I sometimes wonder how much of what we believe about ourselves was actually decided by someone else. Not intentionally, perhaps, but through the experiences we had growing up, the way people responded to us, the expectations we learned to meet, and the conclusions we drew about what made us acceptable, lovable, or worthy.
A child who is frequently criticized may begin to believe that making mistakes is dangerous. Someone who experiences rejection might conclude that something about them is fundamentally undesirable. Another child discovers that achievement brings approval and gradually becomes someone who feels most comfortable when succeeding. None of these conclusions necessarily begins as a conscious decision. They develop quietly, often before we have the understanding to recognize what is happening.
Years pass, and those children become adults. They build careers, establish relationships, raise families, and develop lives that may appear quite successful. Yet somewhere beneath all they’ve accomplished, some of those early conclusions may still be influencing how they experience the world.
I was reminded of this during a recent conversation with Nami Prakash on Inspire Vision Podcast. Nami spent twenty years working in healthcare communications before her own journey of healing and self-discovery eventually led her to create The Mind Quotient, an initiative devoted to developing what she calls human skills. One of her central observations is that we spend years being taught how to perform, achieve, and succeed, yet receive comparatively little guidance in understanding what is happening within us.
It’s an interesting distinction, and it raises a question that I’ve found myself returning to. How much of the person we’ve learned to be reflects who we genuinely are, and how much developed in response to what happened to us?
The Conclusions We Didn’t Know We Were Making
During our conversation, Nami shared a painful experience from her childhood. Growing up as the daughter of Indian immigrants in a small Indiana community, she often felt different from the children around her. In fifth grade, a group of classmates formed an actual club devoted to disliking her.
Imagine being a child and discovering that other children have organized themselves around the idea that they don’t like you. At an age when belonging and acceptance can feel enormously important, it’s difficult to imagine how painful that must have been.
What interested me most was how she began interpreting the experience. She didn’t understand why the other children were treating her that way. Perhaps it was because she looked different. Perhaps it had something to do with her academic abilities or the attention she received from teachers. Whatever the reason, she began searching for an explanation within herself. Maybe something was wrong with her. Maybe she was doing something that caused the rejection.
That conclusion is understandable, particularly for a child trying to make sense of an experience that feels both painful and confusing. But consider what happens when such a conclusion begins to take root. An experience involving the behavior of other people gradually becomes a belief about who we are.
Instead of recognizing that someone treated us unkindly, we may begin believing that we somehow deserved the treatment. Rather than questioning another person’s judgment, we question our own worth. And because these conclusions often develop before we have the maturity to examine them, they can become familiar parts of how we understand ourselves.
We may carry those beliefs for years without ever recognizing where they began.
When Our Responses Become Our Identity
One of the more interesting aspects of Nami’s experience was how her early difficulties eventually connected with her adult life. She went on to become a successful corporate leader, someone whose accomplishments might suggest confidence, capability, and a comfortable sense of self. Yet internally, her experience was quite different.
At forty, she learned that she was living with complex PTSD, associated with prolonged experiences of trauma extending from childhood into adulthood. That discovery helped her begin recognizing emotional and behavioral patterns she hadn’t previously understood, including hypervigilance and the ways extraordinary achievement can sometimes become connected with a need to feel safe.
That possibility caught my attention because we generally admire people who work hard, take responsibility, and consistently perform at a high level. And there is certainly nothing wrong with those qualities. Yet I wonder whether the same behavior can sometimes emerge from very different places within us.
One person may pursue excellence because they genuinely enjoy learning, creating, or accomplishing something meaningful. Another may work just as hard because making a mistake feels threatening, disappointing someone seems unbearable, or achievement has become closely connected with their sense of worth. From the outside, the behavior might look remarkably similar, but the inner experience could be quite different.
Of course, high achievement doesn’t necessarily indicate unresolved emotional difficulties. Many people simply find great satisfaction in what they do. Still, it raises an interesting question. How often do we recognize what we’re doing without understanding why we feel compelled to do it?
