Exploring Identity

About 15 years ago, I went through a trauma. The details involve other people’s stories besides my own, so I’m not going to share the story. I will share the aftermath though.

Something in me snapped when the trauma happened. I had been devout my whole life, but when this happened, I felt like everything I had been promised about God wasn’t true after all. I lost my faith for a long time. That snowballed into losing my career and losing my community and losing the country I had been living in for 11 years. In other words, I lost almost everything that I used to define who I was.

That prompted a long period of lostness and searching. I looked up and down for meaning. I was ashamed of my lostness, and I didn’t know who I was. It was incredibly painful, but in some ways it was a gift too.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, one of the pillars is something called “self-as-context.” It’s contrasted with “self-as-content,” which means that you see yourself as being defined by your stories about yourself. In my case, “I am a Christian; I am my job; I am an expat.” Those things are content, and they feel like who I am, but they are really just the story I am telling about myself.

The breakthrough comes when you see yourself as the one observing the story, as being one with the big space that the story happens in. And it can only happen if you loosen your grip on those ways you define yourself. In that way, a shock to the system or a challenge to your identity can be a blessing that causes you to see yourself as more than the stories you’ve been telling about yourself.

To be honest, I still have trouble wrapping my head around this expansive sense of self. I’ve found new identities and stories to replace the ones I’ve lost, and I have to work on holding those stories loosely.

Perhaps you’ve had a loss of identity too. Or maybe you’re just not sure if your identity is built on solid ground. Maybe you really resonate with the idea of being bigger than your stories, and you’d like to work on moving toward that. This month we’ll be exploring your identity…how you define who you are and how you have come to do that…with the goal of observing the stories you tell about yourself and finding yourself as the observer.

Look for prompts three days a week and let me know how you are experiencing the process!