Who am I? Who are you? The things, people and places around us influence how we perceive ourselves: our self-identity.
We make self-assessments around our talents and strengths, and where we fit within our occupation and social groups. Our self-identity, good or bad, starts forming the very start of everything.
Influential developmental psychologist Erik Erikson created theories around how experiences from birth to six years old are detrimental in forming the character traits that later create identity in life. Things like mistrust of the world or a lack of self-confidence are formed from neglect, trauma or abuse in the malleable years of infancy.
World renowned Vancouver physician Dr. Gabor Maté has spent his life studying addiction, specializing in the biological and socioeconomic roots of it. He predisposes “early adversity” such as child abuse increases susceptibility to addiction.
Maté has connected the amount of adverse child experience exponentially increases a person’s chance of becoming an addict later in life. Early in life, when neurobiological development is impaired, a negative self-image starts.
Maté insists punishing a drug addict is, partly, punishing a person for being abused or for having an unfortunate socioeconomic situation in infancy and childhood. Punishment entrenches and ostracizes an addict, worsening self-image, lowering the chance of recovery and re-entry to a healthy life.
Maté emphasizes the need to fix the root causes of addiction in order to have a chance for wellness. There is a deep pain an addict is trying to numb. Dealing with that pain is key to healing and finding a real sober, positive self-identity.
In life, we become adults, make our own choices and live with the consequences. When a low self-image informs us, bad choices lead to addiction or worsening of mental health conditions. Addiction, criminal behaviour and mental health issues become an entangled mess and, often tragically, are a difficult mess to fix.
An addict, antisocially and internally, self-identifies as an addict.
At midlife, after 29 years pursuing, consuming and living with the consequences of my addiction, my thoughts around self-identity are murky and kind of a bewildering idea.
Post decades of alcoholism and accompanying antisocial behaviour, my brain circuitry is hardwired to be isolating and self-destructive. Mine, and lots of other addicts’ self-identity, is often something that needs a complete reconstruction.
A collapsed and complete conflagration of life calls for a total rebuild. You can just renovate the basement and give the front yard some curb appeal. Often, you have to bulldoze the rubble and start again.
Thoughts of positivity and healthy behavioural changes are a step toward clearing up the cloudiness around a new self-identity.
I recently saw a quote by the writer Victor Hugo circling around the internet: “40 is the old age of youth and 50 is the youth of old age.”
At 53, sitting tentatively on the edge of a half century, I have to look forward with humility, without shame and enjoy the clarity that sobriety follows closely behind, and nurture a self-identity that can create opportunity and spread good things in the “ youth of old age.”
Robert Skender is a Powell River freelance writer and health commentator.
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