EP 008: Identity Shifts, Who Are You Becoming? The Negativity of Positivity

Think about who you were five years ago.

Not just what you looked like or what job you had. Think about what you believed. What you were afraid of. What you thought you wanted. Who you thought you were supposed to be.

Now look at who you are today.

Are those the same person? Because for most of us, the honest answer is not really. We change. We grow. We go through experiences that reshape us in ways we did not plan for and could not have predicted. We lose things. We gain things. We discover that some of the identities we were holding most tightly were never really ours to begin with.

And sometimes that change is celebrated. But sometimes it is terrifying. Sometimes it costs you relationships. Sometimes the people who knew the old version of you cannot understand the new one. Sometimes you look in the mirror and you are not sure you recognize yourself either.

This episode is about that. About the process of becoming. About what happens to your sense of self when life requires you to change. About the people you grew apart from and whether those distances are permanent. About the toxic patterns that can freeze your identity in place and keep you from evolving. And about how to navigate all of it with clarity, compassion, and an honest understanding of who you are actually becoming.

🎵  MUSIC INTRO — Full theme plays in, fade down after 20 to 30 seconds

[ WELCOME — SHOW OVERVIEW ]

⏱ Target: 90 seconds

Welcome to Beyond Horizyns. I am CJ Sugita-Jackson and this is where holistic wellness, ancient wisdom, modern science, and honest human conversation meet.

Every episode we take a topic and we give it the full treatment. Not just the inspirational surface. The depth. The research. The tradition. And the practical tools that help you actually do something with what you hear.

Today we are going deep on identity. On what it means to change. On the science of how the self is built and rebuilt across a lifetime. On what happens to our relationships when we evolve. On the very specific damage that toxic positivity does to our ability to grow honestly. And on what it looks like to reconnect with people and parts of yourself that you thought were gone.

This is a very universal conversation that most people ignore or keep to themselves.  Every single person listening right now is in the middle of becoming someone. Whether you can feel it clearly or not.

Let's explore it together.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Brief and smooth

[ HORIZYNS PLATFORM PROMO ]

⏱ Target: 25 seconds

Before we dive in, a quick word about Horizyns. It is a holistic wellness marketplace and intentional community platform launching in 2026, built for seekers, creators, and practitioners who want more than the mainstream offers. Learn more or schedule a personal demo at www.horizynsinc.com. The link is in the show notes.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Deeper, more interior, more searching

[ MAIN CORE DISCUSSION — IDENTITY SHIFTS: WHO ARE YOU BECOMING? ]

PART ONE: Ancient and Traditional Wisdom on Identity and Change

⏱ Target: 4 to 5 minutes

Every major wisdom tradition in human history has had something profound to say about the nature of the self. And almost every one of them agrees on something that modern Western culture finds deeply uncomfortable.

The self is not fixed. It never was.

In ancient Greek philosophy, the pre Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote one of the most quoted and least understood lines in all of philosophy. He said you cannot step into the same river twice. What he meant is that reality is not a collection of static things. It is a constant flow of change. And the self, the person standing at the edge of the river, is just as much in motion as the water.

Plato later explored the idea of the soul as something that evolves through experience. His allegory of the cave describes a person who was living in a limited, false understanding of reality and who goes through a painful, disorienting process of emerging into greater truth. The emergence is not comfortable. The other people in the cave do not understand it. And yet it is the only path toward genuine wisdom.

That allegory maps directly onto identity shifts. When you grow beyond a previous version of yourself, the people who were comfortable with that version may not celebrate your evolution. And the disorientation of not quite fitting in the old world while not yet fully inhabiting the new one is one of the most isolating feelings a human being can experience.

Buddhism offers one of the most radical frameworks for understanding identity. The concept of anatta, often translated as non self, teaches that what we call the self is not a fixed, permanent thing. It is a constantly changing process. A stream of experiences, thoughts, emotions, and perceptions that we habitually group together and label as me. The suffering that comes from clinging to a fixed identity is, in Buddhist teaching, one of the primary causes of human pain.

The Zen tradition builds on this with its emphasis on beginner's mind. Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese Zen teacher who brought this tradition to the West, wrote that in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. Identity rigidity, the refusal to let the self evolve, is not wisdom. It is a kind of spiritual stagnation.

In many African traditional cosmologies, the person is understood not as a standalone individual but as a relational being whose identity is inseparable from community and from ancestors. The Zulu concept of ubuntu, often translated as I am because we are, reflects an understanding that who you are is always shaped by and in relationship with others. Your identity shift affects the web you belong to. And the web affects yours.

