There is a moment in therapy that I have witnessed hundreds of times. Someone is telling me about their life — their career, their relationship, their plans — and everything sounds fine. Objectively fine. The kind of life that looks good from the outside.
And then their voice drops half a register and they say something like: "I do not know who I am without all of this."
The Inherited Self
That sentence is the beginning of something important. Not because the life they have built is wrong, but because they are starting to notice the gap between who they are performing and who they actually might be.
We all inherit identities. From parents who needed us to be a certain way. From cultures that rewarded particular versions of personhood. From schools that measured us against standardized criteria. From social media that taught us which selves get liked.
The resulting self is a collage — assembled from external expectations, held together by the assumption that if you stop performing it, the whole thing collapses.
Carrying Too Much That Is Not Yours
Erickson had a beautiful phrase for this: he spoke of people as carrying too much that was not theirs. His therapeutic approach was not about adding new beliefs or strategies. It was about removing what did not belong. He trusted that underneath the accumulated conditioning, the person already knew who they were.
This is what I mean by unbecoming. It is not a process of building a new self from scratch. It is a process of subtraction — peeling back layers until you reach something that does not need to be defended, explained, or performed.
Finding the Unperformed Self
One practice that supports this: notice the moments in your day when you feel the least performed. When you are not trying to be anything for anyone. Maybe it is early morning before anyone else wakes up. Maybe it is in the shower. Maybe it is on a walk with no destination. Those moments are not empty — they are you without the costume.
The session Unbecoming Who You Were Told to Be guides this process through Ericksonian metaphor — the shedding of old skin, the emergence of something lighter, and the quiet recognition that who you are without the performance is not less. It is more.