Tweaking the concept to be fair to yourself

THAT'S MEN:It's a question of identity – your own identity

SOME DECADES ago, a man was pictured in an evening newspaper standing beside his Jaguar in a Dublin street. The man had taken to patrolling the city in his car, seeking out scenes of crime. When he came across a crime, so the story said, he would contact the gardaí on his CB radio.

I never heard of him again and I sometimes wonder whatever happened to him.

Did the gardaí point out

that he might be wasting his time and, worse, might end

up getting himself beaten

up? Did he in fact get beaten up? Or did he discover that driving around the city streets searching for crime if you are not the police can involve a great deal of time with very little to show for it?

But he did have one thing to show for his time – the identity of a Batman-like crusader rescuing frightened citizens from wrongdoers.

I wonder was this more exciting and more fulfilling than his everyday identity?

Like the old soldier whose identity in civilian life can never live up to the military identity of his glory days, I expect that he sometimes missed his few months or weeks or days as a mobile crimefighter.

It seems to me that, as we go through life, a major part of our energy goes into projecting an impression of ourselves, an identity, to other people. Sometimes the reasons for this are intensely practical.

A Manhattan taxi driver told me that to keep safe on the streets he had to walk and generally carry himself like a man who would have no hesitation whatsoever in defending himself if attacked. If he walked in a way that conveyed a vulnerable identity, he could be in deadly trouble.

Usually, though, the identity we project has more to do with our emotional and psychological history than with practical issues. One man may project a confident identity because of his genetic make-up or because he learned a confident style from his family. Another may project failure identity because of things that were said to him in the schoolyard or in the home.

But identities can change and that’s worth knowing. After all, most of us already display different identities to different people: to our children, our colleagues or our parents, for example.

To hear a work colleague addressed as daddy or uncle can stop you in your tracks as you realise that this person has an identity to his family that is quite different to the one his workmates know about.

But here’s the big question: what about the identity you project to yourself? What are the things that you say to yourself about yourself and are they true?

When you begin looking into this question, you can often see fairly quickly that some of the things you tell yourself about yourself are simply not true.

For a long time, my self identity included a belief that I am lazy. But so far this year I have taken one day off work, so how can I say I’m lazy? Don’t I need to tell myself a different story?

Figuring out what you say to yourself about yourself is a worthwhile exercise because you spend an awful lot of time with yourself. Moreover, if your self-identity is negative, you may spend an awful lot of time trying to hide it from other people.

Try listing the different aspects of your self that you tend to project to various groups such as family and workmates. Then look at situations in which you are anxious about the outcome of events and ask yourself how you fear being judged if things go wrong.

By the time you finish, you will have listed many pieces of your identity, some based on reality and some on old assumptions, some helpful and some unhelpful.

And that is the beginning of changing to a more realistic, hopefully fairer, concept of your own self.

Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is free by email.