Change of Identity

There are many ways of changing that attempt to compensate for the distress of childhood. Some ways are skilful, and some are unskilful. The experience of trauma leads the person down strange byways in life.

One cause of long-term stress is childhood abuse [¹]. This may be emotional, physical, or sexual. I consider emotional abuse is perhaps the most common form of abuse. The child is subjected to excessive fault-finding, ridicule, other forms of disparagement, and to emotional neglect and lack of tenderness. Sometimes the distress caused to the child is unintentional, as when the parents have “frozen emotions” and cannot give adequate emotional support to the distressed child.

The experience of abuse may be minor or major in its intensity. Hence the intensity of its effects on the child will vary too. If the abuse has been very stressful for the child, then that child, as it grows up, is likely to have difficulty in making fulfilling relationships, especially sexual ones. Hence an effect of abuse is that the child, when it reaches adulthood, may develop various forms of compensation, some forms of which will be healthy and other forms will be dysfunctional.

As an example of a dysfunctional form, consider the psychological disorder of manic depression (bipolar disorder). When the child is regularly denigrated in some ways, this will lead to the shrinkage of its aura (which is the energy field surrounding the body), meaning that the boundaries of its consciousness shrink. As a compensation, the child learns to expand its boundaries beyond its capabilities, thus generating mania. In effect, the child learns to dissociate from the crippled ego and switch to an apparent “limitless” ego. But when it cannot fulfil the desires of the limitless ego, when it realises that it is out of its depth, the child becomes depressed and hence switches into the depression mode of manic depression.

When immersed in a difficult relationship, the person may generate one or more ideals as a means of compensation for his sorrows. If he can rise above materialistic ideals, he may propel himself into a search for freedom, justice, socialism, the pursuit of truth, mystical union, and other high ideals. The energy with which he pursues his high ideals is just the energy that he would like to put into his relationships but cannot. As a general rule, the deeper his sense of frustration and sorrow, the more motivated he is to pursue his ideals.

One form of compensation is that the adult makes a change of identity. In some circumstances, a change of identity makes a person alive; the change gives a sense of aliveness that was absent before the change. The person may feel that it’s almost like a new start in life. By contrast, the old identity is just a dead weight (just an identity carrying the dead weight of guilt). The main factor that is involved is above-average sensitivity, since the average person does not seek to change his identity.

Receiving abuse will begin to make the child sensitive. However, this is usually outweighed by the need to remain socially conformist. In this situation, the child (and later the adult) will seek change in order to find a new validation of himself by others. Only when the level of sensitivity outweighs the need to conform will the person begin to explore ways to find a new authenticity [²].

The subconscious reason for changing identity is the attempt either to be validated by others or to authenticate oneself: this is usually a healthy response to a previous life of dreariness.

Learning and Change

Whether compensation for childhood distress can function or not may sometimes depend on the long-term cycle of stress on the person. The person may go through a period of hard times and high stress, and then find himself in a period of comparatively easy times and low stress, followed at a later date by hard times again as the cycle repeats itself. This cycle of stress affects how the subconscious mind works.

When we are under high stress in hard times, whether mental stress or social stress, then we can learn about ourself and create original ideas. The high stress means that the subconscious mind is very active. We learn about our limitations, and also our strengths, especially if we become self-critical. But we only change ourself when the stress drops off – low stress means that the subconscious mind is mainly quiescent. When the stress is high, we usually don’t change much because we continue to cling to our old beliefs, the reason being that we need something to hold onto during our uncertainties.If we want to try and attain a more balanced character, we have to relax and allow the stress to fade away as much as possible; then we can change our beliefs in accordance with what we have learned about ourself during the hard times. The more quiescent the subconscious mind becomes, the less will it hinder our desire to change. Creativity and learning require high stress, whilst maturing one's character requires low stress.

For example, in hard times the person may cling to “victim” status and does not change. The person clings to the need to blame someone. In easy times the person relinquishes “victim” status and hence can change. Easy times are perhaps the best way to approach change. This effect also explains the real value of retirement as we grow old – as the stress drops away, the person can make changes in his life, changes that will mainly take effect in his next incarnation on Earth.

However, if the person cannot wait for easy times he may try a change of identity as a compensation. In hard times the person cannot solve his problems, and so attempts to switch identities whilst still enduring the hard times. So change of identities is a kind of displacement of identity: the person displaces “victim status” to some aspect of his original identity, and transfers his hopes to one or more aspects of himself that are free of the victim mentality.