In Indigenous North American traditions, vision quests and rite of passage ceremonies were specifically designed to facilitate intentional identity transformation. The young person who entered the ceremony was not the same person who emerged from it. That was the point. Transformation was not accidental. It was sought, held, and honored by the community.

And in the mystical traditions of Christianity and Sufism alike, the concept of dying to the self before being reborn into a greater truth runs through the deepest teachings. Think about the ritual rebirth of baptisms.  

The Persian Sufi poet Rumi wrote about the reed cut from the reed bed crying for its origin. That longing, that grief for what was, is not weakness. It is the sound of genuine transformation. The cut is what makes the music possible.

Every tradition that has produced lasting wisdom understood that the self is not a destination you arrive at. It is a river you are always moving through.

PART TWO: What the Science Says About Identity and Change

⏱ Target: 4 to 5 minutes

Now let's look at what modern psychology and neuroscience have discovered about how identity actually works. The science here is both fascinating and deeply reassuring for anyone who has ever felt like they were losing themselves in the process of growing.

The psychological study of identity has been shaped significantly by the work of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson. In the mid 20th century, Erikson proposed that identity is not something you settle once in adolescence and carry unchanged for the rest of your life. He described a series of identity crises, and he meant that word in its original sense, as turning points, not catastrophes, that occur throughout the entire human lifespan. Each stage of life presents a new set of challenges that require the self to reorganize and expand.

Research has confirmed and expanded this framework dramatically. A landmark longitudinal study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology tracked participants across decades and found that personality and identity continue to change in measurable ways well into midlife and beyond. The idea that who you are is locked in by your mid twenties is simply not supported by the data.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman at Stanford, whose work on the brain and identity is among the most accessible and groundbreaking in the field, describes the self as a story the brain tells about itself. Not a fixed object. A narrative. And like all narratives, it can be revised. The brain is constantly updating its model of who you are based on new experience, new relationships, and new understanding. This process is called narrative identity formation, and it is an active, ongoing construction, not passive.

This matters enormously for how we understand periods of identity disruption. When your sense of self feels shaky or unclear, it is not because something is broken. It is because the brain is in the middle of updating its story. That disorientation is a sign of growth in progress, not evidence of failure.

Psychologist Dan McAdams at Northwestern University has spent decades studying what he calls the personal myth, the story each person constructs to make sense of who they are and where they are going. His research shows that people who have gone through significant identity shifts and who have been able to integrate those experiences into a coherent, evolving narrative show significantly higher levels of psychological wellbeing, resilience, and meaning than people who either cling rigidly to a fixed self concept or who experience their changes as fragmentation with no through line.

In other words, it is not the change that wounds us. It is the inability to make sense of the change.

Now let's talk about relationships, because identity shifts do not happen in isolation. And the relational consequences of personal growth are real and often painful.

Research on what psychologists call interpersonal ripple effects of personal change shows that when one person in a relationship system changes significantly, the entire system is affected. Family therapist Salvador Minuchin's work on family systems theory demonstrated that families and close friend groups function like organisms. When one part changes, the others must adjust. And not everyone adjusts willingly.

Sometimes the people who resist your growth the most are not doing it out of malice. They are doing it because your change implicitly challenges the story they have been telling about themselves in relationship to you. If you were always the struggling one and now you are thriving, that shift creates a kind of identity pressure on everyone around you. Some people will rise to meet it. Others will push back.

And then there is the science of reconnection. Because not all distance between people is permanent. Research on adult friendship repair, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, shows that people who have had significant falling outs are often able to reconnect successfully when both parties have undergone genuine personal growth in the intervening time. The key variable is not whether the conflict was serious. It is whether both people have developed enough self awareness to understand their own role in what happened.

The person you fell out with five years ago may not be the same person today. And neither are you. Approaching a strained relationship with curiosity about who that person has become, rather than certainty about who they were, opens a door that judgment keeps closed.

PART THREE: Toxic Positivity and the Frozen Identity

⏱ Target: 5 to 6 minutes

Now we need to talk about something that is actively working against identity growth for a significant number of people. And it is coming dressed in the language of wellness, spirituality, and self improvement.

Toxic positivity.

