How an Eclectic Personality is an Insight into the Inner Child Wounds

Have you been wondering and replaying in your mind what the eclectic-bourgeois or grandiose behavior of someone says about them? You might have been looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Often we interpret the behavior of others through our own subjective filters which is wrong. And the glam, influencer style personality is one of the most misinterpreted of all. We’ve built up walls to protect ourselves from the world and to hide our trauma and wounds but we do it very differently from one another. Some built the anger wall and become passive-aggressive and narcissistic but others are just fragile and delicate and hide under a pile of lace and velvet.

The lace and velvet paradox and hidden messages

For some years I’ve been watching a very famous influencer in my home country. She is presenting herself as a modern countess. I absolutely love her extravagance and pedantic elegance. Ana is actually a girl with a pretty different life story than mine, but I feel we’re a lot more similar than different.

She grew up in a house where her mother would not wear any fancy jewelry or opulent clothing but her grandma did. I grew up with a very elegant stylish grandmother as well who wore red lipstick everywhere she went. Ana’s house was in Arad, a small provincial town whereas I grew up in the capital of Romania in a beautifully furnished apartment in the city center. We had the velvet couches, fluffy pillows and Mahon wooden curved in rococo style furniture in our house and the wardrobe of my grandma was full of fur coats, diamond jewelry, pearls necklaces, and expensive hats and tiny bags. Even more than that, the bother of my grandpa was in love with a similarly elegant woman of the 50’s who left a similar closet upon her passing to me. I was pretty much a spoiled fairy princess in such a household. But I learned some pretty important lesson from all this:

the softness of every velvet or fur coat talks about the wounds of the people behind it.

I wrote here another article about the brother of my grandpa and the joys of loving authentic people behind the glam. He was loved for his uniform and then learned to seek deeper meaning than an expensive suit shell to act as a wall to his true essence.

Ana did the same with a recent post she made on her Instagram account. To me, this became a very important signal that the way influencers see the world as they are woken up to authenticity is the next “hype”. Healing our inner child wounds as Dr. Nicole LePera talk about also on her famous Instagram account with 1 million followers is becoming a massive movement, and even the “coolest” or “most fake” of influencers will join this new boat soon.

Being fake is not cool anymore

But being authentic requires some heavy inner work sometimes, and if that would lead some of us to despair, then we really need someone like Ana to remind us that we don’t need to go through it all and we can sometimes choose to escape in this phantasy world where she can be the modern countess and live in her castle if she wants to. I see much of her work in the same artistic style I see music healing our soul from trauma, but she does that in images where she carries you to magical places. Her dresses and fancy interiors where she poses help me remember my own escapism whereabouts in my childhood when I would often retreat to my grandparent's cozy house to escape the turmoil and uncertainty of the life with my parents.

You see, when I was a child, I had 2 different reference systems: one in my parent's house and one in my grandparents. They were very different families with different views about the world. My granddad traveled the world, had a high paying job and was a leadership role model for me, whereas my dad is a soft guy, very introverted and highly intellectual with geeky hobbies. So when I wanted to escape the perfectionism and discipline imposed by my parents with very high expectations of me, I would run to my grandpa who would spoil me and treat me like his little princess. He even made dresses for me as he started picking up a new hobby when he retired from his demanding job and became a hobby tailor just like his mum. This allowed me to dream and explore my creativity but it also help me cover up the real drama from my parent's house. I did that for 26 years until the last bit of that dream died along with my grandma. Since then, I woke up to another reality. One with less velvet and silk and lace and fur. One without any cushions at all. It was raw and it got me depressed and in despair. I realized most of my wardrobe contained very girly dresses, with tulip skirts and complex corsets to help me live in that dream, as Ana does in her work. In the next 3 years, by going through therapy, I woke up that past that I was covering up with all the glam in my life. I gave up on many things that no longer felt needed in this new context. All except my femininity.

My life motto was now focused on frugality!

When you start waking up from the trauma you’re hiding, the first steps are very hard. I was looking at people around me and I felt I was just as grey as them, the ones I would normally dismiss because they are not special enough. But as I gave up my fancy clothing and started wearing more clean cuts, simple outfits, more Dutch, more practical, less makeup to none at all in some days, fewer curls, less jewelry, I soon began feeling empty. I stayed with it for a while. I tried compensating with other areas of my life getting more attention now than my looks and outside image. I focused more on inwards. The more I did, the more I discovered the glam of my inner world. The books I read, the knowledge I had, the people I loved, the way I was able to love and share myself with others in an authentic way…it made a 360 transformation of who I was.

