Am I the story I tell?

And away we go..

When we start looking closely at who we think we are, we often encounter something unexpected: the roles we play in life and the identities we carry with us.

Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they blur together, and sometimes they create confusion.

Am I the role I play?
Am I the story I tell?
Or is there something beneath all of that, something closer to pure experience without complex thought?

Stories, Roles, and Survival

In my work with clients, and in my own life, I’ve noticed that identity is built from stories. Stories about who we are, who we’re supposed to be, and what we’ve had to do to survive. Many of these stories form in childhood, long before we could separate the inner world from the outer one. Most of these stories are outside of our conscious awareness.

When you’re two years old, there isn’t much distinction between what happens around you and who you believe yourself to be. If Dad leaves, that absence becomes a story. If Mom shames you, that voice gets recorded. If you find safety by being the helper, or by being invisible, that role gets hardwired into your nervous system.

The Helper, the Protector, the Invisible One, etc. These weren’t choices. They were strategies. They were roles you didn’t consciously select; they were survival blueprints that got laid down in an environment you couldn’t control.

Fast-forward to adulthood, those blueprints are still running the show, and so is the egocentric nature of the magical child mind.

Controlled Hallucinations

Here’s where things get even wilder: even the “I” you think you are is a controlled & controlling hallucination. Current neuroscience reveals that the self is a constructed narrative, a clever trick the brain employs to help us navigate the world.

There is no permanent “I.”

There is the story of “I.”

And all the roles we play, parent, partner, friend, coach, rebel, helper, are nested inside that hallucinated self. They’re useful. They help us survive. But they are not the whole truth of who we are; they are closer to who we think we are.

Rewriting Roles

One of the most powerful things we can do in coaching or therapy is challenge these old stories. Not to erase the past, YOU CAN’T, and YOU CAN reinterpret what past experiences meant to you and what you made it mean about you.

Take anxiety, for example. For a child growing up in chaos, being anxious might have been the role that kept them safe, always scanning for danger. As an adult, that same role becomes exhausting. Through exploration, you can look back and notice that anxiety served me then. I don’t need it to control me now.

The story eventually changes through the work.
And when the story changes, the role shifts.
And when the role shifts, so does the present moment.

It feels like a choice, but maybe it’s less about choice and more about awareness. By noticing, by slowing down, by rewriting meaning, you create space for a different role to emerge.

A Personal Example

Years ago, I noticed how often I used the words “like” and “just.” It was habitual, cultural, automatic. But once I became aware, I slowed down my speech, rewired my patterns, and changed the way I expressed myself.

Was that “my choice”? Maybe. Or maybe it was the system of my brain/body noticing something reflected back to me through others, integrating that awareness, and shifting over time. Either way, the story of me changed.

That’s how change often happens: not through sheer willpower, but through awareness, reflection, and repetition.

Triggers as Teachers

I’ll share a recent moment. A few days ago, I got an email from someone who has some power over my life. The moment I saw it, my body reacted: I’m in trouble. I did something wrong. My heart raced. My chest tightened. Old story: Jator’s in trouble.

I slowed down. I read the email carefully, word by word.
And guess what?
It had nothing to do with me being in trouble.

That pause, that space in the charge, was the work. That’s where I got to choose a different role. Not the scared kid waiting for punishment, but the adult slowing down, grounding, and responding differently.

Parenting the Inner Child

This brings me to reparenting. Whether or not your mom or dad were “there,” their voices still live inside you. If Dad was absent, you were raised by that absence. If Mom shamed you, that voice became internalized.

We’re all parenting ourselves through those voices.

The work is noticing: how am I mothering myself? How am I fathering myself? Am I shaming? Am I abandoning? Am I protecting? Am I nurturing?

One client I work with grew up hearing: You are not enough. You will never be enough. As an adult, he carries that into every area of his life, like a constant background noise. Together, we started creating safe places for his younger self. Sometimes it wasn’t about rewriting the story immediately, but simply about rebuilding trust between his nine-year-old self and his adult self.

Safety first.
Relationship first.
Story later.

Protection as Healing

I remember my first time teaching at the CHEK Institute. Everything went “wrong”: the projector broke, the slides failed, and I was terrified. My five-year-old self, who had been shamed in classrooms, came roaring back.

After a class meditation and each person sharing I softly shared with the class:
“If you see a five-year-old running around here in the next three days, please be nice to him. Because if you’re not, this 37-year-old is going to protect him.”

That changed everything.
My adult self stepped in as protector. My younger self had someone to protect him in the environment where he felt unprotected.

That’s reparenting. That’s rewriting. That’s choosing a different role in the moment.

Closing

So, are we our roles? Our identities? Our stories?

Yes, and no.

We’re the accumulation of survival strategies, shaped by past environments, carried into the present. But we’re also the awareness that can pause, reinterpret, and protect the parts of us that do not feel safe.

The invitation is not to erase the roles you play, but to notice them. To question which ones still serve you. To parent the parts of you that experienced abandonment. To choose protection where there was once shame.

In that awareness, new stories can be written.
And new roles can emerge.

Jator (or am I?????)