We all play roles in life as part of our identity development. Teenagers especially may try out different roles over time or in different social settings as they try to balance needs to distinguish themselves as separate and the desire to belong. We may also be given certain roles or defined in certain ways by our family or our peer group – ‘Paul is the quiet one’. Roles can be part of how we feel a sense of stability and belonging – ‘Mum always makes a cake for our birthday’. Developing our identity is also strongly linked to adopting role models – ‘Shane’s just like Grandpa’. We may struggle to show attributes we haven’t seen in someone else. People often start to adopt the mannerisms and characteristics of others we admire or spend a lot of time with.
Where roles can a problem is when they are limiting in some way, at odds with who we want to be, or have terrible costs we don’t want to pay anymore. We can find that other people’s idea of who we are can be rigid, not accounting for growth and change over time. Paul may long to be a more outgoing kind of guy, Mum may be desperate to swap roles at times, Shane may be rocked when Grandpa behaves badly. Sometimes teenagers identify with rebellious loners and find that the social cost to this kind of identity is depressing them.
I find looking at the way teenagers manage issues around developing identity useful, because it’s not uncommon for them to experiment and try out different roles and approaches to life. They can be quite fluid while they’re finding where they feel most comfortable. It can be a bit trickier as we get older because we get so used to thinking of ourselves in a certain way, and people around us can re-enforce this, making it hard for us to change.
Something to consider is what function the role you’ve been playing has, and if you need to find a new way to perform that function, or if you want to leave it behind completely. Next, what kind of roles are you drawn to? Who do you want to be? Look around for role models, these don’t have to be people in your life, they might even be fictional characters. Look for ways to model what they do. The Magic of Make Believe by Lee Pascoe instructs how pretending to be a person we admire for a short time can help us to step outside our fixed idea of ourself and take on new characteristics. To a certain extent, we are who we think we are. Just because we’re not teens any more doesn’t mean we have to get stuck with roles we chose at 17 for the rest of our lives.
Another way of looking at roles is to borrow from Jungian archetypes. It may be that you don’t want to give up the role you’ve been playing, it’s valuable and useful and fits for some situations. Perhaps a more useful approach would be to expand the number of roles you can play. This idea simply put is that we all contain a whole bunch of different ways of relating to life – broadly speaking, roles. We get stuck when we’ve limited ourselves to only one or two. The idea in this case is to try and connect with some of the archetypes you’ve lost touch with. So for example, a very conservative straight laced person who’s feeling tired and lacking creativity might look for opportunities to play a Trickster role to liven things up. The theory is that all of us have within us the capability for all roles, the kind of flexibility that allows actors to find any character within themselves for a time. It’s a little like the difference between having only three cards to play, and access to a full deck. Being able to access and live out a peaceful, centred role when we’ve been stuck in chaos, or an assertive role when we’ve felt trapped by shyness, or an introspective role when we’ve been exhausted by driven productivity can free us to express many different sides of ourselves and be able to adapt and respond to many different situations in life.
Roles are not static things, they are also about relationships. Roles such as parent/child are mutually re-enforcing. Even if you had no intention of playing the role of a parent with someone, if they keep behaving as a child, you may find yourself starting to behave as a parent. We ‘hook’ each other into roles. So roles that are played within systems are also about the relationships between parts. In the example of someone who’s got the role of an abuser, part of helping them put that role down is getting the rest of the system to no longer relate to them as an abuser – with fear and anger. Part of that process is about rebuilding the relationships – helping the abusive part to see the harm they’ve been doing, to develop empathy for the other parts, and to genuinely apologise for the role they’ve been playing. Helping the abused parts to articulate their pain and fear, to learn how that role came into being and why it was played, to start to connect with the strengths and good qualities of that part they haven’t been able to see before, and to let go of the old dynamic of abuser/abused and hook into new roles.
https://sarahkreece.com/2011/11/10/understanding-roles/