They say that to be a great writer, you need to be a voracious reader, which may explain why my online nonfiction seems to be better than my efforts at novels, short stories or poetry. I spend a lot of time reading blogs, emails, tweets, op-eds and so on. What I like best is raw authenticity, and not the carefully packaged media we too often find.

This was brought to mind by an email I recently received on a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists. There had been a discussion of some group and a dear friend suggested it would be interesting for members of the group to remove their makeup during the session and talk about the feelings that emerged and how it affected their opinions of one another.

This prompted a fascinating reply by Marvin N. Kaphan, LCSW, CGP, Past President of the Group Psychotherapy Association of Southern California.

In his keynote address to their 53rd annual conference, he spoke about The Changing Face of Group Psychotherapy: Adventures in Fifty Years of Practice

He mentioned how many years ago some groups included nudity. Psychotherapist Paul Bindrim’s used this to explore the possibility that “a man's ‘tower of clothes’ is not only a safeguard for his privacy, but also a self-imposed constraint to keep out people he fears”.

On the mailing list, Marv related this story of one group

Many, many years ago when we experimented with nude groups, one woman in one of my groups said: I will take my clothes off, but you will never see me without my makeup. After weeks of the group enquiring about what her fear was, she grudgingly agreed to take her make up off. She went to the bath room and was gone for over a half hour. Finally, the group became concerned and someone went after her. They found her struggling with her fear of facing the group. When she finally appeared without her makeup, no one could detect a difference.

It seems like this applies well to all aspects of life, including blogging. How many of us are afraid that we just aren’t good enough and have to hide behind some sort of makeup designed to make us look a little better? As bloggers, that might be the carefully chosen words, the frequently changing templates of our blogs, or even some sort of counter or demonstration of our page rank to validate our existence as bloggers. The idea that someone might see us as we really are, instead of as who we would like to be and how we would like to be seen, can produce a lot of fear and anxiety.

Yet there is something that might be even more fear invoking, the idea or realization that all our efforts to make ourselves up really don’t matter, that when we appear without our makeup, no one would know the difference. There may be some gender aspects to this as well. When I get a hair cut, very few people ever notice. More women than men tend to notice, and the same thing applies the other way around. I am much less likely to notice when someone else gets a haircut than my wife is.

Marv sums up the experience this way, “It illustrates the tendency of people to undervalue themselves and give the credit to something else (clothes, makeup, etc) for people being impressed with them. One of the great values of group is facing the contrast between our version of ourselves and what others see.”

On the group psychotherapy mailing list, I often try to explore the nature of group interactions online. I’ve learned a lot from the group of group psychotherapists there and have been fascinated by applying the lessons to online communities.

Many of us bloggers are members of informal groups that read each other’s blogs. We may find each other through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, EntreCard, CMF Ads, Adgitize, or a host of other ways of connecting. When we comment on each other’s blogs and when we send emails back and forth, we can also experience some of that great value of groups in learning more about the contrast between our version of ourselves and what others see. With that, I want to encourage my fellow bloggers try blogging without makeup.

Update:
I've received a lot of interesting feedback to this blog post, mostly via email and on Facebook. One particular discussion seemed particularly worth adding as a comment here.

Dave Jacobson, an anthropology professor at Brandies wrote:

I enjoyed reading 'Blogging without Makeup,' especially because it raises a couple of questions: who or what is the real self--real to whom--and how is it to be identified--and by whom? Even if there is an 'essential' me, it seems that people present (or represent) themselves differently in different situations and over time--people do change, more or less deeply, which raises the questions I posed above. (If people don't change or are incapable of changing, even if it's only a change in their perceptions, therapies of all kinds, individual and/or group, would seem problematic.) I'd be interested in what you or folks on the list think about this.

In response, I wrote:

My initial thoughts are that our definition of 'self', however real, or not, it might be, does change considerably depending on time and context and that this is another area where group psychology is particularly interesting; how does the group of people we are with change the way we present ourselves or even think about ourselves.

More specifrically to your question, my thinking is that our views of our selves, our views of how others see us, and the way that other people actually do see us, are three overlapping circles. The amount of overlap is probably a function of how well we know ourselves and understand how other people react to us, and this knowledge can be grown through good group therapeutic processes.

I'm interested in hearing what other people think.