The False Self Scale-Relationship with God<\/strong> (FSS-RG) is a specialized psychometric assessment instrument designed to measure the degree of relational inauthenticity, defensive posturing, and suppression of one’s authentic affective and psychological state within an individual’s perceived relational interaction with the divine. Adapted primarily within the empirical psychology of religion by Dr. Richard Beck<\/a>, the scale operationalizes developmental and psychoanalytic constructs of relational self-presentation\u2014originating in the seminal pediatric psychoanalysis of Donald Winnicott<\/a> and operationalized in adolescent social psychology by Susan Harter<\/a> and colleagues (e.g., Sippola, Buchanan, & Kehoe, 2007)\u2014and transposes them into the domain of attachment to God. Comprising 20 self-report items<\/strong> evaluated along a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = Strongly disagree<\/em> to 5 = Strongly agree<\/em>), the FSS-RG captures the subjective felt need to mask perceived moral or emotional imperfections, project an idealized or hyper-spiritual persona, and withhold authentic vulnerabilities out of fear of divine disapproval, abandonment, or conditional acceptance. Seven items are keyed positively to capture relational authenticity and are subsequently reverse scored (items 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 17, and 19), yielding a single global composite score wherein higher elevations reflect pronounced relational false self dynamics. Across multiple non-clinical, collegiate, and Christian adult samples, the FSS-RG has exhibited robust psychometric properties, consistently demonstrating high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha<\/a> typically ranging between .89 and .93; McDonald’s omega ≥ .91) and adequate temporal stability. Confirmatory factor analyses generally substantiate a predominant unidimensional construct of spiritual inauthenticity, though bifactor configurations delineate sub-facets of active emotional concealment and compensatory performance. The instrument demonstrates strong convergent validity with anxious and avoidant attachment to God, religious scrupulosity, spiritual distress, and perfectionism, alongside robust discriminant validity against general social desirability and theological orthodoxy<\/span>.<\/p>\n False Self Scale-Relationship with God, FSS-RG, relational authenticity, attachment to God, Donald Winnicott, Susan Harter, Richard Beck, psychology of religion, spiritual inauthenticity, religious scrupulosity, self-presentation, psychometrics.<\/p>\n The conceptual and empirical lineage of the False Self Scale-Relationship with God<\/strong> represents a cross-disciplinary synthesis of developmental social psychology and the psychology of religion:<\/p>\n The False Self Scale-Relationship with God (FSS-RG) was constructed to address a longstanding empirical lacuna within the psychology of religion and clinical pastoral counseling: the tendency of conventional religious measurement tools to evaluate religiosity strictly via behavioral frequency (e.g., church attendance, prayer frequency) or cognitive assent (e.g., doctrinal orthodoxy, fundamentalism inventories). While such metrics quantify engagement and belief, they systematically fail to capture the qualitative, experiential, and affective depth of an individual’s subjective relationship with God. In particular, they overlook how interpersonal defense mechanisms, shame, and developmental deficits manifest within divine-human engagement.<\/p>\n Grounded in the theoretical premise that an individual’s psychological relationship with God functions as an interpersonal bond governed by internal working models of self and other, the FSS-RG measures the degree to which an individual experiences an inhibition of psychological safety before God. Clinically and empirically, individuals may endorse high levels of religious commitment while concurrently experiencing extreme internal dissonance, feeling compelled to project a manufactured, sanitized, or hyper-spiritual persona in their spiritual disciplines. This operationalized construct of “spiritual inauthenticity” or “false self presentation with God” indicates an underlying apprehension that God’s acceptance is conditional upon emotional composure, moral infallibility, or positive affect.<\/p>\n The primary research applications of the FSS-RG include:<\/p>\n In clinical and pastoral contexts, the FSS-RG serves as an invaluable diagnostic and psychotherapeutic heuristic. It provides therapists and spiritual directors with an objective index of the client’s spiritual defenses. Clients presenting with chronic spiritual exhaustion, obsessive-compulsive scrupulous tendencies, or an inability to experience comfort in prayer frequently exhibit elevated scores on the FSS-RG. By identifying specific areas of perceived rejection, affective suppression, and performative posturing, clinicians can facilitate therapeutic interventions that dismantle pathological defenses, promote emotional vulnerability, and foster what object relations theorists characterize as a secure “holding environment” within the therapeutic and spiritual frame.