We have touched on this in earlier episodes, but today I want to go deeper. Because toxic positivity does not just affect your emotional life in the moment. Over time, it fundamentally distorts your ability to grow, to change, and to build an identity that is genuinely your own rather than a performance designed to make other people comfortable.

Let's define it clearly. Toxic positivity is the insistence on maintaining a positive emotional frame regardless of what is actually true. It is the wellness culture version of emotional suppression. It uses the language of growth and healing to actually prevent both. And it is everywhere.

It sounds like “I do not allow negativity in my space”. It sounds like everything happens for a reason said to someone who just experienced genuine loss. It sounds like you just need to raise your vibration when someone is struggling with something real and difficult.

And here is what makes it particularly insidious when it comes to identity. The self cannot grow if it cannot be honest about where it is. Identity shifts require a clear eyed reckoning with who you have been, what has not been working, and what needs to change. Toxic positivity short circuits that entire process by labeling honest self assessment as negativity.

Research by psychologist Susan David at Harvard Medical School, whose work on emotional agility has reshaped how we understand psychological health, shows that emotional suppression, including the kind driven by relentless positivity, is associated with increased anxiety, reduced authenticity, and diminished capacity for genuine connection. Her research draws on decades of evidence to conclude that the ability to be with difficult emotions, not to be consumed by them but to be with them, is one of the strongest predictors of resilience, creativity, and long term wellbeing.

The person who never lets themselves feel grief cannot fully appreciate what they have lost. The person who never lets themselves feel anger cannot accurately assess what has been wrong. The person who insists on being fine every single day is not healing. They are performing.

And here is the identity consequence that nobody talks about enough.

When we use toxic positivity to avoid honest self examination, we do not just stay stuck in old emotional patterns. We actually build our identity around the avoidance itself. We become the person who is always okay. We become the person who has transcended negativity. We build a persona out of positivity, and then we defend that persona with the same language we use for spiritual growth.

The result is an identity that is frozen. Not because it is strong. Because it is brittle. Because genuine growth requires the willingness to say I was wrong about this. I am different now. This version of me no longer fits. And those sentences are incompatible with a rigid positivity framework that treats any acknowledgment of difficulty as a failure.

Now let's talk about what toxic positivity does to relationships. Because this is where the real damage becomes visible.

Think about how many people you know who cut off relationships the moment those relationships became uncomfortable. Who disappeared from a friend going through a hard time because the heaviness felt like too much. Who walked away from a family member who was struggling rather than sitting with the complexity of it. Who unfriended, unfollowed, blocked, and labeled everyone who challenged their worldview as toxic energy.

In some cases, distance is genuinely necessary and healthy. Real toxicity exists. Real harm exists. And protecting yourself from genuine harm is not what I am addressing here.

What I am addressing is the pattern of using the language of energy protection to avoid the discomfort of genuine human complexity. Because human beings are complex. The people we love are complex. And the relationships that have the most capacity to help us grow are often the ones that are also the most challenging.

Psychologist John Gottman, whose decades of research on relationships at the University of Washington produced some of the most reliable predictors of relationship success and failure in the field, found that the ability to repair after conflict is a far stronger predictor of relationship health than the absence of conflict. Relationships that never have friction are not necessarily healthier. They may simply be more superficial.

When we cut people off at the first sign of discomfort and call it protecting our peace, we are often actually protecting our stagnation. We are removing from our lives the very friction that would require us to examine ourselves more honestly.

And here is the question that toxic positivity never asks. What if the person I cut off was not entirely wrong? What if the falling out had something to teach me about myself that I did not want to see? What if the discomfort they caused was not a sign that they were toxic but a sign that they were holding up a mirror I was not ready to look into?

Protecting your peace is wisdom. Using peace as a shield against growth is a very different thing. And knowing the difference is extremely important to understand. 

Toxic positivity also distorts identity formation in a very specific way when it comes to spiritual communities. The wellness and spiritual space can create enormous pressure to perform a certain kind of identity. The evolved person. The high vibe person. The person who has done the work and is now beyond struggle, which is never true.  That is the ego.

That performance becomes its own kind of prison. Because you cannot be honest in a space that only rewards a single emotional register. You cannot grow in a community that punishes complexity. And you cannot build a genuine identity in an environment that requires you to perform one.

Real spiritual growth, as every authentic tradition makes clear, runs directly through the difficult material, not around it. The mystics did not bypass the dark night of the soul. They went into it. And what they found on the other side was not an absence of complexity. It was a deeper capacity to hold it.

