Identify Less, Be More
Pay attention to how people talk and see how often they (and maybe you too) start sentences like this:
As a teacher…
As a gay man…
As a Christian…
As a conservative…
As someone who has ADHD…
I couldn’t possibly list all the “as a” phrases that I hear every week, and I don’t mean just in therapy. People write that way and people talk that way in practically every context. Just this morning, someone used a sentence that began with “as a” in the supermarket. I scrolled through comments on a YouTube video and I saw at least ten sentences where a comment is somehow prefaced by an identity announcement.
People, it seems, like to identify as this or that.
Some benefits of identifying
George Kelly teaches us that identities are nothing more than sets of constructs that operate in social space. In other words, identities help us recognize our “tribe”, a group of people that potentially share similar experiences. Identities are also there to clarify the context for some of our statements, they tell people about the particularities of how we see the world.
Identities can be quite liberating! You begin to identify as this or that and suddenly a world opens up to you. You find a group of people that share your experiences and with that group comes a sense of belonging and acceptance. Identities normalize our experiences if we need them normalized. If you felt different from everyone else, suddenly you feel OK in your own skin because a whole string of deeply important experiences becomes validated through connections that are forged thanks to an identity.
Identifying as this or that comes with a complete vocabulary to describe inner experiences. Suddenly, what were once unsettling feelings, become precise concepts that mean something specific. With a vocabulary, you also get the necessary tools to deal with your needs. Alan Downs’ book Velvet Rage shows quite wonderfully how, for gay men, sexuality goes from an undifferentiated “disturbing difference”, something anxiety-inducing and even scary, to an articulated, clear and highly differentiated part of their psychological world thanks to identities and the recognition that they allow. LGBT+ community has produced a remarkable diversity of identities where everyone can find a specific one that gives voice to important parts of their selves. It’s not hard to imagine how many lives were saved, how much depression lifted thanks to the communities built on connections created through identity.
If all they give us is a theory about ourselves and a community, that’s already a lot to be grateful for.
Trouble with identities
From my point of view, there is quite a bit of confusion around identities even though they are useful and even necessary.
We often talk about them as being socially constructed. The most obvious example of this is gender identity. Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the past few years, it’s borderline impossible that you haven’t heard the news: there’s no such thing as maleness or femaleness. There is no core or essence there. Gender identities are labels we put on patterns of behaviors; they are social discourses performed through our stylized series of body movements, as Judith Butler put it in her remarkable yet almost unreadable book Gender Trouble.
Gender identities are just one example that happens to be politically charged and, therefore, more likely to be familiar to you, but the same principle applies to any identity whatsoever. They are all rooted in social norms of our times and therefore always subject to change and always involve sets of behaviors that are included and others that are excluded. Perhaps more than most others, gender identity appears fundamental to us, but only because assumptions and conditions that create it shape our worldview so fundamentally. Just recently, I was reading a book about the Roman empire and emperor Hadrian was referred to as the gay emperor, while a few months back, a blog post referred to Elagabalus as the trans emperor. If we were somehow able to communicate that to Hadrian or Elagabalus, it would be news to them. Confusing news, as in their times, no such things existed. Men still had sex with other men as they do today, but the way Romans conceptualized sexual desire was so different from the way we do it today that we can’t draw nothing but rough and imprecise parallels.
Even though gender identity appears to have existed in a rather similar way in the Roman empire as it does today, it’s not quite the case. Even though the linguistic distinction is the same (male/female), its meaning and content have changed quite significantly since. The idea that women wear high heals and makeup, for example, is a new one. The idea that men shouldn’t is also a new one. High heels were first worn by men – military men, no less! Makeup for men was rather common in Europe and in other cultures even a hallmark of manhood. Yet, in 2022 United States or Europe, one might question someone’s masculinity because of these things. Why? Because these categories are not as solid as we imagine. They arise and then morph until they ultimately disappear and something else arises in their place. Treating them as permanent truths is only bound to cause us suffering.
On the other hand, the way we treat identities is rather different than what I just described. We behave as if they were somehow unchangeable, permanent, natural and even holly. They are not to be touched or questioned… or else – you’re ostracized from polite society! At the same time, many people I talk to seem to hold what are for me very much opposing views: that identities are made up stories used to maintain power relations, and that they must be respected at all costs, even when they cause suffering and sometimes because they cause suffering. I have no desire to respect a story made up by society if it causes me to suffer. But that’s just me.
