Why Do I Fear Becoming Someone I'm Not?
The Pattern
Healing is changing you. The patterns are loosening. The voice is softening. The choices are different. And underneath the changing is a quiet fear that you are becoming someone you would not recognize, and that the someone you would not recognize might not actually be you. The fear is not irrational. The self that survived is the self you know how to be. The self you are becoming is, briefly, a stranger.
Origins & Context
The Jungian concept of individuation includes a recognition that the path of becoming the original self involves the dissolution of the persona-self that has done the daily work for decades. The dissolution is destabilizing. The ego, which is invested in the persona, registers the becoming as a kind of death, even though it is, more accurately, a kind of birth.
IFS founder Richard Schwartz describes this in parts language. The protective parts that have run the system know how to run the system. When the Self begins to emerge as the leader, the protectors fear redundancy, exile, and obliteration. Their fear shows up in the host as a fear of becoming unrecognizable, which is the protectors saying, in the only language they have, please do not leave us behind.
The new self is not a stranger arriving. She is the original self coming home, after a long time being kept out of her own house.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You find yourself saying gentler things and feeling suspicious of your own gentleness. You make a calm decision and wonder if the calm is performance. You are kinder to a stranger than the old you would have been and feel briefly disoriented by the kindness. You wonder, in a quiet voice, if any of it is real, or if you are losing the self who knew how to survive.
It shows up most around the people who knew the old you. They expect the old you. You meet them as the new you and notice the small adjustments they make. Their adjustments unsettle you. You begin to wonder if the old you was the real one and the new one is a kind of impostor. She is not an impostor. She is the original, finally being given the room to take up space.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the ego-death stage of Individuation (Carl Jung), the dissolution of the persona-self that precedes the emergence of the original self. It is also named through IFS as the protectors' fear of redundancy (Richard Schwartz). Contemporary therapists describe it through the language of the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, where the adaptive self fears its own obsolescence.
Related entries in this library include the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, Healing Is Direction Not Destination, and Reparenting.
Nikita's Note
I had moments, in the deepest seasons of becoming, when I genuinely did not know who I was. The self I had been was loosening. The self I was becoming had not yet stabilized. The in-between was its own kind of vertigo.
The practice was trusting the direction even when I could not trust the destination. I did not need to know who I was becoming. I only needed to know that the becoming was toward, not away from, the original self underneath. The new self stabilized eventually. She turned out to be more familiar than I had feared. She had been waiting under the adaptive self the whole time. The becoming was not a stranger arriving. It was a self coming home.
From the work
The new self is not a stranger arriving. She is the original self coming home, after a long time being kept out of her own house.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.