Svatman

Many of us are wandering the earth, accomplished in many ways, capable of fulfillment at points, but with a fundamental wound that stops us from becoming who we truly might be: we don’t quite know who we’re.

It’s not, of course that we don’t remember the basics of our own biographies. We’re unsure around two things in particular:

A. We don’t have a stable sense of what we’re worth, and

B. We don’t have a secure hold on our own values or judgements.

Without knowing who we’re, we tend to have particular trouble coping with either denigration or adulation. If others decide we’re worthless or bad there’ll be nothing inside us from swallowing their verdicts in their entirety, however wrong-headed, extreme or unkind they may be. We’ll always be asking others what we deserve before seeking inside for an answer. Lacking an independent verdict, we also stand to be naturally hungry for external praise. For this reason, we also fall prey to unhealthy habits like smoking, alcoholism, drugs, dysfunctional relationships etc.

No one is born with an independent ability to know who they’re. We learn to have an identity because, if we’re blessed, in our early years, someone else takes the trouble to study us with immense fairness, attention and kindness and then plays us back to us in a way that makes sense and that we can later emulate.

They give us the beginning of a true portrait of our identity which we take on and enrich over the years and use as a defence against the distorting verdicts from hurried or ill-intentioned others.

Knowing, who one is, is really the legacy of having been known properly by someone else at the start. This early identity-building tends to unfold with apparently innocuous life-saving small steps.


E.g, “It must really have hurt,’’ a parent might say in response to an upset, thereby validating an infant’s own feelings. Ideally the child is not just known, he or she is also interpreted as likeable. A good parent offers generous interpretations; they are on the side of the child and are always ready to put the best possible gloss on moments of ill temper or of failure- which forms the basis upon which resilient self-esteem can then later emerge.

That’s the ideal but it can go of course very wrong— and often does. A parent may offer mirroring that is out of sync with the reality of the child, e.g, ‘Look who’s such a happy little boy/girl,’ a parent might insist when the opposite is the case, thereby badly scrambling the child’s ability to connect with his/her own emotions.

A feeling of unreality is the direct consequence of emotional neglect. Realising that we lack a stable identity is a sobering realisation. But we can start to correct the problem at any point. We need to seek out the help of a wise and kindly other person, perhaps a good analytical psychologist, who can study us closely, mirror us properly and then ‘validate’ what they see. Through their eyes, we can learn to study, perhaps for the first time, how we really feel and take seriously what we actually want.

And once we know ourselves through this process, we also start understanding others too. The most important thing is to understand ourselves, our life since childhood till now: “why we did the things we did?”.