next post about identity

4/8/20

Identity

 

The heart of me, of us.

 

The center of who I am, we are.

 

It is here that we find the cause of how we act. 

 

Want to know why you do something?  Look at your identity. 

Want to know why you spend your time the way you do? Look at your identity.

Want to know why your credit card statement looks the way it does?  Look at your identity.

We could go on.

 

Here, in the middle of COVID, we have had the coping mechanisms stripped away.  Like layers of an onion, we have seen our lives shrink, closer and closer to the heart of who we are.  We have had to slow down, our busyness gone, and as we survey our lives, we see our identity and the actions that result from it.

 

I mentioned in the last post, that my fear of being hurt and my fear of failure drove me like a madman to self-protection and perfectionism.  These sucked the life out of me.  My fears lived me.  On the surface I looked highly productive and successful, but inside my fears were living me – I was the yoyo and my fears were the hands holding the string.

 

But the fears were really the action end of my identity – my identity drove the fears and the fears drove me. 

 

And my identity was squishy.

 

I didn’t really know who I was – I was living reacting to my past, to my brokenness, to my hurts and heartaches.  I thought I knew who I was, but I was wrong.  I was caught in a constant survival mode – trying to quiet a war inside me that demanded to be noticed.

 

You see, my actions, my fears, announced my identity:

My fear of failure spoke that inside me I was convinced that if I did not perform as the perfect doctor, the perfect dad, the perfect husband, the perfect friend, that…

I was worthless.

I truly felt that I needed to prove my worth to be someone of value.

My identity?  Worthless. 

 

You can see how frantic I would become to not fail, can’t you?

 

My fear of being hurt spoke that inside me I was convinced 1) I was not safe 2) life would not be ok 3) there would not be joy or goodness and that any goodness I was experiencing was only temporary til I got the crapped kicked out of me again 4) the only way to survive was to protect myself

 

My identity?  Consumed by Unsafe, Bullied, Harrassed, Lost, Lonely, Hurt – I was bruised and broken – that was my identity – doomed to sit in pain and misery – miserable.

 

You can see why I was freaking out at the first sight of anything bad or hurtful that was coming my way, huh?

 

These broken places in my heart were driving the ride of my life. 

And they were making me someone I didn’t want to be.

 

I wanted to be sure of myself.  I wanted to know when to say, “no.” I wanted to know how to play and laugh and have fun.  I wanted to enjoy life.  I wanted to feel peace and goodness in the moments of my life and not expect something bad.  I wanted to deal w the pain and hurts of life and not let them wreck me.  I wanted to spend my time and money in ways that were consistent with what I thought about life, not protecting myself or proving myself.  I didn’t want to hurt my kids and my wife w my negativity and defensiveness.  I wanted my kids to grow up believing in goodness and possibility.  I wanted my wife to be able to count on me.  I wanted to be consistent and strong and true.  I wanted to feel stress and not feel like I was destined to fail or like I needed to hunker down and protect myself.  I wanted to be able to risk and not fear failing.  I wanted to see people w realistic expectations and know that I couldn’t make everybody happy.

 

Yet, every time I tried to be these things, my identity shoved and pulled and pushed and screamed at me – it was living my life for me.

 

I woke up day after day and realized that I was not who I wanted to be.

Here’s the thing, and remember im not a psychologist, just a plain, flannel and cowboy boot wearing family doctor in ordinary old middle America:

 

I’m pretty well convinced that most of us, the everyday American person, lives with an identity that is kinda squishy.

 

I think that is part of what is so freaky about this COVID thing.  We feel uneasy, unsettled. 

We are looking at how we have spent our time, our money, our energy – and we find ourselves questioning…

We are looking at how our culture, our world, has spent its time and energy and money and we are questioning…

 

How is it that i/we believe things and yet our actions seem to be saying something else? 

 

We look back at the frantic last 5 years and we realize that an awful lot of our life has been lived for us and we don’t like it, but we’re not sure what to do about it.

 

I may be way off base here, but working w thousands of people over nearly 20 years of practice, it seems that identity squish is something that plagues us – it seems many if not most of us are being lived instead of living.

 

So, if we are to continue, how bout we talk about some general types of identity squish and then maybe about some things we can do about the identity squish and then after that what we can become out of less squishy identities?