How We Become Who We Think We Are

We become who we’ve been told we are unless we break the spell.

Our identity forms through how others interact with us, and then we recreate those storylines throughout our lives…Until we step in, choose otherwise, and peel it back.

Where in your life might an old story still be deciding what’s possible for you?

As children we absorb messages about ourselves before we’re old enough to question them, allowing the personal histories of others to shape our identity and who we think we are. Then we carry this identity through the rest of our lives, until we interrupt the pattern.

I recently came up against yet another layer of an unconscious belief operating within me and blocking my progress. The subtlety of these patterns still catches me off guard. I’m awestruck by their depth and tenacity.

We begin to break these patterns by being curious, by being kind and by being willing to see what is really there while choosing to respond in new ways.

Most people spend their whole lives walking in some shadow of their family patterns, calling it “me.” And this is primarily what holds us back in different areas of life.

We don't just remember what happened to us. We adapted to it, and those adaptations become part of the personality that we develop.

We learned how safe it was to speak up. How much of ourselves other people could tolerate. Whether love stayed or disappeared. Whether we had to achieve to be valued. Whether it was safe to need someone. Whether we could trust ourselves, take risks, disappoint people, succeed, fail, rest, be seen.

And then we take those unconscious strategies with us into our careers, relationships, friendships, money, creativity and dreams.

We think we're making choices from the present, when often we're still responding to something we learned a very long time ago.

Our brains are also built to filter information. The reticular activating system (RAS) is involved in wakefulness, attention and our ability to focus. It helps determine what reaches our conscious awareness (and what doesn’t).

What we're already paying attention to influences what we notice. So out of the enormous amount of information available to us at any moment, we don't experience everything equally—we selectively notice some things and not others.

In other words, the stories we already carry can influence what we notice—and what we don't. And this also explains why an old story can keep reappearing to confirm itself.

So this work isn’t simply replacing one identity with another. The work to be done isn’t changing who we are at all — it’s taking the time to find out who we take ourselves to be.

Once we get to know who we really are, beneath unconscious beliefs, behaviors, and habits, we can bring love there. Then we can choose again.

I say choosing, but it’s really be-ing… returning to self.

It’s not layering anything on as much as removing what was never ours to begin with.

Then we find something pure and untouchable by anything of the world.

This removing is a process of shining a light… it’s peeling back and bringing love in.

When we know ourselves and love what we see, we can trust ourselves.

When we can trust ourselves, we can be ourselves.

When we can be ourselves, we can finally relax.

I call this relaxing back inside ourselves “coming home.” It’s the place that never left, but we left it because we had to be who others said we were.

This process is very subtle, and we often need help discovering what we don’t yet see.

How much more of you and your life’s potential is there to discover?