Me, Myself, My Self and I

Who am I? Maybe one of the easiest, and paradoxically, most difficult questions to answer.

I’ve been thinking about the linguistic labels I use to describe myself recently. What words do I use to talk about myself, and when I use the 4 words / labels (?) of the title, am I talking about the same person?

We all have lots of ‘parts’ of ourselves, and I’ve been aware of many of my parts for some time. For example, there’s the counsellor in private practice, the counsellor in employment, the PhD student, workshop facilitator, and many, many more. We change our behaviours and ways of being depending on the people we’re with or the situation we’re in, and all of these differing ways of being can be different parts of our overall Self.

Until recently, I’d thought of “Me, Myself, My Self and I” as the same thing. I’d not even given it much conscious thought … until a friend of mine made me aware of my using these different ‘labels.’

My unconscious has still been working with, and for me, and shortly after 3am this morning, I woke up realising that ‘I’ is my persona. ‘I’ is who I present to the world. ‘I’ is the part of me that is often in conflict with my true way of being, the part of me which creates inner, and sometimes outer, conflict. It is the part of me with old introjected beliefs still present from my past; the beliefs I learned from others and made part of me. Swallowing those beliefs suffocated parts of my own belief system and caused them to retreat into my ‘Shadow Self’; a part of me separated and not in my conscious awareness.


('Shadow Self' ... taken March 2011)

‘Me’ is who I ‘truly’ am. ‘Me’ is my way of being when I’m living according to my own beliefs and am responding freely and spontaneously to my own experiencing. ‘Me’ is when I feel most at ease within myself, when I’m allowing myself to simply be. My Shadow Self is opening up and allowing consciousness to shine on all of the hidden aspects of me, enabling me to become a much more expansive, congruent individual.

My Self …. I’ve often broken down the word ‘myself’ like this. For me, this was in response to Carl Rogers’ writings around self, awareness of self, self-concept and the process of self-actualization. Seeing it written down now though, I’m wondering if I’ve actually caused ‘me’ to see ‘Self’ as a separate entity. Something which existed inside of ‘me’ & which I was striving to un-cover & dis-cover. I’ve created a dualism for myself, so reminiscent of dualistic Western thinking with its mind-body split.

I’m now realising though that I want to integrate ‘My Self’ and enable it to simply be ‘myself’. It’s time to stop searching for an entity labelled ‘My Self’ and accept that ‘My Self’ is actually ‘Me’!

And when I reach a point where ‘I’ is the same as ‘me’, then I’ll know that I’m fully integrated and connected with ‘myself’…. I’m not sure that’s a state that anyone can ever fully achieve, but I do believe we can experience times when we’re fully integrated and living as one. Our experience of living and being is constantly changing and we need to be free to move around and between our different parts.