Search Results for: identity

Are You Living with an Accidental Identity?

…less irritable, we can treat others with more patience. Actions shape our identity. How we perceive ourselves is another story. Our sense of identity starts to form as soon as we’re born. We draw on our experiences to develop a definition of ourselves, which we uphold in many ways throughout our lifetime. This prescription is laid out for us in both the subtle and unsubtle ways we were treated and related to as children. While we can assess and c…

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Is My Self-Hatred Getting in the Way of Love?

…the parents’ negative habits and traits contribute to the child’s negative identity. Our negative identity is also a consequence of our primitive need to maintain a positive view of our parents. To sustain the illusion of unbroken and unbreakable attachment to their parents, children must obscure their parents’ inadequacies; if these cannot be denied, then they represent a threat to the union between parent and child. For example, if a parent is u…

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Changing Your Sense of Identity

…all take to challenge our negative self-perception and change our sense of identity. First, we have to realize that identity is the furthest thing from being fixed. A person can come to be who they want to be by changing their actions in any given moment. However, both actions and our self-perception feel much harder to change when we’ve lived with them for so long. Breaking out of an old identity often symbolically means breaking the “fantasy bon…

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Personal Sexual Identity

…ely express themselves without discrimination. Being that forming a sexual identity is a necessary process in forming one’s overall identity, interrupting this natural process can be quite harmful and psychologically damaging to an individual. In society, if anyone deviates from the so-called “norm”, people are quick to judge and stigmatize the things that are different or unfamiliar. Although it is upsetting that most people stereotype, it is how…

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Creating a More Positive Identity

…ves. We are siding with our anti-self and accepting a prescription for our identity that was written by our past – not by the reality of our present. So, how can we separate from this identity? Together with my father Dr. Robert Firestone, who developed Voice Therapy, we’ve collectively written and produced dozens of books, blogs, films, articles, Webinars, workshops, and studies, discussing what works in relation to overcoming this inner critic….

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You Don’t Really Know Yourself

…ges and attitudes toward themselves that represent a basic aspect of their identity. This provisional identity is made up of three essential parts: (1) the way that they were verbally defined as children; (2) the overall emotional impact of the child’s early environment; and (3) the defenses that they formed to protect themselves from destructive influences. Parents tend to attribute a fixed identity, whether it be positive or negative, to their o…

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identity, sexuality, psychalive, sexual stereotypes,

Identity, Sexuality, and Society’s Assault on the Self: A Commentary on John Irving’s Novel, In One Person

…interactions, it is important first of all to acknowledge an individual’s identity as a fellow human being and then to acknowledge his or her sexual identity and choice of partner. Anything that detracts from, denigrates, or attacks a person’s sexual identity is destructive and constitutes a violation of his or her human rights. Yet, our society routinely inflicts this form of damage on groups of people it categorizes as different from the norm a…

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How to Befriend Yourself: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to Living

…feel entirely different about himself. A woman who was hurt in her sexual identity who had spent most of her life feeling sexually inadequate, became aware that this was part of a false identity based on abuses in her family and was able to completely dispel this notion. It changed her feeling and positively affected her sexual experience as well. The truth is that it is difficult and anxiety provoking to make changes in your negative identity. T…

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Changing Sense of Identity

…of each one of us. By looking into all the things that shape our sense of identity – both good and bad, painful and joyful – we can make more conscious, adult choices about how we see ourselves and who we want to be. Learning Objectives: Describe the nature of identity as dynamically constructed as opposed to fixed Describe forces operating within the self, family and society that limit, or seriously damage, peoples own ability to find personal m…

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Why Some Men Give Up Their Identity in a Relationship

…on or parent-child relationship will influence a person’s budding sense of identity and future relationships. One study found that a healthy relationship between a mother and son directly affects his sense of morality and ability to have healthy romantic relationships as an adult. However, if that relationship is more strained or the mother has a more critical view of her son or of men in general, the son often internalizes these attitudes toward…

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