It is more or less normal to be confused about oneself, in various ways, at various times, under a range of circumstances. Self-confusion is a part of development, because as we change and grow, we surprise ourselves¹, and this creates an impetus to try to understand ourselves better in the world. As Herminia Ibarra observes in a now-classic article, “The Paradox of Authenticity“², that appeared in the Harvard Business Review, we are likely to feel inauthentic when trying out new behavior. Authenticity researchers Kernis and Goldman (2006) cite four factors³ of authenticity, and, in the process of change, they may clash with one another, or synergize—depending on how we approach self-confusion.
The Four Factors of Authenticity⁴
- Awareness. Knowledge of and trust in your motives, feelings, desires, strengths and weaknesses
- Unbiased Processing. Objective processing of positive or negative self-relevant information without denial or distortion
- Behavior. Acting in accordance with your true self, values, and preferences
- Relational Orientation. Valuing and achieving openness and truthfulness in close relationships.
The experience itself can range emotionally from pleasant, to neutral, to negative. And by definition, it can be complicated and hard to make sense of, especially in the moment when emotions are heightened.
The Challenge: When Confusion Takes Thinking Offline
Here’s what makes self-confusion particularly challenging: It takes reflective, critical thinking offline, especially when associated with strong emotions. When we’re unclear about our values, motivations, or reasons for making important decisions, the discomfort can feel urgent—like something that needs immediate resolution.
This is when internalized self-criticism⁵ can rush in, providing a level of dysfunctional, yet seductive, certainty. The confusion itself can be reflective of being in a double-bind with oneself, an impossible situation in which we are trying to do mutually exclusive things at the same time—wanting to make something work out while also wanting to cut it off (for example, a troubled intimate relationship, a conflicted major life decision about career).
The Other Side
On the flipside, self-confusion can be an opportunity to learn, but it happens best (if at all) in the context of cultivating a calm, compassionate and reflective stance. This parallels what healthy caregiving looks like—where the child’s developing self has room in the mind of the parent for confusion and distress to be contained, soothed, and ultimately serve as the nidus for reflective function and developmental progress.
Reaching the point of being able to respond adaptively to self-confusion itself is a developmental accomplishment and relates to resilience and secure attachment. Because we are often taught that we are supposed to know who we are and to be simple and without contradiction, being able to engage effectively with self-confusion is not a given. Often a variety of obstacles must be addressed before that desirable state of being comfortable with—even welcoming to—adaptive self-confusion can be achieved.
The Critical Capacity
Learning to distinguish when self-confusion is useful and to be accepted and when it’s a sign of a problematic underlying process or dynamic that needs to be addressed directly, is key—but by the very nature of self-confusion, may be confusing or obfuscated. Being able to move forward in the face of such indeterminacy is an important multilayered capacity with cognitive, emotional and behavioral components; a required first step may be recognizing self-confusion when it is happening, stepping back and looking at the contributory factors, while maintaining emotional awareness and good-enough regulation.
It can be useful to keep in mind, as a kind of conditioned response, John Keats’ concept of “negative capability”—”when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. When in a state of confusion and distress (assuming there is no pressing material or safety-related crisis to first address), negative capability can be trained up with something analogous to fire drills—unlearning maladaptive patterns and “installing” more effective approaches.
This requires embracing ambiguity and often complexity, and setting aside narcissistic needs in order to shift both one’s reasoning position and emotional stance, in relation to self-confusion.
What Accepting Self-Confusion Actually Looks Like
Leaning into, accepting, if you like, self-confusion normalizes the experience while also provisioning one with the capacity to navigate normative processes of self-development and -change as effectively as possible without expecting immediate resolution, relief, or instantaneous results. Adopting a small-steps, good-enough-is-better-than-perfect stance is necessary. Self-confusion can produce an illusory crisis that distracts from the actual work needed.
The work is not about resolving confusion quickly or finding the “right” answer about who you are. The work is developing the capacity to remain present and reflective when you don’t know—to treat uncertainty as information rather than emergency, to notice when self-attack masquerades as self-knowledge, and to create enough internal space that confusion can do what it’s meant to do developmentally.
The answers, if you like, will arrive in due time, out of that process and experience. There’s often a fundamental shift in how you relate to yourself during transitions, and you may surprise yourself by becoming someone you haven’t been before.
As we consider who we want to become this year, we might wonder that the question might not be “Who am I?” but rather “Can I tolerate not-knowing, without it triggering the old certainties—the self-criticism, the retreat, the collapse into familiar but unhelpful patterns?”
Are there better things upon which to hang the hat of uncertainty? And more meta—is it even useful to be asking who I want to become as the new year arrives, or is that timing itself to be questioned? After all, each day is the beginning of a new year.
