When Roles Swamp Our Identities

What happens when we become wedded to the roles that we play in life? Some of us become fixated on a script about who we are and what we can do with our lives. More strongly, we come to believe that we must act in certain ways and are unable to act in others. Roles can become identities that can confine us.

Whether a role is willingly and lovingly assumed and then validated, or if it is taken on without intention and meets with disapproval, doesn’t matter in some important ways. Any role or identity can subsume and confine people, keeping them from flourishing.

The problem with reductive labels: I am just a _____

A woman who does not work outside the home may say, I am just a mother. Someone who has long struggled with their drinking may claim, I am just a drunk.

The just a___ move reduces a person’s complexity to a set of behaviors or traits that are taken as all-defining and all-determining. These roles and identities allegedly have huge explanatory power for those who inhabit them and for the rest of us. They also have evaluative power.

Imagine the mother is really interested in becoming more involved with a volunteer organization. She holds herself back because, well, she’s just a mother, and there probably will be others who are far more interesting, have successful careers, and have so much to offer. She’s too ashamed to volunteer and so doesn’t. The “just a mother” narrative explains how she reaches her decision, and it becomes the source of her own negative self-evaluation. A friend who “supports” her by saying, “You wouldn’t have fit in,” aids and abets the mother’s reduction of herself.

The person with the drinking problem may really want to make changes in his life. Perhaps he wants to become more reliable and dependable. Imagine he misses his child’s band performance. Even if he isn’t drinking but forgot or was delayed, he may say to himself, I am just an unreliable drunk. Who was I kidding? For both him and his family, drunkenness explains every act, freely chosen or not, and their consequences. It is the basis for their evaluation of him as a father. His believing himself to be just a drunk may sap any intention and effort on his part. It may also drain support from family and friends.

No one is ever just a___.

Bad faith

To believe that you are just a___ is to embody what existential philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) identify as “bad faith.” Bad faith forecloses opportunities and possibilities through the belief that a person can never be otherwise than how they are.

Bad faith is a form of self-deception and manifests in tangled ways. To act in bad faith is to deliberately create and cultivate a belief you know on some level to be false. That creates a gap between what you know to be true and the belief that you are pushing yourself to accept as truth. The challenge is that we are no longer able to discern the truth about ourselves and what we have willed or convinced ourselves to believe.

The woman who says, I am just a mother, may have known that she is an organizational rock star who excels at motivating people. She could turn the most disorganized group into a smoothly running machine to great effect. Yet she undermines what she knows about herself and her talents because she starts believing and acting in ways that only support her view of herself as just a mother. At some point, she may no longer believe she has those talents. She flattens her own complexity to fit a role of mother (or, more accurately, what she believes a mother to be).

The man who sees himself as just a drunk creates and exploits the gap as well. Before his drinking started, he may have been the most reliable and dependable person. Yet all the years of drinking make it nearly impossible to access those parts of himself. He may mistake what he thinks to be true about himself (that he has always been unreliable) with what had been true of himself. He flattens his complexity and reduces himself to the role of a drunken screw-up.

Overcoming bad faith

It may feel easier to accept the I am just a ___ rather than work and fight to get back something you have lost or reach for something you have never had. This is bad faith operating in its most debilitating, if not deadly, rhythm.

Bad faith is so dangerous because it becomes familiar and habitual; we have great difficulty recognizing it. We need to make it strange to ourselves. The next time you catch yourself thinking or saying, I am just a___, you might:

• Make a genealogy of how and when you started thinking of yourself that way.
• Ask yourself what is keeping you from believing in yourself.
• Imagine how you might act differently when not so wedded to that role or script.

Identifying the dynamics of bad faith crucially interrupts it, which helps a person to embrace their complexity.

For the mother, she may see other roles that would enliven her and make mothering even more rewarding. She could become a mother and ____.

The man who sees himself as just a drunk may take one step closer to being ready to recover because he begins to see possibilities where before he saw only inevitabilities. Even a short stretch of sobriety might remind him of truths about himself that have long gone dormant. He could be a person who struggles with addiction and ____.

The opposite of bad faith is authenticity, a concept I will explore in a future post.

Originally published on psychologytoday.com May 27, 2026