The Psychology of Pretending – How Trauma Wires Us to Perform and How to Heal It
- Brainz Magazine
- Sep 29
- 6 min read
Written by Janie Terrazas, The Mindfulness Coach
Janie Terrazas is a Mindfulness Coach and creator of PazMesa, a self-mastery guide to help you access inner peace, joy, vitality, and prosperity through mindful living and unconditional loving.
We live in an era where image often matters more than essence and presence. Where “doing more” is valued over being. Where pretending and performing, once adaptive survival strategies, have become the cultural baseline.
From the boardroom to social media, from our parenting styles to our romantic relationships, the performance paradigm is deeply woven into our collective psyche. And it’s not just exhausting, it’s eroding our humanity.
How did we get here? And more importantly, how do we get back to what’s real?
Let’s peel back the psychological, social, historical, and spiritual layers of this pattern and explore how we, individually and collectively, can evolve beyond it.
Trauma turned us into performers: The origins of pretending
At the root of performance is not vanity, it’s vulnerability. Pretending and performing are not signs of weakness or superficiality, they are the nervous system’s intelligent survival strategies.
When a child’s environment is unsafe, unstable, unloving, or unpredictable, the body instinctively adapts to avoid harm and secure belonging.
These adaptations often look like:
Becoming the “good girl/boy” or golden child
People-pleasing and perfectionism
Hyper-vigilance and masking
Minimizing personal needs to keep the peace
Over-achieving to feel worthy
Withholding truth or suppressing authentic feelings
For a child, pretending isn’t a choice, it’s protection. Performing isn’t vanity, it’s survival.
But here’s the problem, what kept us safe then keeps us stuck now. These trauma-born adaptations often become internalized as identity, guiding our adult behavior long after the original threat is gone.
The brain’s loop: Why pretending feels safer than being real
Each time we perform and receive praise, validation, or love, the brain releases dopamine, the reward chemical that reinforces behavior. Over time, the fear of rejection, humiliation, or abandonment becomes more threatening than the pain of betraying ourselves.
This creates a powerful neurobiological loop, “If I do more, prove more, achieve more, they’ll love me. I’ll be safe.”
In this cycle, the nervous system begins to equate external approval with survival, and the authentic self with danger. This is why breaking free from performance patterns is not just a mindset shift, it’s a full-body, whole-being rewiring.
From soul to system: How society institutionalized performance
While trauma sets the stage, culture reinforces the script. The rise of the industrial era fundamentally rewired our collective value system:
Human worth became tied to productivity, not presence.
Speed, efficiency, and profit replaced stillness, process, and peace.
Rest became “laziness.” Play became “childish.” Vulnerability became “weakness.”
Consumerism deepened this shift by convincing us that fulfillment lives outside of us, in possessions, titles, and status, rather than in inner peace, connection, and purpose.
In this trade, we lost something sacred:
We traded being for doing. Connection for comparison. Self-worth for net worth.
Conformity and image culture: Performing as the new norm
Once the system rewarded performance, society began to celebrate it.
“Fake it till you make it.”
“Always look your best.”
“Hustle harder.”
These cultural mantras glorified burnout and masked burnout as ambition. Social media supercharged this illusion with curated highlight reels and filtered realities that deepened disconnection from our inner truth.
Pretending became so normalized that many of us don’t even realize we’re doing it anymore. We’re chasing lives that look good on the outside while feeling empty on the inside. We wear masks so long we forget who’s underneath.
The result? A global epidemic of self-abandonment, imposter syndrome, and soul fatigue.
Why the cycle persists: Disconnection as the default
We cannot heal what we cannot feel, and the modern world is designed to keep us disconnected from the very parts of ourselves that would liberate us.
Body: We override signals, push through pain, and numb discomfort.
Heart: We suppress emotions like shame, grief, and rage to appear “strong.”
Spirit: We lose touch with meaning and the sacred, leading to existential emptiness.
Others: Hyper-individualism teaches separation, competition, and distrust.
In this state, numbness becomes normal. Noise becomes safety. Busyness becomes identity. And the deeper truth, that we are inherently worthy and whole, becomes almost impossible to remember.
Collective amnesia: Forgetting the sacred
Across traditions and civilizations, humanity’s greatest wisdom teachers, from Yeshua and Rumi to Lao Tzu, pointed us toward slowness, stillness, awe, love, and interconnectedness.
