Personal Discovery: Defining the Relationship with Self based on Others Part 1

“I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” – Chuck Palahniuk, author of the book, Invisible Monsters.

Everyone that we have come in contact with in our lives, our friends, our family, our enemies, our acquaintances, even the person we run into at the grocery store from time to time, has somehow impacted our lives. We define ourselves by them and they define themselves through us. Have you ever noticed that as we associate with different groups in our lives: our family, our high school friends, our coworkers, we subtly change the way we act? This is because they have different expectations for us and we have different expectations of ourselves when we are in that specific environment. The behavior that is acceptable with our friends may not be acceptable when we are interacting with our boss in the workplace. This is taught to us socially as we grow up: what is and what isn’t acceptable behavior. We define our behavior in accordance within the confines of those teachings expressed uniquely based on our personality.

The majority of the time, we are generally unaware of these changes in our behavior besides vague notions of appropriateness because we have internalized most of these rules. These rules come from what we believe is expected of us by the people around us, especially by those in higher positions of power or respect as well as those we feel greater degrees of emotional intensity towards. Often, these can be the sole determinants of our behavior. Some people have developed their own set of rules based on what they expect for themselves that may not have much to do with prevailing social conventions. Even these, however, are still developed as a response to the expectations they grew up with and the people around them.

Activity:

Think of your relationships as a target and yourself as the center. Each ring represents a different cluster of people. The closest ring are the people that you feel the closest to, the ones that you would die for or would die for you, that you would trust with your deepest darkest secret, those that you can’t imagine life with. The succeeding rings are those with less and less emotional connections with until you reach the outermost ring of people whom you have the least contact or emotional connection with.

Then think of those who dislike you and make a target with yourself again as the center. The centermost ring are those that you hate passionately or they hate you passionately and so on and so forth, lessening in emotional intensity until the outermost ring hold those whom you actually kind of like but somehow you can’t talk to them except in a horribly awkward manner.

Now, the theory is, those who provoke more emotional intensity are the people who affect the person you are, and the person you define yourself to be, more often. So we go through each person asking these questions: What is your relationship with them? What are the feelings they invoke in you? How do they feel about you? How do you act around them? How does your personality change at all when with them? What expectations do they have for you? Why do you like or dislike them? Is it a quality of theirs or a quality of yours or both? Now, let’s focus in: How do their expectations of you or for you differ from the expectations you have for yourself? Why do they differ? Is it important or significant in the ways that they differ?

The actor, Charlie Chaplin, enters a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in a San Francisco theater. His final standing is not recorded but it was noted that he “failed even to make the finals.”

There was once a girl who never played sports. When she was young, her mother had said she didn’t have the body type to be athletic so she was content to not be athletic. In college, her roommate asked her to play some tennis with her and she said she had never played. Her roommate promised to teach her. That day she found out she was incredibly talented in tennis. She had never known because she had never tried.

Both of these stories illustrate an important idea: that sometimes people see us differently from how we really are. And sometimes, we can allow other people’s perceptions of us keep us from really figuring out who we really are because we often play to other people’s expectations instead, which can make us at odds internally. Think about it more, are there things that we believe of ourselves that we simply took for granted but we’ve never tested it? Maybe we are holding ourselves back and we don’t even know it.