Your identity is primarily formed in your formative years and parents play a crucial role in this. Identity formation is also known as individuation, which is the development of the distinct personality of an individual. You identify your uniqueness apart from others. A study found that for boys and girls, identity formation is positively influenced by parental involvement specifically in the areas of: support, social monitoring and school monitoring.[Sartor, Carolyn E. & Youniss, James. (2002). The relationship between positive parental involvement and identity achievement during adolescence. Adolescence, 37, 221-234.] In contrast, when the relationship is not as close and the adolescent fears rejection from the parent, they are more likely to feel less confident in forming a separate identity from their parent(s).
A central part of your identity is what is known as Personal Continuity. This is the process of ensuring that your self-awareness, sentience (capable of knowing things through your senses), sapience (Latin Sapienta: wisdom, thinking, intelligence, good taste), and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment, are consistent from one moment to the next. When people don’t have this the result could be very concerning. The extreme of this could be Dissociative Identity Disorder, what was previously called multiple personality disorder. This is a disorder characterised by the presence of two or more distinct personality states. It is usually a reaction to trauma as a way to help a person avoid bad memories (e.g. Dissociative Amnesia). Dissociative identity disorder is characterised by the presence of two or more distinct personality identities (on average its actually 3 – 16 alters with different heart rates etc). Each may have a unique name, personal history and characteristics. I am highlighting these things because we are underdiagnosed in this country and our mental health is crucial to our functioning as human beings.
