Who am I? Exploring your sense of self in therapy

Many people come to therapy feeling that they don't know who they are any more. They feel disoriented and confused and cut off from a solid sense of 'self'.

At times, we can move through life without questioning some of our established behaviours, patterns and beliefs. We get up, go to work, repeat behaviours and patterns in our lives and relationships that we generally don't question until something goes wrong, that is.

It's typically at a crisis point in our lives, such as adolescence, midlife, illness, the arrival of a child, or the end of a significant relationship, that we may be forced to confront our pre-existing beliefs about ourselves and to face the puzzling and often upsetting question of 'who am I'?

Exploring your sense of self

A therapist can help guide you through the tangled web of confusion that you might find yourself in. We can help you to navigate the uncharted territory of your unconscious mind, to make sense of the turmoil you find yourself in and to bring you into contact with yourself in a new and transformative way.

From a psychodynamic perspective, Freud famously compared the mind to an iceberg, suggesting that what we see, or are conscious of, is really only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, this model suggests, we may find unconscious thoughts and desires that we repress or deny in order to maintain an identity that we feel is acceptable to the world around us.

How can therapy help?

Therapy is a place where we can come to find out more about who we really are, or at least uncover more of the truth about ourselves. Our passions, our struggles, our unresolved conflicts- they can be brought into the light, or made conscious, and thought about in a new way.

Old wounds may begin to be understood and worked through, and as a result, a more cohesive sense of who we really are can emerge.

It takes courage and commitment to take this journey inwards towards the truth of who you really are, but I can't think of a journey more worth taking.

The changes are intentionally small. David’s original already has a coherent psychodynamic perspective: identity disruption following major life events, unconscious patterns, Freud’s iceberg metaphor and therapy as a process of bringing previously unexplored material into awareness.