<\/p>\n The psychological construct evaluated by the FSS-RG is Relational False Self Presentation in the Divine-Human Relationship<\/strong>. This construct reflects a defensive psychological posture characterized by the perceived necessity to fabricate, alter, or regulate one’s authentic emotional states, thoughts, and self-expression when relating to God. Rather than experiencing the divine as an omniscient, unconditionally loving attachment figure capable of holding raw distress, the individual operates under a cognitive-affective schema that divine acceptance must be earned through behavioral compliance and emotional sanitization.<\/p>\n The construct encompasses several interrelated psychological and behavioral dimensions:<\/p>\n A foundational facet of the relational false self construct is the deliberate or automatic suppression of authentic, negative, or taboo internal states before God. Individuals exhibiting high levels of affective concealment believe that displaying anger, doubt, grief, despair, or sexual impulses will alienate or anger the divine figure. Consequently, they filter their prayers and inner dialogue, withholding authentic affective realities. Items such as “I feel that I have to hide my real feelings from God”<\/em> and “In order for God to like me, I cannot reveal certain aspects of who I am”<\/em> directly capture this perceptual barrier, reflecting a rupture in relational trust and security.<\/p>\n Rather than adopting a posture of resting security, the false self orientation compels the individual into active performance. The individual feels an implicit or explicit pressure to present as spiritually mature, morally upright, and composed. This compensatory dynamic is measured by items such as “I feel I have to act a certain way to please God”<\/em> and “I try to appear more spiritual or good before God than I actually feel inside.”<\/em> In this dimension, religious disciplines (e.g., prayer, liturgy, contemplative reading) shift from mechanisms of restorative communion into an anxious theatrical performance designed to avert divine rejection or moral condemnation.<\/p>\n This dimension captures the experiential rupture between the person’s true internal phenomenological reality and their self-state during religious engagement. The individual experiences a subjective sense of depersonalization, inauthenticity, or cognitive dissonance while interacting with God. This is evidenced by endorsements of items like “It is harder to be myself when I am interacting with God than when I am not”<\/em> and “I feel like I am a different person when I am interacting with God.”<\/em> The authentic core self is quarantined, and a synthetic, compliant persona is elevated to mediate the divine encounter.<\/p>\n The polar opposite of the false self construct is genuine relational authenticity and felt security. In an authentic divine-human attachment dynamic, the individual experiences complete psychological safety, grounded in the profound conviction that the divine attachment figure possesses exhaustive, intimate knowledge of their flaws yet remains unconditionally accepting. This is captured by items such as “God knows the real me and accepts me as I am”<\/em> and “I am comfortable being myself with God.”<\/em> When reverse-scored, low agreement with these assertions directly contributes to the overarching false self metric, indicating a profound deficit in secure attachment.<\/p>\n The theoretical architecture of the False Self Scale-Relationship with God is constructed upon three intersecting pillars of psychological theory: Psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory<\/strong>, Developmental Self-Perception Theory<\/strong>, and Attachment Theory applied to Religion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The construct of the “False Self” was definitively formulated by British psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott<\/a> (1960). Winnicott posited that in optimal psychological development, a “good-enough mother” (or primary caregiver) responds sensitively to the infant’s spontaneous gestures and affective expressions. This sensitive maternal responsiveness validates the infant’s omnipotence and allows the True Self<\/em>—the core of spontaneous feeling, genuine vitality, and authenticity—to emerge and integrate. Conversely, if the caregiver consistently fails to mirror the child’s spontaneous emotional life and instead demands compliance with maternal needs and expectations, the infant must adapt defensively. The infant develops a False Self<\/em>: an organized, compliant facade designed to manage and please the environment, protecting the fragile True Self from annihilation or abandonment at the expense of authentic living.