IDENTITY TRAP – ESSAY NO. 12
Audio file of this essay coming soon.
Who are you?
It is a question that follows us throughout life, and perhaps also one of the few questions that becomes more complex the older we get. Most people answer quickly. I am X (a name). I am a teacher. I am an entrepreneur. I am a mother. I am Swedish. I am a woman. I am retired. The answers come almost automatically, as if they are already prepared and waiting, but if one pauses for a moment it becomes quite clear that the answers do not really describe who the person is, but rather which roles she plays, which contexts she moves within, or which labels she has learned to identify with.
From an early age, we learn that the world works through categorization. Everything is given a name. Everything is sorted. Everything is divided into groups, concepts, and definitions. In many ways, this is both natural and necessary. Without language and its labels, it would be difficult to orient ourselves in life. We need to know who the doctor is at the hospital, who is teaching in the classroom, and who is driving the bus we are about to step onto. Roles, titles, and identities help us create order in the world and make it possible to navigate human interaction.
The problem begins when we start to believe that the labels are who we are.
Carl Jung described these social roles through the concept of persona, the masks we wear in order to function in the world. The concept is often misunderstood as something negative, but Jung never meant that the mask itself was the problem; on the contrary, it serves an important function. We need different masks in different contexts. The mask we wear at work is not the same one we wear with our children or closest friends. The difficulty begins when we forget that it is a mask and start believing that the mask is our face.
The less conscious we are of the roles we play, the greater the risk that we confuse them with ourselves, and often it is only when life suddenly takes an identity away from us that we discover how strong a grip it has had on us. A person who has worked their whole life retires and suddenly feels lost. An entrepreneur sells a company and experiences an emptiness that cannot be explained by money or practical circumstances. Children leave home, and the one who for many years has strongly identified as a mother or father is faced with a question that has been hidden beneath the surface all along.
Who am I now?
What shakes us is rarely that the role disappears. What shakes us is the discovery that we believed the role was who we were.
The same mechanism is visible everywhere around us. People identify not only with professions and family roles, but also with nationality, political beliefs, religion, diagnoses, successes, failures, and life stories. We identify with our past, our experiences, and our achievements. Sometimes we even identify with what other people have said about us.
Perhaps a teacher once said you were shy. Perhaps a parent described you as sensitive. Perhaps you were told that you were ambitious, difficult, capable, or lazy. The words were once spoken by someone else, but slowly they began to weave themselves into the self-image, until the boundary between other people’s perceptions and one’s own experience became harder and harder to distinguish. Eventually, many people walk around with identities they never truly chose, but which gradually became part of the story they learned to call “me.”
What is interesting is that no one else can truly tell you who you are. Someone can describe how they experience you. Someone can tell you how they feel in your presence. Someone can share their experience of meeting you. But that is something entirely different from defining another human being.
Perhaps that is also why I have become more and more careful over the years about describing people through fixed qualities, or even describing or having opinions about anything or anyone at all. A liberating neutrality begins to take shape. I would rather say that I experience someone as warm, that I feel safe in someone’s presence, or that I enjoy being around a certain person. The difference may seem small, but it is decisive. The first speaks about my experience. The second claims to know who someone is.
The more one begins to see how identification works, the clearer it becomes how closely intertwined it is with judgment. As soon as we place labels on people, situations, or events, we also begin to value them. Something becomes good or bad. Right or wrong. Successful or unsuccessful. Beautiful or ugly. People are sorted into categories, and the world is divided into opposites. Slowly but surely, we begin to live more in our interpretations than in reality itself.
The judgment of others can often be seen as a reflection of something within them. When someone judges harshly, it often reveals more about that person’s ego, wounds, and inner conflicts than about the one being judged. And the more a person identifies with the ego (the thoughts), the more they tend to judge.
A tree is actually a quite simple example of how automatic this process is. Before we have even had time to experience the tree, the mind has already begun to work. First it is a tree. Then it is an oak or a beech. After that come the comparisons, associations, and judgments. The tree becomes beautiful or ugly, impressive or uninteresting, large or small. But before all of that, there is a very brief moment that most people never notice, a small gap between the experience and the label.
In many meditative traditions, attention is directed precisely toward that gap. What does it feel like to see the tree before the mind tells you what it is? What does it feel like to meet a human being before all the categories and judgments have been activated? What does it feel like to experience something before language steps in and begins organizing reality?
Perhaps it is there that we come closest to the essence of something. Not in the label, not in the category, and not in the story about what we see, but in the direct experience that exists before all our interpretations.
If we follow this thread a little further, we soon discover that identification is not only about roles, professions, and labels that come from the outside. On the contrary, it often takes much more subtle forms. Many people identify not only with what they do, but also with what they think, feel, and experience. It is so obvious that most people never even reflect on it.
A thought arises, and almost immediately the thought becomes true. A feeling arises, and just as quickly it becomes woven into the self-image. One says that one is anxious, that one is sad, that one is insecure or unsuccessful. Slowly but surely, thoughts, feelings, and states of mind begin to be perceived as parts of identity, until the boundary between the experience and the one experiencing almost disappears. One gets carried along by the feeling or the thought, and it becomes a truth. But it is not a truth. It is only a thought or a feeling meant to be experienced and allowed to pass, not to become stuck.