Of course, I still like the vintage bohemian atmospheres and I love being immersed in such phantasies as Ana creates. I still love castles, long silky dresses in bright colors, vintage jewelry, and many other memorabilia objects that help you live in a past time. I recently watched a movie which reminded me of the way we collect such gateways to our past, or to a more glorious time in the past where we experienced soothing through different means as I did with the softness of the textile, the glam, and sparkles of the porcelain and crystal glasses all part of my escape house at my grandparents. The best quote of the movie was as follows:

“We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence” — Midnight in Paris

By all means, we need a balance between our calm times and wild ones, and this shows perfectly how people like Ana and artists, in general, have the role of carrying us to a universe where things can be calmer for a while and we can escape our emptiness of existence for a while but without really spending our entire life in that parallel universe and keep being present in the moment so we can build new memories and actively heal instead of continuously live in an altered state of numbness just to be able to cope and survive. Living in denial about things is not going to help heal but will just keep you in a loop and stuck which ultimately leads to despair which is why everything needs a good balance, including creativity. Stepping out of the creative shoes for a while and living abroad, changing my life has helped me come back from that own denial I was living in and be more present, balance my darkness with my light and trust the process of healing from these old traumas without questioning why I still need sometimes the old tricks of soothing myself or indulging into experiences that heal.

I wrote another article here about the experience economy in regulating our emotions and mediating our relationship with the environment as adults which I believe to be a good way to maintain a good balance between escaping and living in the present.

Revealing the traumas behind the eclectic personalities

As mentioned in the title, the way we view people with eclectic personalities is through the lenses of our society that doesn’t have time to listen and see individuals and would rather label and box people. We’ve democratized so much the access to fame and celebrity and public awareness that we no longer consider our normal lives satisfactory and rewarding if they don’t provide a certain amount of public appreciation and admiration or envy. Alain de Botton talks about this in his recently launched book on Emotional Intelligence. His view about the current discontent with life is due to the loss of our religion and the lack of culture to follow that need for spiritual connection that religion would provide to unite us. I would really contradict him and say that it goes a bit beyond this to the more basic needs of our survival brain. It goes back to our family life and the love we got from our caretakers. Here are some of the inner child wounds that can create later discontent, emptiness and constant need for validation through escapism or indulgences or narcissism:

1. The abandonment wound

In adulthood, people with this trauma will develop some specific behaviors to cope with this wound that in the “eclectic” spectrum I was introducing, in the beginning, would look as follows :

• Looks for shallow popularity metrics and vanity appreciation and validation
• Is the center of attention at a party despite not having much to say
• Behaves like a pedantic pseudo-intellectual to attract people that would praise him

2. The guilt wound

Coping with this can look like:

• Withdraws into different escapism methods ( gaming, addictions)
• Tattoos and body transformations to remember the gateway to those emotions
• becoming very successful financially by blaming or manipulating people

3. The trust wound

Coping with this might look like:

• is highly sensitive but displays that through outfits that are extravagant and glam to cover the gateway to their true emotions
• come across are attention seekers through all their actions and interactions

4. The neglect wound

Some of the coping mechanisms that come with neglect could look like:

• gathers lots of possessions and things either physical or intellectual ( like my coping through reading a lot) that would protect them from feeling like they have nothing stable
• hides under job titles ( grandiosity), degrees, possessions in order to dissimulate the need for affection and love because that would make them susceptible to being vulnerable

In the end, all these signals into our past traumas as just that, signals! We should not judge the need of someone to behave this way as a result of their trauma but rather try to understand where they come from and see what way we can best cultivate a healing environment for them. My experience since living in the Netherlands has proved that the way dutch people live with a consciousness about their work-life balance and a stable economy and good infrastructure is a healing environment compared to the chaos of my home-country and enabled me to feel less triggered and let down my guard and start the process of working on my issues to the extent that I am now hyper-aware of all my behaviors and patterns and can live less from a survival mode and more from a place of choice. And that’s what I wish to everyone!