Identity Issues

Our society focuses a lot on identity.  We take personality tests, craft careful social media posts, curate bumper stickers, and select our preferences --news channels, political parties, even our churches -- with an eye toward presenting ourselves as who we think we are or who we want to be.  But, for all our self-fascination, we have surprisingly little security.  Even arrogance does not necessarily indicate confidence.  Even those of us who believe human beings are made in the image of God may find that concept hard to embrace, hard to live out.  Why do we have such problems with self-esteem? 

Human identity is a battleground for a much bigger war than we often acknowledge.  Our creation in the image of God means we were designed for the highest purpose imaginable: to reflect the glory of God.  Satan was an archangel who was also created to display the glory of God, though in a different way, but he wanted that glory for himself.  His pride caused him to rebel and be cast out of heaven.  To get back at God, he sought to deceive God’s image-bearers (also known as human beings) into choosing our own will over God’s (Genesis 3), and, as a result, we lost the glory God intended for us and forfeited our communion and fellowship with Him, becoming slaves to sin and Satan (Romans 6:17). 

Look at human identity in Genesis 3.  Satan deceived Eve with the implication that God could not be trusted with her identity – that God was, in fact, lying to her to keep her from being all she could be (i.e., “like God”).  He basically told her that disobeying God was the way to fully reach her potential, and Eve wagered her identity on the serpent’s information, which turned out to be a lie.  Adam, who was with her at the time, chose his wife over God, paying more attention to her feelings and thoughts about the situation than to the truth God had given them.  As a result, he lost his secure status with God, his power, his sense of adequacy and security.  Man was led into arrogance, despair, and a sense of inadequacy.

Jesus came to bring us back to Himself and to redeem creation, but this process is not yet complete in all its implications.  We were made for glory but born into exile, and even those of us who receive His rescue are shaped for now by the influences of our bodies, our families, our surroundings, our limitations.  In Romans 7:15-17, Paul expresses frustration with the state of our own humanity in a fallen world.  Without the secure base of knowing the One from Who we were made – without that as our automatic understanding of who we are – we engage in a continual search for significance through the approval of others.  Like Adam did with Eve, we value the opinions of others more than the truth of God, and we make our choices based on them rather than on the one Who made them and us.  We continually fail to turn to God for the truth about ourselves, thinking that we are what others say we are, and we have extreme difficulty separating our identity from behavior.  With this belief system stamped into our brains, we live by the following equation:

               others’ opinions + my performance = my self-worth.

When we are dependent on our performance for identity, learn to be manipulative (Proverbs. 23:7), develop a “have-to” mentality (e.g., have to have ___, have to do ___, have to be ___), and feel trapped.

While this process is universal, it also plays differently in the development of each individual.  In addition to being personally fallen, human beings are reared by other fallen human beings called “parents.”  Our parents are supposed to model the character of God for us as we develop, relating to us much as God does, but in a fallen world parents love children with imperfect love and give an imperfect picture of how God interacts with us.  This imperfect love exists with varying degrees of dysfunction, and some children receive a far more skewed picture of God than others.  Parents who communicate conditional love to their children predispose them to performance-oriented behavior, which is ultimately about chasing a feeling; it is the drive that says, “If ______, then I’ll be happy/ loved/ able to relax.”  Performance-oriented behavior leads us to so much fear, worthlessness, and despair.  It is difficult to understand the Fatherhood of God when childhood experiences (e.g., abuse, abandonment, not feeling wanted) give such a different picture of what a parent is like and what a child is worth.  This leads to difficulty nurturing and trusting ourselves, trusting others, internalized doubt and shame about who we are, over-wrought thinking about ourselves in an attempt to make it better, etc.

Societies also display different versions of fallen behavior.  In our society, for example, the last few decades have seen women trying to get identity from competing with men, trying to outdo them, trying to get self-esteem from how they rank with men.  This is a different way to chase self-esteem than those seen in societies with different value systems, but all the ways of chasing self-esteem outside the foundation of bearing God’s image are ultimately futile and tend to lead us in downward spirals.

So how do we repair self-esteem? 

-We acknowledge the problems we have with it.  We acknowledge their origin, including the pain we have experienced because of our own choices, the wounds we have from the choices of others, and the pain we have caused others. 

-We rejoin with God, which we are allowed to do because Jesus has paid for our sin, giving us the right to approach God again.  We acknowledge Him as our Creator, asking Him to show us who we are and to restore and build the sense of identity He intended for each of us individually. 

-We forgive ourselves and others (a short phrase that describes a big process). 

-We accept that loving ourselves is acceptable to God, that it is what He wants (Matthew 22:39).  

-We validate ourselves and our own worth based on God’s decision to love us.  Remember, He defines reality; it is not defined by our own feelings and thoughts about ourselves. This does not mean we dismiss or despise our own feelings (feelings are important and don’t really ask our permission to exist), but it does mean we deny them the responsibility or right to define everything (That’s actually not what they’re for.).  When we accept God’s right to define reality rather than insisting we understand it better than He does, we start to find out who we are.  We also start to enjoy the goodness of God instead of making Him work so hard to convince us of His love.

-We learn to know ourselves and to manage our own feelings and personalities effectively.  For example, if we are more sensitive, we acknowledge that and become safe adults for ourselves, giving ourselves safety instead of demanding that others provide safety for us.  We learn to respond to criticism and to live out our values.  Essentially, we learn to be for ourselves the parents we wish we had had as children.  We become safe adults to the child-like parts of ourselves.

-We let go of perfectionism. 

-We learn to be assertive rather than passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive.  We learn to maintain healthy boundaries. 

-We meditate on who we are in Christ.  We learn to walk in His love.

-Sometimes we write strong affirmations.  Affirmation creates within us a strong belief in that which we are affirming.

Remember, low self-esteem is with us because we are fallen, but we do not have to let it steal from us on an ongoing basis.  We can journey back to reality by going to the One Who made us.  The One Who gave us the gift of existence still knows who we are, and He looks forward to helping each of us find out and enjoy who we are meant to be.