But if one pauses for a moment, something quite remarkable becomes visible.
Thoughts change constantly, feelings change constantly. One day one feels hope, the next day doubt. Sometimes one experiences strength, sometimes vulnerability. Some mornings one wakes up full of energy, other days everything feels heavier. Everything moves, everything shifts, everything passes. And yet there is something present through all of these changes. Something that observes the movement without itself being the movement.
Within healthcare, there has gradually been a movement toward a view that in many ways illustrates this. A human being is not their diagnosis. A human being is not their cancer, their depression, or their diabetes. The diagnosis describes a condition, an illness, or a functional impairment, but it does not describe the person’s essence.
The difference may seem small at first glance, but it changes the entire encounter.
When we reduce a human being to a diagnosis, the diagnosis becomes the identity. When we instead see a human being who happens to carry a diagnosis, a completely different perspective opens. It becomes clear that there is always something more than what is written in the medical record. Something that cannot be summarized in medical terms or captured by a disease concept.
The same is true of thoughts and feelings.
You are not your anxiety, even if anxiety is currently passing through you. You are not your grief, even if the grief feels real. You are not your fear, your frustration, or your loneliness. All of that is experience moving through consciousness, but it is not who you are.
Perhaps that is why the metaphor of the sky and the clouds returns in so many traditions throughout history. Thoughts are like clouds. Feelings are like clouds. Opinions, stories, and identifications are also like clouds. Sometimes the sky is clear. Sometimes a storm moves in. Sometimes the clouds are so dense that the sun can no longer be seen. But no matter how dramatic the sky appears, the sky itself does not change. The clouds come and go, but the sky (your true essence) remains untouched.
In the same way, there is something in every human being that remains unchanged behind all the roles, all the thoughts, all the feelings, and all the stories about who one believes oneself to be. The problem is that most of us have spent so much time studying the clouds that we have forgotten the sky.
We have learned to identify with what passes.
When grief arises, we believe we are sad, but in truth it is only a feeling we are experiencing. When fear arises, we believe we are afraid, but we are not the fear; we are feeling the fear. When someone criticizes us, we allow the words to become part of our identity. When someone praises us, we often do the same from the other direction. We collect labels, both positive and negative, until we can barely distinguish what is actually ours and what has merely passed through us.
This is also where much of human suffering arises. Not because thoughts and feelings exist, but because we begin to believe that they define who we are. Grief is no longer a feeling allowed to move through the body, but an identity. Anxiety is no longer a temporary experience, but a personality trait. Fear is no longer something visiting us, but something we believe we are.
The further a person moves away from their own center, the stronger the need for identification often becomes. Then it is no longer enough simply to be; one needs to be something. A title. A group belonging. A political conviction. An ideology. A context. The ego constantly searches for fixed points that can create a sense of stability, and the more uncertain the inner anchoring is, the greater the need for external definitions often becomes. Identification is therefore not only a personal process, but also something that shapes entire societies. The more people identify with their opinions, the harder it becomes to truly meet. The stronger the label becomes, the less room there is for curiosity.
The stronger the identification becomes, the more prominent the ego becomes as well, and the further one moves away from that still place where experiences are allowed to exist without defining the one experiencing them.
Carl Jung described the same mechanism from another perspective. He believed that a person gradually needs to become conscious of their masks (the ego), so as not to confuse them with their true center. The purpose is not to destroy the persona or get rid of the ego. Both serve important functions. The purpose is to see through them.
The ego is not, in itself, the problem. Everyone has an ego. Nor is this about egoism in the everyday sense, but rather about the part of the psyche that creates a sense of identity through the external. The ego wants to know who it is. It wants to feel defined. Therefore, it constantly searches for something to identify with. A profession. A title. A group belonging. An opinion. A success. A failure. Even suffering.
The stronger the identification becomes, the stronger the need to defend it also becomes. And from there arises much of the judgment that characterizes both individuals and societies. When identity is built around opinions, others must be wrong in order for me to be right. When identity is built around group belonging, someone else must stand outside. When identity is built around achievement, constant comparison arises. The ego continually tries to strengthen its own story by defining, categorizing, and evaluating the world around it.
That does not mean the ego is wrong. It only means that it is not the whole truth of who we are. Just as the persona is a mask, the ego is a function. A useful function, but still not the deepest core of the human being.
The longer one follows the thread of identification, the stranger it becomes, because almost everything we usually call “I” turns out to consist of things that change. The body changes. Professions come and go. Relationships begin and end. Interests shift. Opinions that once felt obvious suddenly feel foreign. Even personality, which many perceive as something stable and lasting, changes over time. What felt true at twenty does not necessarily feel true at forty, sixty, or eighty. If almost everything changes, who is it that remains through all of these shifts?
The question has followed humanity throughout history. Traditions have approached it from different directions, often through different languages and symbols, yet they have often pointed toward the same thing. Not toward more identities, more definitions, or more labels, but toward something far simpler. Something that remains when everything else begins to fall away.
