, I often wonder about the masquerade. What is really behind the faces there? What is the truth about their identity? And what is the basis of the thoughts they have about themselves?

Please Don’t Look Too Closely

When I Google-search the word masquerade, I find it is a false show, a pretense, an act, a disguise, and a deception.¹ The Cambridge English Dictionary defines masquerade as a behavior that is intended to prevent the truth about something unpleasant or not wanted from becoming known.² I’ve lived this type of masquerade with masks I created to protect myself from being seen—fearful someone would look too closely at me and find little of value. My masquerade became deceptively useful as part of the safe place emotional walls I built around myself. The protective walls were made up of the many bricks I had created and assembled to wall myself off from my feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt, fear, and rejection. Masks and brick walls: my hiding place. Do you think you might be hiding too?

Trapped in Your Masquerade?

I have learned there is emotional loss in hiding and living trapped in any or all of these burdensome choices and behavioral patterns of perfectionism, idealism, comparison, control, or performing for acceptance. These choices end up robbing us of what we earnestly long for in our female souls: rest, hope, joy, peace, and an unwavering, enduring love and acceptance.

I want to show you in the following pages just what you are doing to yourself and to your relationships, especially those you love, by choosing to hide in these burdensome patterns with their walls and masks.

Fearless Freedom Can Be Found

Rather than remain trapped inside our masquerades, let’s discover how and why we’ve learned to hide and where we could be hiding as we cope with life. Let’s confront the lies of our distorted inner identities that steal our confidence and provoke us to remain hidden. And let’s find the pathway out to healing and escape in an extravagant grace that brings about radical changes with life-altering results.

It took years after my salvation encounter with Jesus to understand the radical nature of the grace that exists in the reality of my spiritual oneness with Him. I had to come to an understanding of the ability of His life to alter my life and to begin to believe the ways that I am seen in God’s eyes in my true identity in Christ, past the shame, fear, and feelings of inadequacy. Your identity—how you see yourself—will be based on lies you have believed about yourself, including the ways you think others see you, or it will be anchored with confidence in the facts affirmed in the words of truth by your Creator as He sees you—beloved, accepted, His chosen child, anchored in Christ, and filled with His life. His words exhort us all to be transformed by the renewing of our minds and not to be conformed (crushed, bruised, and manipulated) by worldly deception or by self-deception as to who or what we should be, or should not be, in order to confirm our worth, value, and significance.

Yet tragically, like Eve in the garden, we have listened to crafty and subtle lies that have seduced our hearts away from being transformed by God’s own words. We too have been deceived and chosen our masquerade—to cover and to hide. So I write to bring a word of deliverance, of liberation to those held captive to lies about themselves and about God. Like you, I want to live fearlessly free and thoroughly confident in my identity in Jesus. Leave the past behind. Time to take off the masks, get out of your hiding places, and learn to live with confidence!

Listen to the spoken words of Jesus setting captives free.

The scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where this was written:

The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free,

He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down.

All eyes in the synagogue looked at him intently.

Then he began to speak to them, The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day! (Luke 4:17–21 NLT)

Sharing in the Journey

Please note: My prayer for you is that you have a safe friend or small group that allows you to share your thoughts in a very confidential manner as you go through this book. Alternatively, you can start a journal as you read in order to record what God reveals in opening your eyes to new truths about your life and the choices you have made or are making. God bless you with His unending grace in this journey!

Image2smallmask.jpg Chapter 1

LEARNING TO HIDE

Part 1: The Games We Play

My little girl came squealing with delight down the hallway. She had found a new treasure in her dress-up box! I had purchased a well-used and well-loved princess dress and an old hat with lots of feathers at a local thrift store. And she wore it all with such precious excitement. It must have fit in perfectly with the part she wanted to play in her make-believe that day.

Did you have a dress-up box? Don’t little girls love them? Hers was full of my old dresses, hats, slips, bangles, and other necessary items for all of the pretending, along with the princess dresses. My daughter, Janell, always gravitated toward her own creations too—the unusual with cowboy hats, old curtains, petticoats, lots of jewelry, and high heels too high and too big for her.

Image3dressupchest.jpg

What was in your dress-up box? We all loved pretending—filling our imagination with the stories of who we could be in make-believe and where our dress-up games would take us. I think we might call the dress-up game child’s play. Yet as I grew older, I found I had many places where I was still pretending. But then my dress-up game was not for fun but for hiding—concealing who I was, and my dress-up days became a masquerade.

Or how about the game of hide-and-seek: Ready or not, here I come! As a child, I remember cleverly hiding myself in the hall closet underneath the many blankets stored there in the hope no one would find me. I knew someone was out there looking for me, but I had concealed myself as best I could. And I was determined to be very quiet, hardly breathing, not making a sound. I wanted to be the last one found. I wanted to be the winner of the game!

