People are complicated, contradictory, and ever-changing. There doesn’t have to be one universal truth of who a person always is. People can be many things all at once or whenever they feel like it.
Anger doesn’t mean someone was never happy. Liking metal music doesn’t mean that same person doesn’t like pop music. Someone can be withdrawn and moody one day, then peppy and pleasant the next. The same person can be wildly different in different contexts and have many sides to themselves, but they are still themselves.
A person is not their behaviors or presentation. A person is a person.
People say “phase” like impermanence means insignificance. Show me a permanent state of the self.
Alixandra Bamford, Tumblr, April 3, 2014
It’s okay if people get very different ideas about who Sarah is depending on who they meet first. We lead the way by being okay with it ourselves, and most people simply follow suit. We had a house-guest here for a few days this week, who quietly observed to Rose – “Wow, it’s like Sarah’s a different person. I didn’t think she’d be the kind of person who games (first person shooters, by preference, particularly L4D2). There’s a photo of a pretty butterfly on one of her computer screens, and she’s killing zombies on the other!” To which Rose responds “yeah, I see what you mean. Some people are like that!”
Sarah K Reece, Inner Children: Shame and Threat, 2015
A man may be kind to his children and friends and brutal to his wife. A mother may love three children and hate and abuse the fourth. When you think of self as one static thing this is horribly confusing and we keep trying to understand which story is true and which self is real – the kind or the vile. When they are understood as both true, real, genuine, there’s both a kind of devastation and a relief in being able to hold them equally in mind. No longer are they different sides of a coin that cannot be viewed at the same time, they are different aspects of the same person and both true.
So the abused person who struggles to find their way to the ‘truth’ of their situation – wrestling with competing stories of who their abuser ‘really’ is, finds a way out by embracing the whole of them. They are both Jekyll and Hyde. They are sweet, wounded, sincere, and savage. It’s all real, inasmuch as any self is real. You cannot have a relationship with only one of them, however wonderful they are and however much you adore them. And you cannot soothe the savage ones through further abasement, sacrifice, and suffering. Until and unless the sweet ones take responsibility for the savage ones, they will continue to let their demons take their pain and rage out on you.
Sarah K Reece, We Are All Multiple (And So Are The People Who Hurt Us), 2019
RH, Identity Shift, 2014