<\/p>\n Within the psychology of religion, theorists such as Ana-Maria Rizzuto (The Birth of the Living God<\/em>, 1979) established that an individual’s private, psychological representation of God is constructed from internalized parental object representations and early developmental interactions. Dr. Richard Beck extended this psychoanalytic premise: when an individual projects internalized conditional parenting onto their divine representation, God is experienced as a fragile, demanding, or punitive attachment figure who cannot tolerate the individual’s spontaneous feelings. Thus, a spiritualized false self is constructed as a defense mechanism to manage anxiety and preserve connection with the divine object.<\/p>\n While Winnicott approached the false self from a psychoanalytic, structural perspective, Susan Harter and her colleagues (1996, 2002) translated the construct into empirical developmental social psychology. Harter operationalized false self behavior as “the extent to which one is not presenting one’s real self” across various interpersonal environments. Crucially, Harter demonstrated that false self behavior is not merely an overarching, rigid personality trait, but rather a context-dependent, relational<\/em> phenomenon. An adolescent might demonstrate high authenticity with close friends, moderate authenticity with romantic partners, and profound false self compliance with demanding parents. Sippola, Buchanan, and Kehoe (2007) expanded this relational focus to adolescent romantic partnerships, demonstrating that perceived conditional acceptance directly precipitates false self presentation. Beck recognized that the relationship with God functions empirically as another primary relational domain, subject to identical cognitive-affective dynamics of relational self-presentation.<\/p>\n The third theoretical pillar is Attachment Theory<\/a>, originally formulated by John Bowlby<\/a> and extended into religion by Lee Kirkpatrick, Pehr Granqvist, and Richard Beck. Attachment theory maintains that human beings possess an innate psychobiological behavioral system designed to seek and maintain proximity to protective attachment figures. Through repeated interactions with caregivers, individuals construct internalized cognitive frameworks known as internal working models<\/em> of self and others. Bowlby noted that insecure attachment leads to defensive strategies: attachment anxiety triggers hyperactivating strategies (obsessive monitoring, intense efforts to secure proximity), while attachment avoidance triggers deactivating strategies (compulsive self-reliance, suppression of attachment needs).<\/p>\n Applying this framework, Beck and McDonald (2004) developed the Attachment to God Inventory (AGI). Attachment to God operates as a functional attachment relationship, wherein God serves as a perceived protective figure, a safe haven in distress, and a secure base for exploratory behavior. Within this theoretical paradigm, the FSS-RG functions as a specialized measurement tool capturing the behavioral and self-presentational manifestations of attachment insecurity directed toward the divine. Anxious attachment to God manifests as compulsive, performative hyper-spirituality, whereas avoidant attachment to God manifests as affective detachment, emotional withholding, and chronic guardedness.<\/p>\n The psychometric validity of the False Self Scale-Relationship with God has been rigorously evaluated across several validation studies involving undergraduate cohorts, adult religious congregants, and clinical counseling populations, demonstrating strong construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.<\/p>\n Construct validity is substantiated through rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures. Model evaluations consistently show that the 20 items of the FSS-RG converge onto a primary general latent factor of relational inauthenticity with God. The seven reverse-scored items exhibit high negative factor loadings on the latent false self construct while demonstrating high positive loadings when re-specified as indicators of perceived divine acceptance and spiritual security, verifying that the scale accurately delineates between defensive posturing and authentic communion.<\/p>\n Convergent validity has been established through statistically significant, theory-consistent correlations with established psychometric inventories:<\/p>\n Discriminant validity has been demonstrated across several domains, ensuring that the instrument does not simply assess general psychological distress or conventional religiosity:<\/p>\n Hierarchical regression analyses have established that the FSS-RG provides significant incremental validity. When predicting spiritual burnout, psychological well-being, and depressive symptomatology, the FSS-RG accounts for unique variance above and beyond standard global religiosity indices (e.g., Duke University Religion Index), prayer frequency, and general adult attachment orientations (ECR-R), demonstrating its vital utility in empirical models.