Sharing – The Identity Crisis Is Coming from Inside the Group Chat

This statement hit me hard:

If you don’t define yourself, the loudest people in your life will do it for you.

https://seekerandsought.substack.com/p/the-identity-crisis-is-coming-from

I have mentioned before that the best and most challenging question my therapist asked me was what I wanted my life to be. The reason I struggled to give her an answer was that the loudest people in it had always defined my life to that point.

As a child, I did what I was told to avoid being a problem to my alcoholic father. That included keeping the secrets of his physical abuse and the sexual abuse I was also subject to in my family, because I knew better than to upset either of them.

In my teens, I did what was expected of me academically, joining a church youth group and allowing the church to dictate my life’s direction.

That included getting married when I was supposed to, planning to have children, and so on.

All that time of trying to be what the loud people around me told me to be only led to a mental health breakdown that left me alone when I couldn’t live up to those expectations.

When my therapist asked me that question and taught me that I was the only one who could answer it, I was in my late 20s. I was lucky. Many survivors don’t learn this lesson until their 40s or 50s and spend even more time trying to appease the loudest voices around them. They don’t tell anyone about their abuse or the chaos they grew up with, and continue down the path of being defined by how other people treat them.

Answering the question was not easy. Continuing to answer the question over the years has not always been easy. (Defining what you want your life to be is not a one-and-done task. It’s ongoing.)

It was worth it, though. Stephanie is correct; if you don’t define yourself, other people will. It happened as a child to many of us when an abuser defined us as someone whom they could abuse; we took that lesson to heart and allowed others to keep defining us repeatedly. Some of those people may have wanted to help, some likely didn’t. It doesn’t matter. The only person who has the right to define you is you.

I’ll ask you the question the same way she asked me those many years ago – “What do you want?” That’s it. There is nothing else to consider when answering it.