Personal Identity, a Brief Overview

 

Your identity is your sense of who you are. Your identity has a structure and content. 

 

The content  is everything you identify with, like your thoughts and feelings,  your beliefs, your memories,  your social roles (like being a partner or a parent) and your personal story—the story that we tell ourselves and others about who we are. For example, when you first meet someone and tell them about you, you share your story.  

 

And then there’s identity structure, which is literally the structure of your identity. So, if your identity content is everything that you identify with, the structure is it parts--the "I" and the “Me”. We’ll talk more about structure in a little bit but first: our social roles.

 

 

Social roles 

 

So social roles or social identities are the roles that we fulfill socially. Our more professional identities are kind of like outfits, for example the fire fighter outfit… and we try on that outfit, to see how it feels for us, how well it fits our sense of who we are. If we like the outfit, we keep it, and then when someone asks who are you we say we're a fire fighter. And then we wear that outfit until it doesn't fit right or doesn’t feel right anymore. Our more personal social identities are roles that we fulfill with close others, e.g., being a partner or a parent or a friend.

 

Beliefs 

 

Another big part of our identity content are our beliefs--everything from politics to religion, to your morals.

 

Beliefs, about ourselves 

 

Of all the beliefs that we have, it’s how we think about ourselves that determines our relationship with everything else

 

For example, If we believe that we are good enough or worthy of good things then when good things appear we recognize them as being good things. And because we believe that we are good enough and worthy of good things, we’re able to enjoy those good things. But if we believe that we're not good enough  or not worthy, then even when good things fall in our lap, we either don't recognize them as being good things, or if we do recognize them, then, because we think we’re not good enough, we’re already sort of waiting for them to go away, because that’s what we expect is going to happen—because on some level we think we don’t deserve that good thing. And either way—whether we don’t recognize it as a good thing or we are just waiting for it to go away, we wind up sabotaging the situation.  And worst case sometimes we'll even intentionally sabotage the situation, to make the good thing go away. 

 

Our story—the glue that holds it all together

 

Of all the things that we identify with one of the biggest are our stories. And our stories are just that, meaning, the stories that we tell ourselves and others about who we are. So when you  first meet someone and you’re getting to know them and you tell them about who you are, that's your story. And our story holds together everything that we identify with, all of our thoughts and feelings and beliefs and memories. 

 

Since the story holds together all of your thoughts and feelings, and memories and beliefs, if the story you tell yourself is that you're good enough, then when you’re when you’re searching your memories, you’re gonna pull memories of you being good enough. And you’re going to pull thoughts and feelings that support the idea that you’re good enough –thoughts like you're capable or that you’ve got this and the feelings that go along with thinking that you’ve got this. BUT, if the story that you tell yourself is that you’re not good enough, then you’re going to pull memories of you not being good enough and thoughts and feelings that support that. That’s how powerful your story is. 

 

And that is identity content in a nutshell. 

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Identity Structure

 

And then there’s identity structure, which is literally the structure of your identity. And your identity structure is made up of the "I" and the "Me." 

 

The “I” is the thinker, and the "me" is all the things that we think of as belonging to us or being “ours, like *my* thoughts, *my* feelings,  *my* beliefs, *my* memories,  and *my* social roles (like my partner or my parent or my friend, and of course our personal story, *my* story. 

 

And what the I does, as the thinker, is think about and hold together all of those me’s and say “all of these me's, they all belong to the same I.” And because the I does that, that is how we have a sense of identity, a sense of being a person.