Category Archives: Identity
What’s When You Have A Gay Part?
I have often experienced that a multiple has parts that are gay. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there are many people who are either 100% heterosexual or 100% gay. Most people can be located somewhere on a continuum between <gay and straight>. I can imagine that it feels more absolute and set …
What is Conflict
Most people have a clear idea what conflict is. Most people don’t like conflict. In most cases conflict is difficult and hurtful for all parties involved. Social theorist Axel Honneth explains the significant role conflict plays for a person’s healthy sense of identity and individualisation as follows: Individuals learn about who they are through interactions …
I Don’t Want To Talk About Sexual Abuse
Childhood abuse, be it physical, emotional, mental, or sexual, has a lasting impact on people. Unfortunately, often they are not even aware that they are affected by it. They live out the abuse on a daily basis: by not trusting others or themselves, by being unable to feel, by being unable to regulate their emotions, …
How To Build Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is a product of recognition through solidarity. Let me explain what that means. Within a community of peers people experience the expression of appreciation, acknowledge, valuing, and support as a sign of solidarity. When we are recognised in the above ways by people who share our values, concerns, and/or interests it means they ‘esteem’ …
How To Build Self-Respect
Self-Respect is a product of being granted rights like anybody else. Self-respect is understood here as the ability to perceive oneself as a morally responsible individual whose actions are respected by others. Recognition through the granting of rights by legal systems is thus the second form of recognition that is vital for the development of …
How To Build Self-Confidence?
Self-confidence is one of these terms that are used by many people in many different ways without there being a clear agreement or understanding what exactly it means. In fact, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-worth are often used interchangeably. I am going to use the concept “Self-Confidence” in the philosophical sense of Axel Honneth’s Recognition Theory. He …
Positive Relations With Self – Positive Identity
People derive a sense of self and identity through interactions with others who give recognition and approval to a person’s abilities and accomplishments. How does that work? As children grow up, they are dependent on ‘significant others’ for forming of a positive sense of self. Children need the experiences of a ‘human hothouse’. When they …
How Disrespect Impacts On A Person’s Identity
What happens when the ‘hothouse’ conditions are not given that allow young children to develop a positive sense of self and a positive Identity? We see a struggling child, adolescent and later adult. What will the struggle look like? People will have difficulty relating, difficulty being independent, and difficulty grasping a strong sense of self!
Diagnosis and Identity
Making a connection with the therapist and equally so being diagnosed with DID have a huge impact on peoples understanding of who they are. Identity is the label of a group or social category that a person gives herself (Charon, 1998), for example ‘I am a woman’ or even ‘I am a multiple’. As such …
Connecting Through Diagnosis
Making a connection with a therapist had to be followed by making a connection through being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID). It signaled for the DID clients I interviewed a break through in this first stage of their therapy that I have called 'Connecting'. We finally seem to have got something so that I …
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