PART FOUR: Practical Tools and Putting It All Together

⏱ Target: 5 to 6 minutes

So what do we actually do with all of this? Because understanding identity shifts intellectually is very different from navigating them in your real life, in your real relationships, with your real history.

Here are five practical approaches grounded in both the research and the wisdom traditions.

Practice One. The Identity Inventory.

Take out a journal (notice the pattern of journaling throughout our episodes) and answer these questions honestly. Who was I five years ago? What did I believe that I no longer believe? What did I want that I no longer want? What roles was I playing that no longer fit? And who am I becoming? Not who do I want to perform being. Who am I actually in the process of becoming right now?

Dan McAdams's research on narrative identity shows that the act of writing your own story with honesty and intention is one of the most powerful tools for integrating change into a coherent sense of self. You are not erasing who you were. You are understanding how you got from there to here.

Practice Two. Separating Protection from Avoidance.

The next time you feel the impulse to cut someone off, distance yourself from a situation, or declare something or someone as toxic energy, pause before you act. Ask yourself two honest questions. Am I in genuine danger here, emotionally, physically, or relationally? Or am I uncomfortable in a way that might be asking me to grow?

Both answers are valid. But they require completely different responses. One requires protection. The other requires curiosity. Knowing which one you are actually in is essential. And toxic positivity makes that distinction almost impossible because it labels all discomfort as something to be avoided.

Practice Three. Approaching Old Relationships With Fresh Eyes.

If there is a relationship in your life that ended or became strained during a period of personal change, consider whether the distance is permanent by choice or permanent by default. There is a significant difference.

If you are open to exploring reconnection, start not with explanation or justification but with genuine curiosity about who that person is now. People change. The friend who hurt you at twenty two may have done a tremendous amount of inner work since then. The family member who could not understand your choices at thirty may be in a very different place at forty. Approaching with curiosity rather than the fixed story of who they were creates the possibility of meeting who they have become.

This does not mean forcing reconnection where it is not safe or wanted. It means releasing the assumption that what was broken must stay broken, and being genuinely open to what honest conversation might reveal.

Practice Four. Developing Emotional Agility.

Susan David's framework of emotional agility, grounded in her Harvard research, offers a practical alternative to both emotional suppression and emotional overwhelm. The practice involves four steps. Showing up, which means allowing yourself to feel what is actually there without immediately labeling it as good or bad. Stepping out, which means observing your thoughts and feelings from a slight distance without being fused with them. Walking your why, which means connecting your response to your deepest values rather than your immediate reaction. And moving on, which means taking values aligned action even when the feelings are still present and difficult.

This framework is particularly powerful during identity transitions because it allows you to hold the discomfort of becoming without being paralyzed by it and without bypassing it with false positivity.

Practice Five. Letting Go of the Old Identity With Intention.

One of the least discussed aspects of identity growth is grief. When you genuinely change, you are also genuinely losing something. The old version of yourself. The relationships that belonged to that version. The beliefs and certainties that once felt like home. That loss is real and it deserves to be acknowledged.

Many of the Indigenous and traditional wisdom traditions we explored in Part One built intentional grief rituals into the process of transformation for exactly this reason. The community understood that you cannot fully inhabit the new self while you are still trying to pretend the old one did not matter.

Give yourself permission to grieve who you were. To honor what that version of you survived and built and loved. And then to release it with care rather than abandonment.

That release is not a betrayal of your past. It is the most honest form of respect you can offer it.

You are not erasing who you were. You are building on it. Every version of you that has existed was doing the best it could with what it had. And the version you are becoming is the result of all of them.

The question this episode began with was who are you becoming. And I want to offer a reframe on that question before we close this section.

The question is not just about the future. It is also about right now. Who are you being in this moment of transition? Are you being honest with yourself? Are you giving yourself permission to change? Are you holding space for the people in your life to change too? Are you distinguishing between the relationships that need distance for your genuine safety and the ones that just need more courage and more honesty?

Because who you are becoming is not only shaped by the destination you are moving toward. It is shaped by how you move. By whether you move with integrity. By whether you bring compassion to the process, for yourself and for the people who have known all the different versions of you along the way.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Warm, grounding, settling energy

[ SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT — TEA4PEACE TRANQUILITEA LOUNGE — QUICK TIP ]

⏱ Target: 60 seconds

This episode is brought to you by Tea4Peace TranquiliTea Lounge, my ritual centered tea and botanical wellness brand.