And when a particular response has accompanied us for most of our lives, how easily might we mistake that familiar pattern for our identity?
The Difference Between What Happened and What It Meant
Something happens to us, and we interpret what that experience means. Those two things are not always the same.
A child is excluded from a group. That is the experience. The child concludes that they must be unlikeable. That is an interpretation. An adult receives criticism from a supervisor. The criticism may be reasonable, unfair, or somewhere in between, but the person receiving it might interpret the experience as evidence that they are incompetent. Someone doesn’t return a telephone call, and we begin wondering whether we’ve offended them or whether the relationship has changed.
The event itself may be relatively simple. The meaning we attach to it can become considerably more complicated.
Of course, our interpretations aren’t always mistaken. Sometimes people genuinely are unkind, rejecting, or unfair. Some experiences deserve to be recognized for precisely what they are. But even when the experience is real, the conclusion we draw about ourselves may not be.
I think that’s an important distinction because the conclusions we develop can begin influencing experiences that occur long after the original event. Someone who learned early in life that rejection means something is wrong with them may carry that expectation into adult relationships. A person who learned that approval depends upon achievement may continue feeling compelled to prove themselves, even after accomplishing more than they once imagined possible. And someone who experienced repeated criticism may become unusually sensitive to disapproval, even when no genuine rejection is intended.
Over time, these responses can become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as responses. They simply feel like who we are. But perhaps familiarity isn’t the same as identity.
What Lies Beneath What We’ve Learned?
There is another dimension to this question that I find particularly meaningful. We can recognize the person who has developed through years of experiences, perceptions, beliefs, and emotional responses. But is that the entirety of who we are?
I sometimes think of two aspects of being human. There is the person shaped by everything that has happened throughout life, and then there is what I think of as something deeper, the genuine person beneath those influences, perhaps even a spiritual dimension of who we are.
Different spiritual traditions approach this question in different ways, and I don’t think we need to settle those differences to appreciate the possibility that our familiar sense of identity may not tell the whole story.
Much of our attention is directed toward the person we’ve learned to become. We recognize our strengths and weaknesses, our accomplishments and disappointments, our likes and dislikes. We know how we typically respond when someone criticizes us, disappoints us, or challenges something we believe. Those responses become familiar, and we gradually assemble them into a picture of ourselves.
But what happens when we begin examining that picture more closely?
Perhaps we discover that some of our strongest reactions developed during experiences we barely remember. Maybe certain beliefs about our worth were formed in moments when we lacked the ability to understand what was happening. We might even recognize that characteristics we’ve always considered part of our personality began as ways of adapting to difficult circumstances.
And as we uncover those influences, we may begin wondering what remains beneath them.
I don’t necessarily think we’re searching for some final, perfected version of ourselves. Perhaps understanding ourselves is less about reaching a destination and more about gradually recognizing the influences that have shaped us.
We begin noticing which beliefs arose from fear, which expectations developed through a desire for approval, and which responses were once useful but may no longer serve us. And as we become aware of those influences, we may discover that we are not necessarily limited to the person those experiences taught us to become.
There may be more freedom available than we’ve realized.
We Don’t Have to Erase Our History
One of the more meaningful ideas that emerged from my conversation with Nami was the distinction between eliminating painful experiences and changing how those experiences continue to influence our lives.
We may never completely erase everything that has happened to us. Some experiences become part of our history, and pretending they never occurred doesn’t necessarily help us understand them. But perhaps healing doesn’t require us to remove those experiences. Perhaps it involves changing the way they show up in our lives.
Imagine someone who experienced repeated rejection as a child. Years later, they find themselves feeling excluded from a social gathering. Almost immediately, a familiar response appears. They feel hurt, perhaps angry, and begin questioning whether others genuinely value them.
The feeling may be very real, but what if they begin recognizing that the intensity of their response may be influenced by something much older than the present situation? Perhaps they become curious about why this particular experience feels so threatening. Maybe they recognize the familiar conclusion that being excluded must mean something is wrong with them.
