Self-concept

But there is, I know that you speak on your podcast about parentification and that that can be a piece of it, of a parent who, or an alcoholic parent, I need to keep you okay.

And so I have no sense of self, no boundaries, because all of me, all of my emotional resources, sometimes financial resources, time that I spend it for you so that you can be okay so that I can be okay and that our senses of self are completely intertwined and really I don't feel like a full person at all because I have since childhood been formed to prop you up

Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet.

Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.

Totally.

And for those people, I think it goes back to what we started with.

It's like, who am I if I'm not helping you? Sometimes my sense of self is formed in relation to you that I am taking care of you.

You need me.

To me, that life transition is fascinating.

Her sense of self, her self-esteem and her motivations might all change overnight because of her son going off to university.

That transition is a psychological goldmine.

However, to start off looking into this topic, I really do want us to investigate divorce and how it impacts our mental health.

The research shows that recovery is very much possible after the grief associated with divorce because most people return to baseline psychological functioning within 2-3 years.

Also, most people experience a period of acute distress that is the most intense within the first 6-18 months, as well as meaning making is very important to recovery.

This is when you find ways to understand your divorce that allow for a coherent sense of self.

Lastly, around a quarter of people experience prolonged or complicated grief responses, and it is these people in particular that might benefit from mental health support.

Now, what that creates, Patrick, and this is important before we talk about emotional dependency, because this really plays a big role in it.

We develop early on a reflected sense of self, meaning how I think about myself is based on how you are interacting with me and reflecting me back to me, how you are marrying me.

If you're marrying me in a way of proving to me if I perform a certain way, then what starts to happen to my self-esteem? It's other validated self-esteem.

Now my reflected sense of self, meaning feeling good about myself, is completely dependent on how people think about me.

When Bill said he wanted top approval, that's why he wanted that, is because then the reflection back to him is I'm of value.

I'm okay.

I'm whatever.

He'd fill in the blank that he needed to feel about himself.

Sometimes that path is leaving and sometimes it's not.

But the key becomes to knowing that, yes, you do have an ego, a you, a sense of self.

And while you recognize that to make it work for the narcissist, you have had to give up on that.

But there is another option, which is to recognize that they don't get to be the only one with an ego in this relationship.

that you see it clearly, you retain your sense of self, and you use that ego strength to foster healthy spaces outside of the relationship.

And instead of them breadcrumbing you, why don't you try breadcrumbing them

All right, welcome back to the Man Talk Show.

Today we're going to be talking about shame and how crippling shame that you have lived with for years will have interrupted your sense of self-worth and your sense of identity.

And so I'm going to break this video down into how your identity forms and how the shame and how toxic shame or chronic shame growing up will have interrupted the formation of a really healthy, robust sense of identity.

I'm going to be talking about how to recover your true self, as Jung called the process of individuation or the deep self.

Where I wanna actually start is the crisis that you can find yourself in as an individual where you are in this pattern of pretending to be somebody, chameleon behavior around other people, constantly fawning, people pleasing.

These types of behaviors that you deploy, you constantly undercut yourself, undermine yourself, sabotage yourself, You're constantly saying yes to other people, even though it's not necessarily what you want to do.

Those types of people-pleasing behaviors, what happens is those all erode your sense of self-identity, and it creates a kind of internal conflict.

And this often becomes very apparent in adulthood where you sort of feel like you have adopted roles of being a chameleon for a very, very long time.

I'm Eric, your host.

Today, we're going to explore the nature of consciousness and the sense of self, what it's like to be you.

And we're going to start with what it's like to be a bat.

In 1974, Thomas Nagel publishes this paper in the Philosophical Review called What Is It Like To Be A Bat?, It's nine pages long.

They all come to the same place through very different methods and very different metaphysics.

And they all reach the same conclusion that there's nobody in there.

There is a sense of self, but there isn't a self having the sense of self.

So it's a sign we've probably found something.

And then when the breakup happens, you're becoming your own individual person without your person anymore.

So your sense of self, what we call self-concept, did you feel that that was changed or influenced

in any way? I'm laughing because there's you asking this really deep question and my head goes to, wait, which ex are we talking about? Which break-up are we talking about? And I'm like, shit, is it that bad?

I'm laughing to go, which one? Which break-up? I was going to let you choose that.

Like, it would just give me the heap doobies.

I think realistically...

Even though it was obviously a not very nice period afterwards, because you lose your sense of self, but you also kind of gain your sense of self when it's a relationship where you kind of lost your sense of self during.

Towards the end of that relationship, I felt like I completely disconnected and detached from him.

and we can read that symbolically without treating it as a literal account of a psychological disorder.

In a relationship, losing your sense of self rarely begins with a dramatic disappearance.

It may begin with smaller adjustments.

You stop mentioning a preference because it causes friction.

We abandon ourselves.

And so you've been in a relationship where you've kind of let your sense of self dissolve.

And so our first and very, very central thing is to try and come back to a sense of self.

Who am I? And that question involves about many, many different components.

One of the really important ones I think is to rebuild the connection with our own inner experience.

for me? So here's what it kind of might look like practically.

If someone says to you just something like, oh, you're devaluing something, you're an idiot, you always do stupid things.

If we have a strong sense of self, we're going to check inside