Today's post is an excerpt from my Zoom talk this morning, "The Self You Are Not". To be on the email list for information and links to future Zoom talks, email your request to hillsideew@aol.com The audio version of today's Zoom talk will be added to our website audio files over the next week or so. Hillsidesource.com
Self as a concept, developed over centuries, with various descriptions and definitions that come in and out of fashion. Concepts are platforms that we gravitate to, adopt or usually born into that become the framework around which we build our lives, understanding and knowledge and values. This is one aspect of the self you are not. The self is a construct and who and what you are becomes limited by that construct. You are far more than our ideas of self; out constructs, our intellect and even our imagination cannot contain the whole "knowledge" of the cosmos. Nevertheless, I offer a model of a Wheel of Identity, where self is the the hub, and the spokes are all the identities and roles that we express in life, as work and relation labels, like mom or grandmother, or son and daughter, friend all your relatives, and the work of work and the concerns of the body and interests and activity.
One way to see this is that all those identities compose the self but the self is not limited to those identities. It's a useful picture for dealing with the shifts in life where some of the spokes fall off. You lose a relationship, a role, your appearance or body changes, or your retirement funds, the center holds despite the losses. If the center collapses because the spoke falls off, it means you made that (or those because sometimes one loss triggers another) particular identity your hub, your core. And it is time to rethink that misplacement. The self expresses through identities. And it seems to me that a solid self, self acceptance come when 3 ways of viewing this wheel line up--who you actually are (that is the identities are true) is who you want to be and who you think you should be. The actuality is congruent with the your shoulds and your longing. This idea of the self-you-are-not can refer to the self you long to be, or the measuring up (based on all sorts of ideology, what you feel is correct, or the best thing), the true spokes that are missing. Or it can refer to the false identities that you carry, based on duty or shoulds or expectations of others or other subterfuge, that we carry and invest energy in, but hold little meaning or truth to them for us. They're out there as a spoke, but dead weight. Pre-tense consumes tremendous energy. This wheel is dynamic, it is not fixed. If we freeze it, hold on to every identity, despite the changing nature of life or identities that are incompatible, behavior that is incompatible, our self image freezes, remains the same, there's this ravine, between who the self is and who we think we are, this splintered wheel, we create internal conflict. The mind doesn't work well with this kind of conflict. We can avoid dealing with it, again at a cost of energy and distraction and dissatisfaction. While there is this idea of an unchanging self, the reality is we are changing, we physically and emotionally grow, we learn new skills, and essentially enter a new world.
(Susan Nettleton)
For some of today's reading, follow the links below.