Identifying with Traits, Experiences, and Trauma
You can build a whole identity around the characteristics you give yourself from your experiences and trauma. You can construct a whole sense of being based on what you allow your limitations to be as you label yourself different things. On one end of the spectrum, you can label yourself a sensitive person, highly sensitive, intuitive, an empath and you can label yourself as an asshole, strict, ruthless, and other unsympathetic terms. These can apply to how you treat yourself, and how you treat others.
These labels are harmful because they are limitations that are either self-imposed from experience, or externally influenced and accepted as your truth. These labels come with an energetic agreement that you will uphold, whether you consciously see them, or unconsciously do not see them. Just because you see the validity in feeling, respecting, and expressing feelings doesn't mean you need to label yourself as sensitive. Just because you value accountability, work ethic, and progress doesn't mean you need to label yourself as strict.
When we experience a challenging situation, or more so a pattern of challenging situations, it's easy to put ourselves in a category and give ourselves a label. It seems legitimate for the time and place more than likely. It creates a familiarity that makes the next scenarios easier to treat in a pattern-based manner rather than holding space and feeling into every scenario as the unique occurrence that it is. The issue is that it freezes you in that time and space, repeating the same cycle rather than being able to observe new situations and credit them as unique and evolve yourself.
Imagine for a second that you lived two different childhoods, one being told that you were sensitive, empathic, passive, and non-confrontational. Non-confrontational. The other being told that you were tough-as-nails, devil-may-care, aggressive, and confrontational. And let's say in these childhoods you fully believed it, really took these labels and ran with them, even made them your own. You developed your personality around these traits over the course of decades. Your friends, coworkers, and family all get reminded of these traits with how you carry yourself, how you interact with everyone in your life. How would your life be different in these two different scenarios? Undoubtedly the “sensitive” you would be more shy, more reserved, more cowardly, less eager to overcome obstacles, and would likely be more prone to wallowing in self-pity, and pity of others. The “tough” you would be more outspoken, more bold, easily ready for a fight, eager to bash through obstacles by whatever means necessary regardless of who may get hurt, and wouldn't spend too much time worrying about your feelings or the feelings of others. This place in time or phase of being, all of a sudden is copy and pasted on to the rest of your life and interactions. That's not individuation nor evolution, that's letting yourself be turned into a pattern.
These labels shape our perception, our emotions, our nervous system, our character, our entire lived existence in so many different ways. There is no one size fits all when it comes to personal traits. Becoming attached to one trait gives us the false sense of comfort that we have a specialty or permanent character trait and blinds us from the limitations that we are truly putting on ourselves.
Let the qualities that you bring to each and every scenario ebb and flow with whatever means necessary so you can treat every moment and every situation with the presence that it deserves. Don't be the same way and enable yourself to always be one way. Practice demonstrating the traits that are impactful when you see the opportunity. You’d be surprised how infinite you truly are without limitations.
