The students with whom I worked talked as if the issues had become their identity. They identified what they had done in the past as definitional to themselves and to the scope of their lives in the present and the future. In a very powerful sense that ended the idea of balance for them. They felt their lives were overly heavy in one direction or another, weighted down by their past issues so no balance could ever exist. They sought a kind of control over themselves and their lives by endlessly restraining their past issues, controlling the issues of the past so they could function to some degree in the present. This effort became exasperated by the amount of themselves they invested in these issues which they saw as an essential part of their identity. Issues of the past formed a complex meaning perspective which, as such perspectives often do, offered a kind of comfort even as it made for restriction and limits in how they could see themselves and the world, limits in how they could live their lives and simply enjoy them. Such a meaning perspective offers a form of identity which they and we value as part of the structure of our coping with the seeming chaos of the life we live and the world we live in. Even the saddest identity feels better than no identity at all.
Identity exists for us as a way of identifying ourselves to ourselves and to the world. In the midst of the vagaries and shifts and changes of everyday life, identity allows us the security of some sort of anchor, a fixed place from which we can live in the world and with ourselves. It offers continuity and form to our lives in relation to the world around us. Generally, we feel we possess our identity in such a way as it works like a card that allows us admittance into everyday reality even as a driver's license allows us into the official life of the automobile, the road, and the traffic we find there. In the same way, we feel our identity shows that we possess a certain competence in participating in life just as the driver's license does for the road.
However, when we have an identity, it possesses us as much as we possess it. It allows us to feel a sort of competence and ready to enter each day with some sort of purpose and some sort of pattern in ourselves and in our lives. Without an identity, we fear that our lives will have no mooring, no personal structure that will give each day form, each action meaning in that form, and give us direction as to how to move from one place in our day and in our lives to another. When the child sought to make form out of the myriad toy pieces with which we began, she/he wanted to give them form, to give them a kind of identity. In doing that to the toy, the child also works at giving form to her/his life by way of forming an identity. Identity works as a kind of heuristic, a way we have of solving situations in life based on what we have experienced in the past. Identity in all these ways helps us live in a world which presents innumerable problems of one size or another for us to solve every day. Identity can also keep us from living our lives fully, from experiencing the becoming self, because the very factor of its comforting, if illusory, stability makes the transformative that we also seek nearly impossible.
When these students came into the program where I worked, they sought something of the transformative from the low end jobs in which they felt stuck into some other professional possibilities. They saw themselves as failed and inadequate in many ways, and they wished to find some liberation from that sense of inadequacy. The problem in such a desire for the transformative came in the way they and we seek that transformation. They sought it in the instrumental almost entirely, in learning new mechanical skills, using the computer for work in this instance. They did not see the inadequacy they felt came from their sense of identity and the meaning perspectives that motivates their identity. That could incorporate new work skills with enough instrumental training. That might mean a new kind of job and a better income. It did not mean that they would get to some place that took them out of where they were when they came in. If their sense of their issues-based identity did not find a transformative expression, they would often continue to feel the same way about themselves and their lives no matter what skills they attained or job they secured.
After many discussions about the past, we discovered that typical programs which intended to help their recovery from abusing themselves with some substance or another involved a nearly endless rehearsal of every excruciating thing that had happened to the participants and every rotten thing they had done. A vast body of psychiatric literature may well exist that theoretically demonstrates the benefits of such extreme if not endless self-exposure. My students demonstrated and reported that it also brought with it some profoundly deleterious effects.