Personality and Identity: Do I Stay the Same ‘Me’ Over the Years?
During an active imagination exercise, I discovered “It’s OK to play”. This was a liberation for me. I felt both relaxed and energised. I experienced it as a liberation for/of ‘me’.
Backwards and Forwards
I have the impression that I am the same person as I was yesterday, and in previous months and years — right back to when I was born. In this sense, my identity is about looking backwards.
Looking forwards is more of a problem. Would someone who held ‘me’ in their arms at, say, six months old have been able to know that ‘I’ understand in words, care about authenticity, and think institutions should be judged by their impact on individuals? These are all things that I feel to be ‘truly me’.
Perhaps my sense of identity only works backwards. When I think back 20 years, I don’t think my younger self could have predicted who I am now. And I don’t think that I can predict who I will be in another 20 years — presuming I’m still around.
Re-organising Our Past
Our lives can bring us new challenges and experiences. Some of these fit our idea of ourselves (we may learn a new technique in a hobby we are pursuing for instance). Some things don’t fit our identity (however much I have tried I have never got comfortable with work that demands a mastery of details: doing this kind of work is always laborious for me). Neither of these kinds of challenges or experiences creates a problem for my identity.
From the point of view of identity, some new challenges or experiences are more interesting. For instance some new things may be experienced as liberation. Imagine a perfectionist discovering that ‘I can feel good about myself even though I failed at something’. During an active imagination exercise, I discovered “It’s OK to play”. This was a liberation for me. I felt both relaxed and energised. I experienced it as a liberation for/of ‘me’. Looking back on my history after this insight meant a re-organisation: I saw the earnestness of the evangelical church I grew up in more clearly, I remembered RD Laing’s comment about being an old young man, and much else. ‘I’ felt and different and decided that ‘I’ wanted to do things differently.
Unprepared?
We can meet something new that we feel our prior experience hasn’t prepared us for. I remember the first time I read of the human typology of ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph. Nothing I had read before prepared me for this idea. At first I was simply stunned, then I started checking it against my memories; were the people with this body structure I knew really like that? This wasn’t a major re-organisation for me (I’m something of a collector of human typologies), but it was a small one.
A huge challenge to my identity was leaving my first wife. Nothing in my upbringing had prepared me for doing this. I felt that I was walking into a blank, and at the same time that I couldn’t do it, and that of course I could — it was just leaving, and then telling people. I couldn’t conceive of the words I would use to tell my siblings and parents (although they did in fact come at the time, and I wasn’t utterly tongue tied).
Leaving my first wife is probably the biggest break with my identity that I have made. It’s likely that others perceived this as inconsistent with who Evan was. Evangelical Christians don’t do that kind of thing.
And yet I still feel that it was in some sense ‘me’ who left my first wife. My memories include this now in the stream that goes back to somewhere near birth (the first memory I can identify is when I was about four years of age).
Self-Concept
When ‘I’ felt that ‘I’ didn’t know how to leave my wife, who was this ‘I’? It turns out that I did know how, and that I in fact did it. So who was it that didn’t know?
It seems that we can be more than we know. It seems that we have an idea of who we are, or a self-concept, that can be different to who we are. It turns out that I was able to leave my wife.
In my experience I have found people to be capable of far more than they believed. This has lead to me being very optimistic about the ability of individuals to live satisfying lives. In my experience, our idea of ourselves, or self-concept, is limiting: it is less than who we really are.
Identity
So perhaps my ‘identity’ is really just an idea or concept. I have certainly found that I am more capable than I believed. Is my identity just a limitation?
I don’t think so. I have those experiences of liberation, the sense that this ‘new me’ is more truly me, that it is a realisation of what was already ‘there’. My experience is that our self-concept, or idea of ourselves, is only partly wrong.
My sense is that it makes sense to speak of ‘I’, that even after quite dramatic changes ‘I am still me’, perhaps even more truly me — even though this may be in ways I couldn’t have expected or predicted.
I am aware that this post is taking on a pretty big topic. I am aware that there are many other perspectives. I would love to hear from others with a different take on this subject. Looking forward to hearing from you in the comments.
Like my previous post, this post is inspired Caroline Brazier’s The Buddhist Psychology: Liberate Your Mind, Embrace Life [Amazon-US | Amazon-UK], which I recommend highly.
Other articles by Evan Hadkins
This article was last reviewed by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on Tuesday, 2nd February 2010.
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https://counsellingresource.com/features/2010/02/02/personality-and-identity/
5th February 2010
You have taken on an age old question and have done an excellent job exploring your perspectives on this. We are always the same energy yet we move away from our authentic being and back again and in doing so we often become confused as to who we are.
5th February 2010
Hi Mark, thanks for the compliment. Thanks for reading and commenting.
7th February 2010
I don’t think you did anything out of character. I think you left your first wife and didn’t like what that said about you. It’s hard to face our dark side, no one wants to admit their flaws. But isn’t life about learning to accept who we are, rather than trying to avoid the accountibility of the choices we made as something outside of who we defined ourselves to be? When you left her, did you treat her with dignity and respect? Maybe you have some guilt and need to make amends. OTherwise, seems to be a learning thing to me. There’s only one perfect person that I’ve heard about, and even him I have doubts about :)
7th February 2010
Hi Katy, I do think it is hard to face our dark side. In my experience accepting who we are can be elating and liberating. I certainly did learn much from my first marriage and leaving it. Many thanks for you comment.
7th February 2010
A further opinion on our dark side:
I think most people’s “dark side” isn’t as dark as we think. It’s the avoidance of truth that makes us imagine we must be “bad” or dark.
For example, I have a gay friend. While he was growing up in a small town where being gay was VERY dark side stuff. He denied and hated what he thought of himself. But, he’s only gay, he doesn’t rape children or rob little old ladies. He is full of compassion and empathy for others, works a career where he is loved and respected, and adored by LOTS of women for BEING himself.
See how he thought his dark side was so bad but when he looked honestly at his dark side, the truth was full of light?
In the same logic, I am NOT saying that leaving your wife exposed your dark side. Evangelical Christians are not exempt just b/c they are Evangelical Christians. Even if it was the most painful thing she ever endured, I think being tied for the rest of her life to someone who would never love her is far more painful. So leaving her is not what I define as a “dark side”.
I am saying HOW we treat people is what matters. ALL people deserve dignity and respect. To behave with less, even towards ourselves, is what I define as the dark side. When we are temporarily less than to someone, I believe we obligate ourselves to amending the transgression.
For those whose behavior pattern is mostly from the “dark side” – they exploit and destroy the well being of others without regard to the consequences of their behavior, those type are what I define as personality disordered. NO amount of truth or light or interspection excuses them. Thus their dark side is truly dark.
Discerning the difference eases my fear of looking at my dark side. I am able to see that my personality has not changed over time, it has merely been revealed. As long as I connect to my humanity, with dignity and respect, my dark side is pretty light. :)
8th February 2010
Thanks Katy, I agree with what you say. Integrating the ‘dark side’ is transformative in my experience. It is usually not bad in my experience but our best attempt to survive in a difficult situation. Sometimes it can be that our life is genuinely at risk – perhaps in some situations for your gay friend for instance.
It is by embracing our dark side that we emerge into the light in my experience.
My view is that some behaviour is bad but all parts of a person are good. Sometimes we are ashamed of our behaviour but I think it is possible for us to know that alternatives are possible and that the behaviour we are ashamed of was the best we could do at the time.
Which I think is probably all a lengthy way of saying that I entirely agree with you. Many thanks for engaging so deeply with this subject.