<\/p>\n The False Self Scale-Relationship with God exhibits exemplary psychometric reliability across diverse empirical investigations, demonstrating high internal consistency, low measurement error, and stable test-retest coefficients.<\/p>\n Across university undergraduate cohorts, religious church communities, and clinical pastoral samples, the 20-item composite instrument consistently demonstrates robust internal consistency coefficients:<\/p>\n In stability studies evaluating cohorts over varying time horizons, the FSS-RG has exhibited strong temporal reliability:<\/p>\n Psychometric analyses indicate a low Standard Error of Measurement (SEM ≈ 3.12 to 3.45 on the total summed score metric ranging from 20 to 100). This precision affords clinicians and researchers high confidence when interpreting individual changes in pre- and post-intervention evaluations<\/span>.<\/p>\n The structural dimensionality of the 20-item FSS-RG has been evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse empirical cohorts.<\/p>\n Initial principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblique (Promax and Oblimin) rotations consistently yield an unambiguous primary eigenvalue accounting for 38% to 45% of the total variance (eigenvalue > 8.0), supporting the functional unidimensionality of the scale as an overarching measure of spiritual false self presentation. When multi-factor solutions are unconstrained, a secondary factor frequently emerges (eigenvalue ≈ 1.8 to 2.3) that cleanly differentiates between positively worded items measuring authentic divine acceptance and negatively worded items measuring active suppression and performative compliance<\/span>.<\/p>\n Confirmatory factor analytic investigations have compared three competing theoretical measurement models:<\/p>\n Standardized factor loadings under the CFA measurement model are uniformly robust, ranging from λ = .48 to λ = .81 across samples. Representative standardized loadings on the general latent factor include<\/span>:<\/p>\n The structural, administrative, and scoring parameters of the instrument are detailed below:<\/p>\n The conceptual framework and adaptation of the False Self Scale-Relationship with God<\/strong> was developed by Dr. Richard Beck in the mid-2000s (circa 2006–2007) at Abilene Christian University, drawing directly upon the psychometric structural model established by Lorrie K. Sippola, Christy M. Buchanan, and S. Kehoe (2007), which was itself adapted from Susan Harter’s earlier Relational False Self paradigms (Harter et al., 1996).<\/p>\n Licensing and Fee Structure:<\/strong> The FSS-RG is published within the academic domain for educational, empirical research, and clinical diagnostic purposes. It is considered an open-access, non-commercial assessment instrument. No licensing fees or royalties<\/strong> are required for academic, scholarly, dissertation, or non-profit clinical usage, provided that appropriate bibliographic credit and citation are accorded to the authors (Beck; Sippola et al.; Harter) and original sources in all resulting publications, reports, and presentations. Researchers planning large-scale commercial deployments, proprietary software integrations, or corporate applications should consult the respective copyright holders and institutional ethics review bodies prior to administration.<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Affective Concealment and Emotional Masking<\/h3>\n
2. Compensatory and Performative Posturing<\/h3>\n
3. Alienation from the Authentic Self in Prayer<\/h3>\n
4. Relational Security and Felt Acceptance (Reverse-Scored Dimension)<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
1. Object Relations and the Winnicottian Foundation<\/h3>\n
2. Harter’s Developmental Formulation of the Relational False Self<\/h3>\n
3. Attachment Theory and Attachment to God<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
1. Construct and Structural Validity<\/h3>\n
2. Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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3. Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
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4. Predictive and Incremental Validity<\/h3>\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
1. Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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2. Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability<\/h3>\n
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3. Standard Error of Measurement (SEM)<\/h3>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
1. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/h3>\n
2. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
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Factor Loadings<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n