More generally, choosing a new identity is often an issue in identification. The person identifies with a role or an ideal that is free from the ravages of childhood trauma. The world of capitalism that we live in is a high-stress world, with very little place for personal ethics. Hence when choosing a new identity, a common strategy for an idealist is to choose one that is not based on the values of capitalism. A traditional choice is that the idealist becomes a man of honour.

New Identities

I give a brief overview of changing to a new identity, with a more detailed look at the Hero role.

The need for validation may propel the person into emigrating to a new country, which the person hopes will be a new start in life. In this case the emigrant is seeking a new society which can validate him.

One dysfunctional response is to attempt validation by taking the identity of someone else who is validated.

I went through a change of identity when I became transgender (or trans as it is now called). Changing identity by changing gender will be described in a later book.

A confused way of attempting a change of identity is that of multiple personality (or dissociative identity disorder). I analyse this in a later book on mental disorders.

As an example of the pursuit of authenticity in changing identity, I look at the idea of the Hero. Sometimes, for a person who centres his life on will power, and who has experienced trauma in childhood which weakens that will power, one common remedy for restoring the will is to identify with the role of Hero. The new identity that the person assumes is that of being the Hero. As with any identity, the Hero identity can be a positive one or a negative one.

Hitler and the Identity as the Hero

As an example of a negative change of identity, I look at Adolph Hitler. First of all, I give my views of the influences on him of his parents. His father was a bully and a stern disciplinarian. So in some degree he would have inflicted trauma on the young Adolf. All Hitler’s life he had a very strong attachment to his mother. However, as an adult he did not like being touched. This indicates touch deprivation in childhood, that is, he was not cuddled and caressed very much by the mother. He sexually liked younger women but had no intimacy skills. He never consummated any of his sexual relationships with women. This means that he was afraid of mature women. Hence his attachment to his mother was actually a love-hate attachment [³]. Overall, therefore he experienced some degree of trauma from both parents – physical trauma from the father and emotional deprivation from the mother.

So how did he learn to handle the effects of trauma? Infancy trauma from the father invalidated him as a straight, average man. This meant that he could not handle power effectively. To handle power, he had to change his sense of identity to one which was not affected by the negative beliefs produced by trauma. So he had to become something for which trauma had no relevance. In his book Mein Kampf, and to friends, Hitler claimed that before he went into politics he heard an inner voice telling him to restore Germany’s greatness. This claim is quite likely to be true. The long-term effect on Hitler was that he believed his destiny was to become the Hero whose mission was to lead Germany back to its former greatness. He would be the Hero who would save Germany. This was now his new identity. Now he could handle power very effectively.

However, the experience of trauma stills creates one character limitation: every problem has to be viewed in black and white terms. There can be no middle way of negotiation and compromise. As a Hero, Hitler’s absorption into politics was extremely intense: he did not gradually immerse himself into new challenges, but instead dived headfirst into them.

His use of will power was based on his new identity. When his identity as the Hero of Germany faced collapse (as it did during the first German reverses in the war with Russia), then he maintained his identity by making the use of will power rigid and inflexible. So he forbade the German army commanders to retreat to more defensible positions – the army had to maintain its ground, even at the cost of unnecessarily-high casualties. A common method of making willpower inflexible is to develop paranoia. In my view, Hitler gradually became paranoid and inflexible. As the German army continued to lose the war, Hitler’s identity as the Hero gradually collapsed and so too did his will power. His childhood traumas began to be more influential since he aged extremely quickly in the last year or so of the war (the fast ageing was an effect of extreme bitterness being stimulated by his childhood traumas).

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Ian Heath
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.	Compensation Why do we have unpleasant aspects to ourself ? Often it is related to the ways in which we handle stress. What seems to happen is that when we are under long-term major stress, whether as child or adult, we eventually generate a pattern of belief and behaviour that enables us to survive that stress. If other people like our behaviour, then it is labelled “good”, whereas if they don’t like it, it is labelled “bad”. Overall, when the stress level reaches a critical point, our beliefs and behaviour cannot cope any longer with the situation or relationship that is causing the stress, so we change in order to survive. As with any change, in some ways we can now handle the stress better than before, but in other ways we find ourself in new difficulties.
Sub - Headings
Learning and Change
New Identities
Hitler and Identity as the Hero
References