And perhaps, instead of immediately accepting that conclusion, they begin considering another possibility.
The original experience hasn’t disappeared. The memory may remain, along with some of the emotion associated with it. But the interpretation no longer has to determine what happens next.
That seems like a meaningful form of freedom. We don’t have to rewrite our history to develop a different relationship with it, and we don’t have to wait until every painful memory has disappeared before beginning to experience life differently.
Sometimes the change is found in recognizing that an old conclusion no longer deserves the authority we’ve been giving it.
Discovering What Helps Us Return
As we become more aware of the experiences and beliefs that influence us, another question naturally emerges. How do we begin relating to those influences differently?
There are many approaches, and I don’t believe any single method works equally well for everyone. Some people find meditation helpful, while others discover greater awareness through walking, running, singing, gardening, or spending time outdoors.
For me, walking meditation has become particularly meaningful. There is something about moving quietly, listening to gentle chimes, and allowing my attention to settle that helps me experience a greater sense of peace. Someone else may discover a similar feeling while working in a garden, preparing a meal, or becoming completely absorbed in something they enjoy.
The particular activity may be less important than what happens while we’re engaged in it. We stop being quite so occupied with the endless commentary of our thoughts. We become more aware of what we’re experiencing, and perhaps, for a few moments, we aren’t trying to prove anything, accomplish anything, or become someone different.
We’re simply present.
I don’t think these practices need to become another collection of expectations we place upon ourselves. There’s already enough pressure in life to improve, achieve, and become more. Perhaps their greatest value is that they allow us to become familiar with ourselves without continually evaluating who we are.
And sometimes that familiarity helps us recognize what we’ve been carrying without realizing it.
Perhaps We Were Never Who We Thought We Had to Become
As I think back on the story of that young girl who couldn’t understand why other children disliked her, I wonder how differently her experience might have unfolded if she had been able to recognize that their behavior wasn’t necessarily a reflection of her worth.
What if she had understood that being rejected didn’t mean she was someone who deserved rejection? What if she had been able to recognize that the actions of others often reveal more about their own perceptions, fears, and struggles than they do about the person receiving them?
Of course, we can’t return to childhood and change everything that happened. Nor should we assume that understanding something intellectually would have prevented all the emotional consequences. But we can begin recognizing those distinctions now.
We can question beliefs we’ve accepted for years, become curious about why certain experiences affect us so deeply, and begin separating what happened to us from what we’ve come to believe those experiences say about who we are.
I find something quietly encouraging about that possibility because it suggests that we don’t have to become entirely new people to experience meaningful change. We may simply need to understand more clearly how the people we’ve become were shaped.
And perhaps, through that understanding, we begin rediscovering qualities that have remained present even when our attention was focused elsewhere. Our capacity for kindness, our curiosity, our willingness to connect, and our ability to experience joy, compassion, and love.
These qualities may sometimes become difficult to recognize beneath years of fear, disappointment, or the effort to meet expectations. But difficulty recognizing them doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve disappeared.
I don’t know whether we ever reach a point where we’ve completely uncovered who we are. Perhaps the journey continues throughout our lives, with each new experience offering another opportunity to understand ourselves a little more clearly.
And perhaps that’s enough.
We don’t have to arrive at some final, perfected version of ourselves before recognizing the worth of the person already here.
I find myself wondering how many of us are still living according to conclusions we reached when we were too young to understand what was happening. How many of those conclusions have quietly shaped our relationships, our accomplishments, and the expectations we place upon ourselves? And what might begin to change if we recognized that some of those beliefs were never truths about who we are?
Perhaps discovering ourselves isn’t so much about becoming someone new. Perhaps it’s about gradually recognizing which parts of ourselves developed in response to what happened to us, and which parts have been there all along.
And perhaps, as we begin to understand the difference, we find ourselves returning to someone we never entirely stopped being.
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen