Life has a way of handing us moments we never asked for. Breakups in our teenage years, a loss on the football field we poured everything into, conflicts with people we love, or setbacks in work we’ve built with our own hands. I’ve lived all of those. And if you’re honest with yourself, you probably have too.
We all want to be known as capable, good at what we do, and worthy of respect and love. Sometimes we try to define ourselves by our strengths. Men, in particular, often anchor their identity to their careers. But perhaps even more common, and more damaging, is how many of us define ourselves by our failures and the painful things that have happened to us.
In my work as a counselor, one of the most frequent journeys I walk alongside clients is the journey of redefinition. We are far more than our circumstances, our failures, our careers, or even our victories. The question is: “What are you using to define yourself?”
If you find yourself struggling emotionally with depression, anxiety, or a persistent sense of being stuck, it may be worth pausing to examine that very question.
Why your definition of yourself matters
In counseling, I spend a great deal of time helping clients question and clarify their definitions of themselves, of others, and of the events that have shaped them. I see this play out constantly with couples. Most conflict doesn’t come from malice; it comes from misunderstanding. Two people tend to define the same word, the same moment, or the same behavior in completely different ways.
When you have the wrong definition of something, or of yourself, you think, feel, and act accordingly. We find wisdom in the Bible, which says, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.” There is a reason we need to correctly assess our own thoughts and experiences. You may imprint the wrong definition onto them. When you do this, that misalignment of your thoughts costs you.
Just because I do poorly on a test, or drop a plate, or hit a rough stretch in business, I’m not all of a sudden bad. I’m human.
Consider this: if you struggle in math, that gives you information, not an identity. If you hurt someone unintentionally, that’s information too. It doesn’t permanently make you a hurtful person. And if you’re kind and generous, that’s also just one data point. Which brings us to the real challenge: we can’t fairly define ourselves by a single situation, or even a handful of them.
The goal isn’t to ignore the data. It’s to get the correct definition, an accurate, honest view of who you are, so that you can live authentically and impact the people around you in the way you actually want to. By seeing your struggles as information, not a declaration, you now have the opportunity to move outside of whatever stuck point you are in. It’s an opportunity to learn and grow if you choose.
How life circumstances affect us and why that’s not the whole story
Let me be clear: life experiences absolutely have real power. Traumatic events like losing someone, getting fired from a job, accidents, and profound betrayals can fundamentally shift how we see ourselves and the world around us. I know this personally.
When I was a teenager, I flipped a car. Not necessarily speeding, but on a gravel driveway (I will spare you the details). For a while afterward, I carried shame about it. I kept up an exterior that wouldn’t let people in, not wanting anyone to know. Even now, when that story comes up, it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable. And I’ve had to sit with a quiet question: does a part of me still wonder if I’m careless, stupid, or not capable? Now, are those thoughts actually true about me?
That’s the power of experience. It can build a lens over everything, like how we see the world, how we see others, how we see ourselves. And we humans have a natural pull toward the negative. Ask most people whether they’d focus on five good things or five bad things that happened in a week, and the honest answer is usually: the bad.
Dr. John Gottman’s research on couples offers a striking parallel: healthy couples maintain a roughly 5-to-1 ratio of positive to negative interactions during conflict. That buffer of positivity is what keeps them connected. When that ratio collapses, so does the health of the relationship. Our inner life works the same way. When we let the negative define the whole, we lose perspective on the truth.
This doesn’t mean we minimize pain. I’ve seen too many couples and too many individuals be harmed by having their wounds dismissed. Minimizing someone’s hurt doesn’t make it go away. It just drives it underground, where it does more damage. Our experiences deserve to be seen, heard, and understood for what they were. They were just things that happened to us, not a verdict on who we are.
The difference between being shaped and being defined.
This distinction is one of the most important ones I know.
When something shapes you, it has an impact — it influences how you feel, what you believe, what you’re afraid of, and what you pursue. My daughter once fell off her bike while learning to ride it. That experience could shape her by making her more cautious. Or it could shape her by making her more determined. Either way, the fall influenced her — it didn’t become her.
When something defines you, you’ve merged it with your identity. Instead of “that happened and it was hard,” it becomes “that’s who I am.” Instead of “I’m still learning to ride,” it becomes “I can’t do this. I’m bad at this.”
Common false labels people carry:
- “I’m not good enough” — often born from being overlooked or dismissed by someone whose attention mattered.
- “I can’t do this” — often born from a single failure that got treated as evidence of a permanent truth.
- “I’m not capable” — often born from shame that never got the chance to be processed or challenged.
These labels feel true. That’s what makes them so hard to release. But feeling true and being true are very different things.
Here’s a real example from daily life: this morning, I got up later than I planned. Immediately, my mind wanted to run with it. I thought, “I’m behind, I’m not productive, I don’t have it together.” One small thing, and I was three steps down a path toward a false definition of myself. Life compiles these moments. A plumbing problem, the washer acting up, the dog at the vet, an unexpected medical bill, all in the same week, and suddenly the narrative in your head becomes, “What’s wrong with us?” That’s not truth. That’s exhaustion wearing the mask of identity.
How counseling helps you separate experience from identity.
When a client sits down with me, we start by doing something that sounds simple but isn’t: we separate. We take the experience, whatever it was, and we work to see it as an event. Something that happened. Not a referendum on the person sitting across from me.
Once someone can see it as an event, we can start to reframe it. Maybe they contributed to what happened. That’s worth understanding. Maybe they didn’t. That’s worth understanding too. We look at what skills they already have, what they’re still growing in, and we start to see the bigger picture: none of us is a finished product. We’re all still adding, still growing. And that’s not a failure, that’s being human.
One of the tools I often use is helping clients examine their circle of control. There are simply things in life we don’t control. And it doesn’t make sense to define yourself by the outcomes of things you were never able to determine in the first place.
We also work with cognitive behavioral approaches, where we help you capture and challenge negative thoughts to ask: “Is this actually true? And if it’s not, what is?” We make room for grief when it’s needed. Emotions are not the enemy; they’re information. The goal is to learn what they’re telling you without letting them write the entire story.
Counseling can’t erase your past. But it can change your relationship with it.
Your brain is built to remember. That’s not a flaw — it’s how you survived and learned. But the goal of counseling is to help you understand what those memories mean and, crucially, what they don’t mean. By processing an experience in a safe, non-judgmental environment, with someone who genuinely empathizes with you, the weight of it often shifts. It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes something you carry differently.
Signs you might be living inside an old story.
How do you know if a past experience is still quietly running the show? Some signs to watch for:
You’re dealing with persistent anxiety or negative self-talk that traces back to something old. You find yourself reacting to present situations with an intensity that doesn’t quite match them. Something your spouse or partner does today triggers a response that belongs to a different time and place, and they don’t understand why, and honestly, neither do you.
I’ve sat with couples where a wife comes to her husband with a simple concern, and he shuts down completely. She doesn’t know why. He may not even fully know why. But somewhere in his history, being approached with a concern became dangerous. His withdrawal then activates her deepest fear, abandonment. Which probably also has roots long before him. Two old stories, colliding in an ordinary Tuesday evening.
If you want a practical question to ask yourself: Is my reaction bigger than the situation calls for? Does this remind me of something that happened before? That awareness alone can begin to create distance between you and the old story, enough distance to ask whether it’s still true.
Your story matters, and so does what you do with it.
I want to be careful to say this clearly: your story is important. I would never tell you it doesn’t matter or that you should simply move past it. It shaped you. It gave you information. It built beliefs, some of which are strengths you rely on today and may not even fully recognize as gifts.
Playing football gave me discipline and resilience I still draw on. Hard relationships taught me things about health and connection that I now bring into my work. The difficult moments in business have made me more thoughtful and more tenacious. The things I might easily label as “bad things that happened to me” are also, if I look at them honestly, part of what made me who I am, the parts I like, too.
That’s the invitation: to look at your experiences, the hard ones especially, and ask, “What choices do I have here?” “What opportunity is coming out of this moment?” Not to bypass the pain, but to refuse to let the pain be the final word.
You are not your worst moment. You are not your hardest season. You are not the label someone put on you, or the one you put on yourself in a moment of shame or exhaustion. You are someone still in the process of becoming, and that is not a deficit. That is the whole point.
If you’re feeling stuck in an old story, counseling can be a place to explore it, with a compassionate, non-judgmental person who can help you see those experiences for what they were, and yourself for who you actually are.
Call us at 706-916-6740 or book an appointment at https://legacymarriageresources.clientsecure.me/
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