Carl Jung described individuation as the process through which a person gradually becomes more whole by becoming conscious of the parts of themselves that were previously unconscious. It is often presented as a journey toward something new, but perhaps it is just as much about stripping away what was never truly real. Not becoming someone else, but slowly discovering who one has been all along behind all the layers of adaptation, roles, and identifications.
Perhaps this is also why many people experience deep crises when certain identities disappear. Who am I when I no longer fill the role that has defined me for so long? It is easy to believe that the crisis is about the loss of the role, but often it is about something deeper. The role disappears and at the same time reveals how strongly one has identified with it. What shakes us is not that circumstances change, but that the image we have had of ourselves suddenly no longer holds together in the same way.
I myself have often found it difficult to describe myself through titles. When people over the years have asked me who I am, the answers have almost always felt too small. Entrepreneur, economist, nursing student, strong, capable, or anything else may have described parts of my life, but they have never truly captured what I have experienced as me. There has always been something strangely limiting in trying to summarize a human being through a title or a profession, as if the living and constantly changing could be captured in a single word.
Perhaps that is why the identity trap is so difficult to detect. Society constantly encourages it. We introduce ourselves through our professions. We describe one another through our traits. We build groups around shared identities, political convictions, nations, religions, and lifestyles. Much of this serves a practical function, but somewhere along the way we often begin to forget that identities are tools, not our essence.
When this insight begins to settle, the way we meet the world also changes.
The need to categorize everything becomes smaller. People become harder to reduce to opinions or group belongings. It becomes harder to place someone in a box and believe that we have thereby understood who that person is. The same thing happens in relation to oneself. Thoughts are allowed to come and go without having to define identity. Feelings are allowed to move through the system without becoming self-images. Grief may be grief. Joy may be joy. Fear may be fear. Experiences are allowed to exist without one having to build an “I” around them.
Somewhere here, judgment also begins to soften. Not because one decides to become more tolerant or more understanding, but because one gradually sees how limited the labels really are. The more conscious one becomes of one’s own masks, the harder it becomes to fully identify other people with theirs, and the need to “have an opinion” falls away, because there is no right or wrong.
This does not mean that the world loses its forms. The tree continues to be a tree. The nurse continues to be a nurse. The teacher continues to teach, and the doctor continues to treat patients. Roles and concepts still serve their function. The difference is that one no longer confuses the map with the landscape.
Perhaps this is where true freedom begins to appear.
Not in becoming someone special. Not in creating a new identity that feels more spiritual, more developed, or more true than the old one. Nor in getting rid of all roles and living outside the structures of society. Freedom arises rather when identifications begin to lose their grip, when one no longer needs to defend them with the same intensity, and when the value of one’s own existence is no longer dependent on which mask one happens to be wearing.
Behind all roles, all stories, and all identities, there is a still being that does not need to be described, defended, or proven.
Philosophers, mystics, and psychologists have throughout history tried to put words to that place, but perhaps it is difficult to capture precisely because it exists before all words. Perhaps that is also why so many traditions return to the same question. Who am I? Not as an intellectual exercise or another problem to solve, but as a real inquiry into what remains when everything that can change is allowed to step aside for a moment.
The further one follows the question, the stranger it becomes, because the answers that first seem obvious slowly begin to fall away. First the professions disappear. Then the roles. Then the stories of who one has been and who one believes one is supposed to become. Thoughts reveal themselves as coming and going. Feelings do the same. Even the self-image changes over time. What remains is something harder to name, something that cannot quite be captured by language, because language itself is built on categories, definitions, and identifications. Something beyond all that is concrete and material.
Perhaps that is why the expression I am returns in so many traditions. Not as a new identity to place on top of all the old ones, but as the opposite of identity. Simply — I am. A simple recognition of existence before all descriptions of it. As humanity, we are now moving from an identity rooted in doing toward being. And this is an enormous shift, because then one has seen through the identity trap and has finally integrated one’s masks and shadows into being. Polarization disappears in order to make room for wholeness.
When one begins to sense that difference, something also changes in the way one meets the world. The tree is once again allowed to be a tree before the mind has had time to call it oak or beech. The human being in front of us is allowed to be a human being before we place them in a category. Thoughts are allowed to come and go without becoming truths about who we are. Feelings are allowed to move through the system without becoming identities. The clouds continue to pass across the sky, but the sky no longer needs to believe that it is the clouds.
Perhaps it is precisely there that the identity trap begins to lose its grip. Not when we find a better identity or a more developed self-image, but when we gradually realize that what we are searching for was never in the roles, the labels, or the stories to begin with. Behind all of that, something still and unchanging has been present the entire time, patiently waiting behind the layers of identification, just as the sky always remains behind the weather, our true being also remains behind all layers of identification.
When you see through this and are able to rest in being, you are no longer trapped in the identity trap and the suffering it creates. Life becomes lighter, freer, and more authentic, both for yourself and for others. A person who rests deeply in their own being also embodies a pure form of self-love, and from there it becomes possible to meet others with a purer love.