But as time slowly ticked by, the closet became very hot and stuffy under all those piles of blankets. I waited and waited. There in my hiding place I began to feel trapped and entangled in the heavy layers. I longed for fresh air. I began to hope someone would open that door, find me, and I could breathe again. Where was the kid who was supposed to find me? Was anyone coming for me? I wanted to be found!

The dress-up game. Hide-and-seek. Remember those games? I’m going to guess we all played them at one time in our lives. But let me propose to you we are still playing these games. I know I continued to play them as I grew up, and I learned to hide myself from prying eyes. I’ll tell you my story of learning to hide, but I hope you will also see your own hiding places as we journey along in this book.

The Questions

What if I asked you, Who are you? Depending on the context of the question, most if not all of us, would begin with what we do or have done. You may answer that question by responding in various ways: a teacher, a mom, a doctor or nurse, a chef, a painter, a counselor, a housecleaner, a bus driver, a marketing exec, a corporate president or vice president, an athlete, or a beauty consultant. Is there any other answer you would add? I would have to ask far more probing questions to find out how you really saw yourself as a person—as a woman in your thoughts and feelings. Because in your heart and soul, like me, you have formed an inner identity that is far more permanent and more difficult to change once it becomes ingrained in how you see yourself.

Sometime in life we have all searched for answers, either consciously or unconsciously, to these inner questions: Who am I? Does my life have value? Am I loved or worthy of love? Am I acceptable? Am I adequate? Where do I belong? Is there any meaning in who I am? Every life needs the answers to these questions. And those answers will be based on how we truly see ourselves. All based upon our inner thoughts and emotions and the messages we have received about ourselves.

Past Messages and Inner Identity

Our life messages come from what we have observed and interpreted from our experiences, our circumstances, and the voices of significant people—spoken or unspoken. The people or events that affect our lives come from sources such as these:

• Mom or Dad, siblings, school, teachers, friends

• one-time events we experience, such as disasters, loss, extreme rejection, abuse (physical, sexual, or emotional), abandonment, death of someone, or divorce

• relationships: dating, marriage, singleness, children, or no children

• fears, failures, or disappointments

As a consequence of the messages we receive from these sources, we begin to develop thoughts and feelings about ourselves, that then become imbedded in our hearts and minds. These then form an inner monologue, as the outside voices become the inside conversation within our minds. From that inner monologue, our inner identity begins to develop and is ultimately formed. Your inner identity and my inner identity formed in the past over time and now affect our life choices and actions in the present.

People, especially children, are great observers and terrible interrupters of the actions and attitudes of others. As children, we hear words spoken directly to us or about us. But we also see, and then feel by the actions and attitudes of others, the unspoken words. Though not heard with our ears, we inwardly interpret what we feel others are thinking about us. We very often hear more loudly these unspoken words that are truly felt deep within us. So whether spoken or unspoken, words enter our lives. The thoughts and feelings they evoke within us all become a part of our inner identity formation.

My Story

For you to have insight into this process, let me share with you a window into the forming of my inner identity that began, as yours did, in my childhood and as I grew. Life for me began on a farm in Kansas way up in the northeast corner of the state. It’s near the spot where the Missouri River flows south past a very small river town named White Cloud. As I remember it, White Cloud had a general store, a grocery store, a bank, a post office, at least two churches, and one major street with no traffic lights to stop the flow of what few amount of cars or trucks might be happening through on any given day. That one major street in White Cloud led directly down to the river’s edge.

The farmhouse where I grew up was about five miles west of this little town. Just beyond the farmhouse about a mile was the one-room schoolhouse, Hilltop School, where my brother, my sister, and I attended together. I have many happy memories of that schoolhouse. I loved school and learning. About another two miles on down the same county road was the church we attended with unhindered regularity. We were a family who went to church together every Sunday, even when we were away from home on vacation. The important goal for the kids in our family was the perfect attendance pin and earning it every single year.

Sadly I do not recall ever hearing the gospel, but for sure, I had rows of perfect attendance pins that eventually proved the eighteen years I went to my church. As a child, I remember going to church as a family on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nights. The church was really the social center of our farm community, and it was important for the family to be there.

My dad was the ever-faithful farmer in the field preparing his crops, almost every day—except on Sunday. My mom was a stay-at-home housewife preparing meals, baking, cleaning, and gardening. On the farm, we had lots of chickens, sheep, and cows. One particular milk cow, named Soupbone, supplied all of the milk we needed. There was also lots of room for pets on the farm—with lots of puppies and too many barn kitties to count, plus a goat, a goose, a wild jackrabbit, and baby lambs. We had a huge extended family with lots of cousins who lived just down the road that meant loads of fun, especially around every birthday and holiday. This all just added to the idealistic picture of the 1950s Middle America family. It almost could have had the appearance of a Little House on the Prairie existence: Ma and Pa and the kids living the happy farm life together on the land in the tranquility of rural Kansas.

