People Who Are Missing a Sense of Self

One of the odder features of life is that, without there being too many significant outward signs of the problem, many people are to be found wandering the earth lacking any sense of self.

By this, we mean that they are radically unsure of who they might be, what they might want and whom they should trust. These unfortunates have no settled core. In the background, they are always quietly asking themselves not ‘What do I like?’ but ‘What am I supposed to like?’; Not ‘What do I approve of?’ but ‘What is it good to approve of?’; not ‘What do I find funny?’ but ‘When should I laugh?’ When we watch them carefully, we may notice rapid, almost arbitrary shifts in their views: they love this artist or jacket or political opinion … but in fact, no, they prefer another one, and then another. They are implicitly, constantly calling out to a world that puzzles and terrifies them: Who should I be? What is it right to think?

These poor souls tend to be the products of very particular sorts of childhoods. When little, they will have faced environments in which their uniqueness was never a matter of concern to their self-absorbed caregivers. Mother or father were never able to push their needs aside for a time, drop to the child’s level and ask: Who is this extraordinary new member of the human race whom I have helped to create? What are their particular inclinations, loves and hates? What do they have to tell me?

They were far too perturbed and fragile for such self-abnegation. They couldn’t attune to the child – and so the child could not, in turn, attune to themselves. For we can only find out what we think if, in the early days, someone is sufficiently patient to facilitate our own process of self-discovery; if someone doesn’t shout over us and say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ when we ventured forth an opinion, or doesn’t use all the resources of adulthood to insist that their way is the only way.

The self-less child will have had to cope with an egotist who simply coerced them to follow an already predetermined agenda: these are the books you need to think are amazing; the only way to be a good boy or girl is to win at this kind of sport or that school subject; and later, to be a banker or a vet, and so on – all without in any way bothering to check in on how this might have felt to the small person biologically programmed to adore and revere them. From this was drawn a moral: survival depends on compliance. The price of existing is the sacrifice of one’s real identity.

Self-less people can be deeply charming. Their manner can be exquisitely polite and mellifluous. They are built to work out what we like and to reflect it back to us. They aren’t merely pretending to go along with what we think for a few minutes; they genuinely seek out our worldview and lose themselves in it.

But these people also pose grave dangers, for no one forgoes their sense of self without storing up a significant degree of rage and dissatisfaction. Yet this can never emerge cleanly because the candid expression of their needs was never something that these self-less people were allowed to practice. The first we are liable to learn about a problem they have with us is when it has become unmanageable.

We can be most at risk if we fall in love with these elusive, beguiling, shape-shifting people. At first, it’s our tastes they want to understand; it’s the books and places and foods we like that seem especially interesting to them. We can allow ourselves a dangerous moment of self-indulgence: we are made to feel marvellous and aren’t suspicious enough to wonder why.

Until, at some point, the wind changes. Our beloved-without-a-self starts a new job, develops different friends, and starts to hang out with a crowd they take to be superior. What replaces their approval of us isn’t just gentle disinterest, it will probably be disdain. We become as repulsive to them as we were once extraordinary. They may say, ‘You don’t really know me…’ or ‘You expect me to be perfect…’ They feel trapped by the very borrowed identity they once sought out so avidly from us. There is considerable anger in their system – because they know that someone has quashed their true self; they simply forget that it wasn’t us. They know implicitly that they have been prevented from becoming who they are and hold us responsible for stifling them. They may say with an early adolescent level of scorn, ‘You’re controlling me,’ when what they really mean is: ‘I don’t know who I am. I have surrendered control to you and now can’t work out what to think.’ Or, more profoundly, ‘I can’t determine the line between being loved and being controlled because a parent who was meant to do the former was more interested in the latter.’ We can find ourselves dropped like a stone. And yet, ironically, we may have been very right for them: they just didn’t know enough about who they were to trust their original instincts.

The best we can do for people who have been denied a self is to signal that we aren’t, as their parents once were, only there to foist yet another set of views on them. We won’t demand that they echo us. We want to be curious about someone they have never yet been allowed to discover; we are keen to do a very eerie and unparalleled thing: get to know them properly.