David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

change

Identity crisis may be long-coming integration of warring parts of me

By ·

I’ve been having an identity crisis.

For the last month or so — maybe longer — I’ve felt internal rumblings that left me uneasy. I turned inward and started reading a lot of psychology to help me understand what was going on.

At first, I felt confused and disoriented. I found myself questioning some key assumptions I’ve had about myself for many years. I felt very uncomfortable with the feeling that my internal narrative about who I am might be wrong.

But in the last couple of days, something has suddenly cleared up. It’s as though my mind suddenly zoomed out to a far longer view of my life.

I wasn’t just having an identity crisis for the last few weeks. I was experiencing the closure — integration might even be a better word — for something that started many years ago. This isn’t a crisis. This appears to be a point at which I’m merging parts of myself — stages of my life? — that I had never quite been able to put together.

I was 29 when I first realized I was having an identity crisis, but I still remember everything about that year.

Keep Reading

Related Posts

Death of classmate from past feels like a reminder to change my life

By ·

I can’t say that Paul and I were ever friends, but I knew him well. We went to high school together and we were both active in the same church youth group. We worked on church projects together and we spent time together on long church trips.

So I knew him well, but we were very different sorts of people — with very different friends and then we went in very different directions. He stayed in the little town where we went to high school and I haven’t been back there for years. So our paths have diverged for decades.

Still, it was disturbing to me to hear Saturday that Paul had just died.

I’m getting information second or third hand, so I can’t say for sure what’s true. I’m told he lived with his widowed mother. He was overweight. He was diabetic and he smoked. Saturday morning, he apparently called out to his mother from upstairs to call 911, but he died of a heart attack before help could reach him.

Keep Reading

Related Posts

Until you ask the right questions, you’ll never find missing answers

By ·

Most people are addicted to their pain and their drama. If you offer them a way out — even if they ask for one — they will almost certainly ignore it. They have too much invested in the dysfunctional narrative which they believe is reality.

That kind of dysfunctional narrative can’t survive tough questions, though, so humans avoid those hard questions.

That means your root assumptions about yourself and your life are almost never examined. You are too invested in justifying your old decisions and protecting yourself from imagined dangers that you go right along living out the same old mistakes and experiencing the same pain, frequently to the point you have to become numb to survive.

Even if you believe you need change, you find excuse after excuse to keep living as you always have. You say you’ll change your life, but before you know it, the weeks turn to months and the months turn to years. By then, your life is so far down a miserable road that you convince yourself it “isn’t that bad” — because you know there’s no way out.

Keep Reading

Related Posts