How Self-Perception Determines Relationship Behavior

Who are you? … Yes, you. I’m not asking your name, your family name, the city you were born in or anything like that. I’m asking if you really know who you are. You see, how you perceive yourself directly influences and quite literally determines how you will interact with others. So, am I saying that your relationship problems are all your fault? …. maybe. Stick around to find out.

So, are you the root of your relationship issues? This is a hard question to answer because, it hurts when you find out that it might be you causing the problems in your life, but to find out if it is true for you, first you’ll need to understand how our self-perception has such a big effect on our lives and relationships. To start, our self-perceptions are formed by an innumerable amount of varying influences and inputs we absorb throughout our lives. Starting from infancy, we develop our understanding of who we are through how our parents and caregivers interact with us and as we continue to grow, those inputs expand to include our extended family, our friends, our communities, as well as media influences in everything from the music we listen to, to the newsfeeds on our social media pages. Our brain is working constantly in the background, filtering all of these inputs into useful categories of information and one of those subsets is information regarding who we are in relation to everything going on around us. This is how we form our sense of identity in the world and why that sense of identity is ever changing and evolving as we continue on through life.

So, in a nutshell, this is the process; we have been learning who we are through who and what others tell us we are. Already, you might be able to spot where some of the first problems lie – what if those influencing the development of our identity are wrong? They probably are, to some degree. Also, is our identity, then, purely subjective and open to interpretation or do we have an objective identity that transcends our subjective understanding and experience? Heavy thoughts for a short video, but important ones to wrestle with if we want to improve our interactions with others. Let’s take a look at one prominent example of a popular modern perception of who we are as humanity and what that means for us as individuals so that we can then see how it impacts our self-perception. Then, we’ll take a look at how that particular understanding of our identity dominoes out into how we interact with other people. Carl Sagan was an American astronimer and author who taught a lot about who we are as people, with many of his teachings and ideas still being taught in one form or another today. Here’s who and, more appropriately what, Sagan believed we are.

We are made of star stuff. Sagan would expound on that saying, “We are made of star stuff. Our bodies are made of star stuff. There are pieces of star within us all.” and “We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.” This might sound like poetry, but these words are actually about as clear an understanding of the scientific worldview which Sagan propogated. He wasn’t just saying this to sound nice, he meant it. And it is a nice sounding thought, isn’t it? Well, what Sagan was saying is that we are, in our most root essence, matter formed from the residue of long dead stars – along with everything and everyone we’ve ever known. We are matter. Digging just a little bit deeper, that means that matter is all there is or ever was. There is nothing beyond, no transcendent reality and, thereby, no greater purpose, cause or meaning for our individual lives or experiences. Similarly, our brains are objectively real, but the thoughts they produce are just the result of input and evolutionary process taking place over time. The hormones which produce our emotional responses are real but the emotions they produce have no bearing on reality. When we die, we cease to exist. Our material bodies will return their mass of material and latent energy to the cosmos; the “what” that we’re made of changes state but the “who we are,” our identities, will stop. The warm feeling of being both part of and comprised of the stars becomes cold really quickly when we take the next logical step and realize that every thought, every emotion our brains and chemicals have ever produced amount to negligable blips on a universally cosmic scale. Even ideas which we construct our societies and build our lives upon are, in the end, unconsequential. Ideas like altruism, ethics, and morality – feelings like joy, grief and even love, are just your hormones pushing you along like the cosmic cog you are, furthering our species until, inevitably, our planet burns up or freezes over and even then, nothing matters because we’re just matter.

If you believe, as Sagan did, that all you are is what you physically are and that that is just leftover material from the universe, made without care or cause or meaning, then you can’t believe in transcendent, objective purpose. That’s not to say that you won’t live like your life has purpose, you usually will, but you will be caught up in a constant, subconscious battle between what you think you should do and “what’s the point?” Does that sound depressing? Well, it doesn’t stop there. If you are just star-stuff, then so is everyone else. Really, you’re just a temporary chemical composition interacting with similar chemical compositions all around you, like bacteria in the petri dish of our planet. If you are ultimately meaningless and purposeless, then so is everyone else. Your friends, your romantic partners, your spouse, your kids. All, ultimately, without transcendent purpose and therefore, incapable of anything more than illusory, subjective value. These conclusions are uncomfortable, but inevitable if you are willing to be logically consistent. But, you can keep taking comfort in the tragic beauty of the thought that you and everyone you love are star-stuff; cold, dead, purposeless, star-stuff. That is just one example of a very common worldview which is extremely prevalent in our culture today, but it is not the only one. And, fortunately for all of us, it’s also not the right one. Shots fired!

The biblical worldview is built on the Word of God. In the Bible, we can discover that our universe, this planet and everything and everyone on it, were made with a purpose, on purpose by a holy and perfect God. We read that we were set apart and above all of creation when He formed Adam from the dust of the eart and breathed into Him the breathe of life. We are made in the image of God and He has given us dominion in this world to steward it, cultivate it and subdue it – we were created for an adventure! We also know that we were created to be in relationship with Him – to love God with all of our hearts, our soul and our strength – as well as to love our neighbors – every other human being made in the image of God – as ourselves. On these truths, we have an objective ground to root our ethics, our morals, our every choice on. If we are image bearers of God, then so is everyone else, whether I like them or not, and because they are, I am called and created to love them. We can only know who we are, our true identities, when we have the right inputs and the perfect input comes from the only one Who is perfect, who knows not just humanity in general but you personally, right down to every hair on your head. Our value as individuals is not rooted in what we do or do not do, but intrensincly in who we are because of Whose image we bear. He created you with this undeniable worth and everyone else, as well.

Now, all of these things are objectively true. We all already have some understanding of the truth in this and it is evidenced in the fact that, although we’ve all been told who we are by Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, most of us don’t live our lives like we actually believe what they’re telling us. When a few people do, it shocks the nation and leaves everyone asking, “Why,” when, if we truly believed what those lab coats were telling us, we should have been asking, “why does it matter?” But, instead, we for the most part as if we did have intrinsic value, we treat others as if they do, and expect that they would recognize and respect ours, also. The Bible tells us in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that God has written eternity in the hearts of men, but done so in a way that we can’t see and understand everything from beginning to end. We get a glimpse of truth. He has revealed His invisible attributes – His eternal power and divine nature – from the very beginning of the world. You already know, to some small degree, that what we’re saying is true, but many of us still choose to reject the truth so that we can live our lives according to our own standards and not His. So, we’ll take the words of the Carl Sagan’s and accept the materialist worldview while we continue to live our lives to the contrary. These lives of contradiction are known as incongruence and I believe incongruence is a primary cause of many of our mental health issues today. But, that will have to wait until next week.