Identity Reconstruction

Definition

Identity reconstruction is the structural process by which a person rebuilds their sense of self after a load-bearing component of their belief system has collapsed or been deliberately revised. The process is sharply distinct from ordinary belief update: ordinary belief update revises a proposition while leaving the architecture of the self intact, whereas identity reconstruction is the re-architecting of the framework through which selfhood, meaning, and orientation in the world are housed.

The concept's clinical articulation is most associated with Marlene Winell's work on religious trauma syndrome and with the broader literature on worldview transition; its philosophical articulation is associated with existentialism's account of self-construction and with pragmatism's treatment of belief as a habit of action whose revision is therefore a revision of the agent.

The problem it answers

Why does belief revision sometimes produce identity crisis and sometimes not? A person who has updated their view of who painted a particular Renaissance fresco has not lost any part of themselves; a person who has lost the religious framework within which their life has been organized for forty years often experiences months or years of disorientation, grief, anger, and felt loss of meaning even after the revised view is, by the believer's own lights, more accurate.

The difference, the concept of identity reconstruction proposes, is that the second belief was load-bearing for the self in a way the first was not. The doctrine of God, the framework of religious meaning, the practices and community organized around them, the sense of one's own life as fitting into a larger pattern — all of these were held together by a single conceptual architecture. Removing the architecture does not just revise a proposition; it removes the framework within which the believer had been a self of a particular kind.

The core thesis

The core thesis has four parts.

Some beliefs are constitutive of identity. Most beliefs are not; their revision is a cognitive update with no significant implications for who the believer is. Some beliefs — typically about ultimate meaning, ultimate value, the structure of reality, and one's own place in it — are constitutive: the believer is in part the person who holds these beliefs.

Loss of a constitutive belief is structurally different from loss of a non-constitutive belief. It is not the same kind of event. The cognitive content of what was lost is only part of what was lost; the architecture of selfhood is also part. Treating the loss as merely a cognitive update typically produces inadequate responses (well-meaning friends saying the belief was false anyway, why are you sad?).

Reconstruction is necessarily slower than deconstruction. The collapse of an inherited framework can be precipitous; the building of a new framework that takes up the load takes years and is not done by reasoning alone. New practices, new sources of meaning, new communities, new ways of being-in-the-world must be cultivated for the architecture to support weight again.

The reconstructed self is not the prior self with revised beliefs. It is a structurally different self. The continuities are real but the discontinuities are also real; treating reconstruction as restoration is one of the standard ways the process miscarries.

The clinical articulation

Marlene Winell's Leaving the Fold (1993) and her subsequent clinical work coined the term religious trauma syndrome for the cluster of symptoms common to people who have left high-control religious communities. The symptom cluster typically includes identity confusion, persistent guilt and shame, social isolation from one's prior community, difficulty making decisions outside the framework that previously decided them, and a felt sense that meaning has collapsed even when the believer is intellectually persuaded that the previous framework was false.

The analysis applies, with appropriate modifications, to other kinds of worldview collapse: leaving an intense political ideology, an intense subculture, a high-demand career, an intense relationship that had organized identity around it. The structural process is similar even when the substantive content differs.

The existentialist substrate

The existentialist tradition provides much of the conceptual substrate for the concept. Kierkegaard's analyses of anxiety and despair (the Concept of Anxiety, 1844; the Sickness Unto Death, 1849) treat the loss of a constitutive framework as one of the structural possibilities of the self and develop a phenomenology of the resulting disorientation. Sartre's account in Being and Nothingness of the self as a project rather than a thing, Simone de Beauvoir's account of the self as constituted in part by its commitments, and Heidegger's account of authentic existence as the taking-up of one's own possibilities all give the structural articulation of selfhood that the concept of identity reconstruction presupposes.

The existentialist contribution is the recognition that the self is something that can be lost and rebuilt, that the process is not optional, and that the rebuilt self bears a particular relation to the lost one — not restoration but a kind of inheritance from the loss.

Common confusions

Identity reconstruction is not the same as belief revision. Belief revision is a propositional update; identity reconstruction is an architectural one. The first can be done in an afternoon; the second typically takes years.

Identity reconstruction is not the same as healing from trauma. Trauma response is involved when the collapsed framework was held in conditions of duress or when the loss occurred suddenly and painfully, but the underlying structural process of rebuilding identity is the same whether the loss was traumatic or gradual.

Identity reconstruction is not the same as finding oneself. The popular discourse of finding oneself often treats identity as a pre-existing essence to be discovered; the existentialist and pragmatist treatments behind the concept of identity reconstruction reject this picture. There is no pre-existing self that the reconstruction recovers; the rebuilt self is genuinely constructed, drawing on the materials of the prior self but not reducible to it.

Contemporary engagement

The concept is engaged in several contemporary literatures. Clinical psychology through the work of Marlene Winell, Janja Lalich (Take Back Your Life, 2006), and the contemporary literature on cult recovery and worldview transition. Sociology of religion through Phil Zuckerman's research on apostasy and the contemporary literature on the nones (the demographically growing population of religiously unaffiliated). Philosophy of religion and applied epistemology through engagement with Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) and the broader Taylor framework of immanent frames and cross-pressured belief. Memoir and first-person literature — the contemporary literature of memoirs of leaving religion, political movements, intense communities, and totalizing careers, which gives the phenomenological substrate the analytic concept formalizes.

Further reading

• Belief Systems — the Pillar concept this satellites
• Authenticity — the existential ideal the reconstructed self can aim at
• Inherited vs. Chosen Belief — the distinction whose movement reconstruction enacts
• Values Construction — the related process of intentionally building a value system
• Coherence Without Certainty — the epistemic posture the reconstructed self often takes

Satellite of Belief Systems. The structural process of rebuilding the self after a load-bearing framework collapses.