Who am I?

Early in my career, I had an office overlooking the Monterey Bay. It wasn’t large or impressive, but it had one gift: a small window that opened to the ocean air. On quiet afternoons, the smell of salt drifted in, and the sound of waves seemed to slow the room down.

One Friday in June, I met with a man who had everything most people spend a lifetime trying to build. He was a retired surgeon and professor, widely published, financially secure, married for decades, with children and grandchildren who admired him. He was articulate, composed, and openly an atheist. His identity had been forged through discipline, intelligence, and achievement.

That day, none of it mattered.

Six months into retirement, his wife of 60 years had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Less than a year to live. The future he assumed would stretch gently outward had collapsed overnight.

“I don’t know who I am anymore,” he said quietly, staring past me toward the ocean.

He wasn’t confused. He wasn’t cognitively impaired. He wasn’t even primarily depressed. He was undone. Something deeper than mood or stress had fractured. The story he had lived inside no longer made sense.

It wasn't a brain problem. It wasn't a psychiatric diagnosis. It was a crisis of identity.

After decades in clinical psychology, I’ve learned to respect the limits of my profession. Psychology is very good at helping people manage symptoms, understand patterns, and develop skills to cope with suffering. I’ve watched people recover from trauma, stabilize severe mental illness, and reclaim their lives after devastating loss. 

But psychology is not designed to answer one question — a question that emerges not in moments of strength, but in moments of collapse:

Who am I, really?

That question doesn’t belong to diagnostic manuals or treatment protocols. It belongs to the soul.

For the first 10 years of my career, I worked in a psychiatric hospital. The work was intense, concrete, and urgent. Patients were trying to stay alive. We focused on stabilization, safety, medication, and discharge planning. There was little room for reflection about meaning or purpose. Survival came first.

Later, in outpatient work, I began seeing a different kind of suffering. People weren’t falling apart psychiatrically; they were unraveling existentially. Careers ended. Marriages dissolved. Children grew up and left. Bodies betrayed them. Long-held roles disappeared. And beneath it all, the same question surfaced again and again.

Who am I now?

I wasn’t trained to answer that question — and ethically, I can’t impose an answer. Psychology helps people clarify what they believe, not declare what is ultimately true. Yet over time, I noticed a pattern that no theory fully explained.

When people anchor their identity primarily in roles, relationships, abilities, or inner feelings, it works — until it doesn’t. When those structures remain intact, life holds together. But when they fracture, identity fractures with them.

I saw this early in my work with adolescents. In the 1990s, I helped run a day treatment program for teens struggling with severe emotional and behavioral problems. Those years were saturated with youth subcultures that didn’t merely express teenage angst; they offered ready-made identities. Looks, music, language, posture — all of it provided a script for who to be.

These cultures didn’t reflect identity. They supplied it.

And when those identities leaned into despair, alienation, or glorified suffering, the psychological cost was steep. Depression deepened. Self-harm increased. Suicide clusters emerged after highly publicized deaths. The question wasn’t whether teens were influenced, but how desperately they needed something — anything — to tell them who they were.

Today, identity has become one of the central battlegrounds of our culture. We are told to define ourselves from the inside out, to trust our inner voice as the highest authority, to construct meaning through authenticity and self-expression. Questioning this approach is often framed as harmful or oppressive.

But clinically and culturally, I’ve watched the same story play out.

When identity is self-generated, it becomes fragile. When it depends on performance, affirmation, bodily comfort, or internal certainty, it cannot survive loss, suffering, or contradiction. And when it collapses, people don’t just feel sad — they feel erased.

This is where psychology reaches its edge.

Contemporary culture often assumes that if we look deeply enough within ourselves, we will find something solid and trustworthy at the core. But human experience tells a different story. Our inner lives are complex, conflicted, and often self-deceptive. Thoughts misfire. Emotions contradict one another. Desires shift. Even our most sincere self-understanding changes over time.

If identity rests entirely on the self, the self must carry a weight it was never meant to bear.

From a Christian perspective, this is not a failure of effort. It is a design issue.

Christian faith begins with a quiet but radical claim: we are not the authors of ourselves. We are created. Our identity is not something we manufacture or discover in isolation — it is something we receive. Meaning does not originate inside us; it addresses us.

This does not erase the psychological realities of the mind, body, personality, roles, and relationships. These shape our lived experience every day. They influence how we think, feel, react, and suffer. But they are not the final word on who we are.

Most mornings, long before we speak to anyone else, we walk through an interior hallway. In that hallway, familiar voices speak.

Our bodies remind us of their limits — fatigue, pain, aging, and illness.

Our thoughts rehearse worries, regrets, and unfinished tasks.

Our personalities replay patterns we wish we could outgrow.

Our roles press in with responsibility and expectation.

Our relationships echo with longing, disappointment, or fear of loss.

None of these voices are imaginary. They are real. And some days, they are overwhelming.

But Christianity offers another voice — not as denial, not as motivational self-talk, but as declaration.

You are not merely your body; you bear God’s image.

You are not trapped in your thoughts; your mind can be renewed.

You are not confined to your patterns; you can be transformed.

You are not reducible to your roles; you are God’s child before you are anything else.

You are not defined by relational wounds; you are fully known and not abandoned.

This voice does not silence the others. It reframes them. It places them in context rather than allowing them to rule.

When identity is anchored in God rather than the self, suffering does not annihilate meaning. Loss still hurts. Grief still aches. Bodies still fail. Relationships still disappoint. But identity holds, because it is rooted in something that does not collapse when circumstances change.

Over the years, I’ve watched people begin to heal not when they finally perfected themselves, but when they stopped trying to carry the burden of self-definition alone. When identity shifted from performance to belonging, something softened. Anxiety loosened its grip. Shame lost its authority. Suffering became survivable.

This is not a promise of ease. It is a promise of grounding.

The Christian claim is not that we become whole by looking harder within ourselves, but by being known by the One who made us. Not by inventing meaning, but by receiving it. Not by securing an identity, but by resting in one already given.

At some point — through illness, loss, failure, or quiet reflection — most of us arrive at the same question my patient asked that day in Monterey.

Who am I, really?

If identity is built only from what we do, feel, or achieve, the answer will always be unstable. But if the truest thing about us is not what we say about ourselves, but what God says about us, then identity becomes something no storm can erase.

That possibility does not end the struggle. But it changes how we carry it.

And sometimes, that is enough to begin again.