Not knowing who you are when the ordinary self has dissolved or loosened
The ordinary sense of self — as a particular person with a continuous story and a fixed identity — becomes tenuous or collapses entirely. This disorientation can be profound: not knowing who one is, how to relate to one's own history, or how to function in daily life.
Several accounts describe looking in the mirror and not recognizing the face there, or meeting old friends and not knowing how to be the person they remembered.
I was searching for an identity because as a child I always felt that I didn't know who I was and everyone else seemed to know.
And when I came back, that process of actually deciding to return to my body, my mind, my sense of self as an individual went through a transformation that completely changed my psychological makeup and also my understanding of who I was as both an individual and also as more than an individual.
And so, all of a sudden, my regular human identity started slipping to the back burner, and then gradually off the stove, as quite quickly my whole sense of self became more expansive.
Yeah, here's a passage from your book, you said, "Subjectively it felt like my identity was dividing into two parts, an impersonal side on the one hand and my personal sense of self on the other." Yeah, that is the experience when you connect with the witness.
Experience types that appear most often alongside this.
Other integration challenges that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.