In my view, identities are in large part socially constructed but, in addition, they arise from a complex interaction of personal experiences, social categories and even our biology. Many people can identify as gay or Christian or Peruvian or French or female, but it’s highly unlikely that being gay, Christian, Peruvian, French or female means the same thing to everyone. You have rich and poor Peruvians and when you cross that with being a male or a female Peruvian, you already have a plethora of different combinations that produce vastly different experiences. Whenever we start a sentence with “as a…” we are not presenting ourselves, so much as claim the power in order to control discourse, by asserting an expertise or privileged knowledge. One identity can’t possibly communicate much about us other than the bare skeleton. “I identify as gay” means nothing other than “I feel sexual attraction towards the same gender”, “I identify as Christian” means nothing more than “Bible is my holly book” – but the variety that exists in these groups is staggering. When you explicate your identity, you haven’t really exposed anything personal, anything truly unique to you. Just look at the word: identity is how you’re identical to others, not what makes you unique.
The mistake that we often make is that we treat identities as if they were somehow real. I am always reminded of Robert Thurman’s witty remark that the problem is not that we believe that we are real, but that we believe that we are really real! Insofar as we can speak about any reality of identities, it’s that they are made up boxes that we sometimes end up in.
We sometimes can’t help but be categorized by others. The boxes they put us into aren’t necessarily something we can control. But giving them power and allowing those boxes to become a part of how we see ourselves is something that we most certainly have power over and can control.
Julia Kristeva, the famous French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst once remarked that every identity politics is necessarily oppressive. This isn’t to say that all our identities necessarily oppress other people. I would argue that oppressing others is a choice but oppressing ourselves - with identities - isn’t. Identities are like cages that we sometimes voluntarily step into, they not only tell us how to see ourselves, but exclude other ways of seeing. If you see yourself as heterosexual, then you can’t see yourself as homosexual, because those two categories exclude each other. If you need both, you can’t have both. Instead, you have to reach for a third category – and that’s no fun either because that box has its limitations too. For example, you can see yourself as bisexual, but try being bisexual and see how you’re being excluded by both gay and straight groups. Every form of identity requires us to renounce at least a small part of our desires.
Just recently, a mindfulness student of mine shared his dismay over a discovery: he, a heterosexual man, found himself sexually attracted to a colleague from work. And he blamed it on mindfulness! Practicing mindfulness, of course, didn’t produce sexual desire in him, but it certainly made him aware of it. Living with the idea of what his sexuality is, sitting in that heterosexual box, he was blinded by what it could be. As he began practicing mindfulness, he became attuned to the nature of his desires more carefully, beyond identity boxes as constraints and he noticed that – surprise! – his desires don’t care about how he identifies, they exist beyond those silly linguistic games. They simple are, they react, change and evolve in a way that is sometimes surprising. This resulted in a short-lasting but full-blown existential crisis, before he reached the inevitable conclusion: there’s no need to revise his identity because of one instance of attraction, but beyond that, perhaps identity shouldn’t be treated like it’s really real either.
The constructivist solution
The constructivist solution isn’t to somehow give up on having identities. Perhaps someone can imagine a world like that, but I don’t know how to just yet. If we live with other people, identities are a necessary evil. Even if we refuse to identify, chances are, identities will be glued onto us by society. Weirdly, the constructivist solution is to identify less with our identities while perhaps still retaining them. Personal construct psychology advises us to treat them as tools, not truths. We don’t have to be manipulated by identities; we can manipulate them instead. The same way you can use a knife to cut a stake or a piece of bread or to stab someone, you can use identities to your benefit or to your detriment.
The biggest mistake we can make is to think that we are our identities. When I teach mindfulness, I teach people to see emotions as information and thoughts as hypotheses. That allows us to let go of them and only use them when we label them as useful information or useful hypotheses. Their truth value isn’t so important.
When we approach our identities as tools, we get to choose where we want to use them and how. That is freedom. Furthermore, we open up towards ourselves in a way that is more authentic. We don’t have to be stuck in language games and societal categories. What was once a cage, now becomes a box, one that can be used or put away, depending on your needs.
As a constructivist (ha!), I think of persons as “forms of motion” (to quote George Kelly). It’s a process philosophy, one that doesn’t care for static categories. Persons are always a work in progress, never complete. Identities sometimes constrain our motion and that’s why I referred to them as cages. When we move past them and begin seeing them as helpful tools but nothing more, we can allow ourselves to just be and let our being in the world take us in more authentic directions. When we stop being married to identities, be that those we choose or those that were imposed on us, we are free to realize our potential and see the vast space that every person is. We enter a vaguely defined but wonderfully creative space of perpetual becoming.