However, all was not well on the home front. Outward appearances often defy realities. Difficult issues began when I was just a baby—actually even before I was born. I was an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. My mom had suffered with very severe postpartum depression when my sister was born. And then when my sister was only seven months old, my mom became pregnant with me. With another difficult pregnancy and my birth, my mom’s health and her depression all went crashing downhill.

Sadly, this depression came with such severity that she was suicidal when I was born. She had convinced herself she was going to die. Her plans were to drive the car into the Missouri River nearby White Cloud and just end the pain. Because she was so convinced that death was her only way to escape the despair, she decided there was no reason to care of me as an infant. In her words, I’m going to die anyway. Because she planned that she would soon be gone.

As a result, one of my older high school-age cousins came to live at our house. She came to help my dad care for my two siblings and me. In addition, she arrived to keep an eye on my mom, who was at such a high risk of harming herself. Mental health issues had such stigma at that time that no one spoke of them. People just suffered in silence and shame. My cousin later related to me the details of those days as a very sad and confusing time in our family.

Later in my life, my mom was able to share about the deep darkness of her depression and her sickness at that difficult time. Finally, with the help of the local family doctor and proper medication, she eventually recovered, but somehow I did not.

Even though I was a small child, the residuals began to hang onto me, becoming deep fears of death and abandonment. Those fears became part of my life from that point forward and were somehow bound like cords around my mind and heart. This fear dominated my life from childhood and continued with a vengeance into my adult life. My bizarre irrational fears and panic were ever present and had everything to do with dying; being alone; seeing dead people, darkness, storms, spiders, and aliens; and overwhelming feelings of intense anxiety in my sleepless nights, feeling someone or something was always waiting just outside the window or door in the darkness, ready to kill me.

As an adult, if I had to be alone, all of the lights in my home had to be on, TV blaring, checking and rechecking locks and doors, and ever watchful. And even with all of these precautions, I was still filled with miserable panic. In those times of panic in the darkness, I had only fitful sleep and at times could hardly breathe. Any sound in the night left me with my heart racing and just more panic feelings. I felt powerless over my fear. Bizarre, but normal for me, I had to watch or listen to the nightly news broadcasts to know what I had to fear at any particular time. I had to know who or what was out there in the night, ready to end my life. I remember spending one entire sleepless night terrified in my bed convinced a satellite reported to be falling out of orbit toward earth was going to fall on me, right there in my bedroom and kill me. Humorous? You may laugh at me or trivialize these fears, just as many people did. On a regular basis, I was humiliated by other people who I might have let into my secret world of fear. I learned that trusting others with my secrets of uncontrollable, irrational fear was not safe for me. I had deep shame to match my fears. I humiliated myself with crying and begging never to be left alone at any time in the dark. I always had roommates in the various apartments where I lived; just knowing someone else was there helped me cope to some extent. As an adult, this was filled with burdens of shame and embarrassment, but I was helpless for it to change.

Adding to my uncontrolled fearfulness as a child was the loathing of me by my older brother. He was five years old when I was born, and because of me and the deep suicidal depression in my mother that followed my birth, she was unable to be the Mama he had depended on for his love and care. He had Mom all to himself until the birth of my sister complicated his life, and with her birth came the beginning of Mom’s deep depression. This was all then compounded by my tragic birth sixteen months later and Mom becoming suicidal. Consequently she was unwilling and unable to care for him. I suspect at the age of five he concluded I was the culprit who robbed him of Mom’s nurturing care and affirmations. He had contempt for me and must have felt justified in his deep resentment for me, the robber of his mom’s love and attention. As a consequence, I heard these insinuations repeatedly from him as I grew:

• "You can never do anything right."

• You will never amount to anything, so don’t even try.

His intimidations and continuing critical words of contempt convinced me I was worthless, weak, defective, and inadequate—and along with my humiliating fears, my shame was always present. Thus, as I grew, those words and thoughts became the voices that formed my inner monologue and began to form the foundation of my inner identity.

I was so afraid of critical words and the judgment of others that I had to devise ways to protect myself—ways I could cope to hide myself from the pain of rejection. My self-protection actions or coping behaviors consisted of what seemed very logical tactics to me for my emotional safety. These safety measures consisted of lies and masks, controlling of circumstances to manipulate the opinions of others, striving for perfection, fear of failure, and performing for acceptance. These became just part of my "hiding