The Real You

We all have habits, behaviours, and thoughts we want to change. People-pleasing, pressure to achieve, conditional self-acceptance, chronic self-criticism, perfectionism, fear of disappointing others.

‘Changing’ these habits is often not enough. And even when we manage to shift them temporarily, we often find ourselves returning to the same old ways, our default settings. Sometimes, then, we need to dig deeper and connect the dots between early experiences and the present.

The trouble is, we easily get bogged down by identifying these patterns with our identity or self-image. You are the people pleaser. It’s who you’ve always been.

But the truth is, we don’t really have a fixed self that exists as an objective thing. And in many ways, this is deeply liberating, because we no longer need to fixate on a perceived flaw or one defining aspect of ourselves. Instead, we learn to understand why we identify with it so strongly, and eventually, we loosen our grip on it.

This is very much the core of Albert Ellis’s The Myth of Self-Esteem.

Ellis argued that humans are not single, stable entities to be evaluated as “good” or “bad.” We are collections of behaviours across time and context, sometimes helpful, sometimes unhelpful, and no single action, trait, or pattern can define our worth as a whole.(See Ellis, 2005; Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy).

Understanding yourself, then, is more like studying a map. Thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences…they all belong somewhere on the map of you, connecting to each other geographically.

Getting stuck on one negative belief about yourself like  “I’m not enough,” “I’m weak,” “I always mess things up”,  or one painful experience like a rejection, a failure, a moment of humiliation, is like walking in circles on that map. You miss the wider terrain. What brought you to this place in the first place? And if you zoom out, what were the connecting routes that led here?

This is exactly what Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) tries to do. CAT helps people map their current thoughts, behaviours, and emotional responses by linking them to earlier relational experiences. The goal isn’t blame, but understanding patterns and how they repeat.(See Ryle & Kerr, 2002).

Take people-pleasing as an example:

In CAT terms, someone may have learned early on that attention, affection, or safety had to be earned. Perhaps by being agreeable, helpful, or emotionally invisible. Over time, this becomes a reciprocal role: “If I please, I am accepted; if I don’t, I am at risk.” This pattern then plays out repeatedly in adult relationships, reinforcing the belief that one’s needs come second, and that love is conditional.

Neuroscience tells us something rather interesting here too and in many ways, it’s catching up with what Buddhist psychology has been saying for thousands of years: there is no fixed self. Or, if you’re a Matrix fan, there is no spoon.

Our brains rely heavily on self-referential processes. In simple terms, we learn who we are through interaction: through feedback, reactions, relationships, and social learning. Identity is not discovered, more like assembled.

As far as we can tell, there is no single brain centre responsible for generating a unified, fixed “self.” Instead, the default mode network (DMN), a network of interacting brain regions, becomes active when we are not focused on the outside world. When we daydream, worry, ruminate, reflect for example.

The brain takes fragments of experience and stitches them together like a collage. And because this process is largely self-referential, those fragments are often shaped by how we’ve been treated, responded to, or judged.

So if much of your experience has been painful, critical, or unsafe, it makes sense that your internal collage contains fewer positive fragments. There simply hasn’t been enough material to work with.

Buddhist traditions go even further, suggesting that the self is something like a hallucination, not because there is no central core to find when you peel back the layers. Notice how quickly people describe themselves through roles, histories, achievements, or failures. None of which, on their own, can conclusively be you.

Our internal self-image then can become just as distorted as our external one. We live in a world dominated by comparison culture, curated images, selfies, and superficial validation. Unrealistic standards of beauty and success constantly nudge us toward dissatisfaction. It’s no surprise that our sense of self becomes fragile under this pressure.

When this happens, our hope of genuine peace is impossible to attain. Our world shrinks. Self-worth gets compressed into a tiny box labelled ‘self-image’. We’ve learned to see ourselves through imagined evaluation.

Where does this leave us?

In Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of arrogance, but confusion. A tragic misrecognition. And arguably, our modern world is fertile ground for a similar confusion. That is not to say we are all self-aggrandising narcissists in love with ourselves. Quite the opposite, an obsession to look a certain way leads to a quiet hum of insecurity and unhappiness.

You are quite literally so many moving parts, connecting roads and landmarks that come together. And the parts you find hard to visit, or get stuck in, with enough inner work, self-acceptance and understanding you can learn to visit all of you in ways you thought impossible.

The takeaway: We all suffer, its inevitable. This concrete self-image we hold, be it internal or external, creeps in, persuades, convinces, decides. But if there is one thing to remember, let it be this: understand fundamentally that you are multi-layered, complex, never fixed and understandable given your past. And past in a way does shape present if we think about the behaviour of the brain. But so too is it malleable, so too are we capable of reflecting on this fact alone and hold the capability to alter the relationship with ourselves, hopefully one of gradual self-compassion, love, acceptance.

Cultivating a genuine deep recognition that no one thing can define you, good or bad. This is both liberating and necessary if we are to move forward into a healthy, peaceful state of mind. There will of course be behaviours or things you want to change. And that is ok! Just remember that there was a time this may have served you, but no longer now. You need not have to survive by depending on people’s approval. We can create real value authentically, not conditioned, not for survival. Just from simply being alive and breathing and seeing this fascinating weird world go on.

‘The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless’

Alan Watts