Here is today's quick tip. Identity work is cognitively and emotionally demanding. And one of the most overlooked aspects of doing deep inner work is giving your nervous system the recovery it needs between sessions.

Research published in the journal Nutrients shows that the amino acid L theanine, found naturally in green and white tea, promotes a state of calm alertness without sedation. This is exactly the mental state most conducive to honest self reflection. Not too wired to be present. Not too drowsy to think clearly.

Make a cup of tea before your next journaling session or quiet reflection time. Let it be a signal to your whole system that it is safe to slow down, look inward, and be honest with yourself.

Find Tea4Peace through the link in the show notes.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Returning, reflective, warm closing energy

[ FINAL REFLECTION — SUMMARY AND SYNTHESIS ]

⏱ Target: 2 minutes

Let's bring this home.

From Heraclitus and the river of change to Buddhist non self to the Ubuntu philosophy of identity as relationship, every tradition we explored today understood that the self is not a fixed thing. It is a living, breathing, evolving process.

The science confirms it. Erik Erikson showed us that identity continues developing across the entire lifespan. Dan McAdams showed us that narrative integration, making honest sense of our changes, is a foundation of psychological wellbeing. Susan David's emotional agility research showed us that the ability to feel difficult emotions honestly is not a weakness. It is the most direct path to genuine growth. And John Gottman's research on relationships reminded us that the ability to repair is more valuable than the absence of conflict.

We went deep on toxic positivity today because it deserved the depth. Because it is actively preventing the honest self examination that real identity growth requires. Because the people it most affects are often the ones who are most genuinely trying to grow. And because learning to distinguish between protecting your peace and avoiding your growth is some of the most important discernment work any of us can do.

You are changing. You have always been changing. And the person you are becoming is not a departure from who you were. It is the fullest expression of everything you have lived, learned, lost, and discovered.

Give yourself permission to become that person without apology.

And give the people around you a little grace as they try to catch up.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Warm closing theme rises gently

[ CALL TO ACTION AND CLOSING ]

⏱ Target: 60 seconds

If this episode spoke to something real in your life, please follow the Beyond Horizyns podcast wherever you are listening so you never miss a future conversation.

And come join our Horizyns community at www.horizyns.com where you can meet like minded individuals, find amazing products, and take workshops from our many curated vendors.

Each week we explore new ideas, traditions, and perspectives that help us live more balanced, more intentional, and more meaningful lives.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being honest enough to ask the hard questions about yourself.

And until next time, keep exploring what lies beyond the horizon.

SHOW NOTES AND RESEARCH REFERENCES

Ancient and Traditional Sources:

Heraclitus, pre Socratic philosophy on change and identity, approximately 500 BCE

Plato, Allegory of the Cave, The Republic, approximately 380 BCE

Buddhist concept of anatta, non self, Pali Canon

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind (1970)

Ubuntu philosophy, Southern African traditional cosmology

Rumi, The Reed Flute, Masnavi (13th century CE)

Sufi tradition on transformation and the dying of the false self

Indigenous North American vision quest and rite of passage traditions

Meister Eckhart, Christian mystical tradition, concept of the true self

Psychological and Clinical Research:

Erik Erikson, identity development and psychosocial stages, Childhood and Society (1950)

Dan McAdams, narrative identity theory and personal myth, Northwestern University

Longitudinal personality research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011), Stanford University

Susan David, Emotional Agility (2016), Harvard Medical School

John Gottman, relationship repair research, University of Washington

Salvador Minuchin, family systems theory and interpersonal ripple effects

Adult friendship repair research, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Interpersonal ripple effects of personal change, social psychology literature

Toxic Positivity Research:

Susan David, emotional suppression and psychological cost, Harvard Medical School

Emotional agility framework and wellbeing outcomes research

Forced positivity and identity rigidity, social psychology research literature

Neuroscience Research:

Narrative identity and brain plasticity, neuroscience literature

L theanine and calm alertness, Nutrients journal

Nervous system recovery and reflective states, autonomic nervous system research

Links:

Horizyns platform preview: www.horizynsinc.com

Tea4Peace TranquiliTea Lounge: www.Tea4Peace.org

Horizyns community: www.horizyns.com

Recommended reading: Susan David, Emotional Agility

Recommended reading: Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

Recommended reading: Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind

Recommended reading: Rumi, The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

DISCLAIMER: This episode is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your mental health care, especially if you are managing trauma, depression, anxiety, or any other health condition.