Yet over centuries, these values were overshadowed by ideologies of:
Control
Competition
Colonialism
Consumerism
The result? Soul care was marginalized, while ego inflation was normalized.
Our deepest truths became background noise, drowned out by the relentless hum of production and performance.
The PazMesa way: Returning to the real self
The PazMesa philosophy was born as a conscious SOULution against this paradigm, a call to remember who we are beneath the programming. It is a map back to authenticity, transparency, and truth, back to the real self that existed before trauma told us we were not enough.
This is not self-help fluff. It is the foundation of human evolution, psychological, biological, and spiritual. The journey from performance to presence is the same journey from trauma to truth.
The hidden cost of staying stuck
Remaining trapped in the performance paradigm doesn’t just harm our mental health, it hollows out our humanity.
Physiologically: Chronic stress and adrenal fatigue
Relationally: Disconnection, resentment, ruptured intimacy
Psychologically: Identity confusion and self-alienation
Spiritually: Emptiness, cynicism, and a sense of purposelessness
Behaviorally: Anxiety, depression, addiction, and compulsive busyness
The longer we perform, the further we drift from presence, and the harder it becomes to remember who we really are.
The invitation: Return to wholeness
Healing is not about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you were before the world taught you to pretend.
The first step is awareness, naming the soul wounds and emotional programs that drive our performance. Then, we begin to:
Normalize truth-telling: Speak what is real with compassion and clarity, even when it’s messy or uncomfortable. Truth builds trust, within yourself and with others.
Reclaim sacred rest: Remember that rest is not laziness, it is a radical act of wellness, worthiness, and resistance in a productivity-obsessed world.
Rebuild body trust: Treat your body as an intelligent guide. Listen to its signals, honor its rhythms, and respond with reverence and care rather than ignoring and resisting them.
Replace judgment and punishment with compassionate curiosity: Growth takes root in safe, loving soil. Meet your mistakes and emotions with gentleness, and they will reveal their wisdom.
Practice presence: Anchor yourself in the now, not as a pause between achievements, but as the richest part of life. Savor and participate fully in this moment instead of hustling for “someday.”
This is not a quick fix, it is a sacred reclamation. It is the work of remembering that we are already enough and already worthy of resting and enjoying life.
A new story for humanity
When we stop performing and start being, we do more than heal ourselves, we participate in the evolution of humanity.
Our nervous systems shift from hypervigilance to harmony.
Our relationships transform from transactional to sacred.
Our societies evolve from exploitative to collaborative.
This is the ripple effect of authenticity. When we heal, we stop replicating the systems that harm us. And when enough of us return to the real self, the false self-paradigms of fear, separation, and scarcity begin to dissolve.
Begin now: Join the great remembering
The world does not need more performers, it needs more present, real, and rooted humans.
It needs souls brave enough to take off the masks, dissolve trauma-born patterns, and show up as they truly are, messy, magnificent, multidimensional, and whole.
This is the heartbeat of PazMesa: to help you power up your peace within, integrate the parts you’ve abandoned, and live and love from your most authentic, transparent, and real self.
Begin now:
Pause. Take a deep breath in through the nose and slowly breathe out through the mouth (longer on the exhale). Slow everything down.
Notice. Where are you performing instead of honoring your truth? Where are you saying “yes” when your body says “no”? Where are you hustling for worth instead of resting in it?
Name it. Write down the patterns you see. No judgment, just awareness.
Choose one small shift. Pick something that feels safe and doable, and practice showing up as your real self there, even in the tiniest way.
Repeat. Keep choosing truth over performance, authenticity over pretending, presence over proving.
Because your authenticity isn’t just your personal liberation, it’s the spark of humanity’s evolution. When you remember your true self, you help the world remember, too.
Read more from Janie Terrazas
Janie Terrazas, The Mindfulness Coach
Janie Terrazas, known as The Mindfulness Coach, transformed her media career into a life coaching and wellness advocacy mission after a spiritual awakening in 2011. As the creator of the PazMesa Self Mastery Program and the force behind Rise Above TV, she fosters balance and mindfulness in others. Her triumphs and trials deeply shape her coaching as she helps clients address stress, trauma, and safe relationship building. Janie combines spiritual depth with actionable strategies to guide individuals toward a joyful, vital life. Her coaching transcends conventional methods, empowering clients to find peace and purpose within. Janie's empathetic and innovative approaches offer a safe self-discovery roadmap to authentic living and loving.
