Rebuilding your sense of self after difficult experiences

Our past experiences can shape the adults we are today. Our past is important, as the dots from the past can connect with the dots in the present and future. If our past has been hard and tumultuous, how do we have hope for the future or the present?

Is my past going to create a very different person today and in the future? What would I have been if I didn’t suffer childhood abuse or trauma, or if I wasn’t married to him for most of my adult life? Who would I have been?

So many questions and so much uncertainty around:

• Who am I?
• What could I have been?
• Who can I be?
• How do I move forward and look into the future and have hope for the future?

Learning to acknowledge the past and understand how it has affected me as a child or an adult can help us explore the decisions we made as a result of our experiences, and the various relationships we built, lost, recreated and maintained.

Creating a new sense of self

The question “who am I?” can create this sense of not being adequate. When working with individuals who have suffered some form of childhood abuse or a long-term relationship breakdown, they sometimes say they don’t really know who they are if not for the childhood abuse or the time spent in this long relationship.

Rather than staying with this fragile sense of self, what about creating new experiences for yourself and creating a new sense of self?

Understanding, learning and being aware of one’s own thoughts and feelings, fears and hopes can help to create a new sense of self which is flexible and will keep changing over time.

This can involve learning and accepting that there will always be parts of our identity that serve us well and that we may want to keep, while letting go of or changing other parts of our identity that may no longer serve us or may limit us.

In T.S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman, a character says:

“I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone.
And in becoming no one, I begin to live.”

A counsellor can provide you with the space to explore your thoughts and feelings and begin to create a new sense of self.