How Defending Your Identity Might Be Exhausting You (audio essay)

Have you ever been asked to tell your life story and not known where to start? Perhaps your work history does not show one clear career, or a therapist has asked you to connect your past to your present and you find that awkward. You may have concluded that something is wrong with you.Many of us are told that a psychologically healthy person can tell a coherent story about their life: where they came from, what shaped them, and where they are heading. In this video I discuss the philosopher Galen Strawson's argument that this is not true of everyone. Strawson distinguishes people who experience their lives as a continuous story from people who do not, and he argues that living without a life story is legitimate and can be fulfilling.I also explain how this differs from identity disturbance, a persistent and distressing instability in a person's sense of self that occurs in some clinical conditions and deserves proper support.At the end, I share what people who live by a life story, like me, can learn from those who do not.This is one section of a longer essay on the self, which also covers Buddhist dependent origination, David Hume, Derek Parfit and Zhuangzi:https://eggshelltherapy.com/on-emptiness/Eggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

We spend much of our lives constructing a sense of who we are, and then defending it. In this episode, I read from my essay on emptiness and the self, covering Jung's account of identity at midlife, the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination, and the difference between the Buddhist meaning of emptiness and the clinical experience of feeling empty.PS- The Buddhist sense of emptiness discussed here is distinct from the clinical experience of chronic emptiness, which deserves proper support.The full essay, which further covers David Hume, Derek Parfit, Zhuangzi, and Galen Strawson's philosophy (albeit only briefly), is here: eggshelltherapy.com/on-emptinessEggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

Most of us who live with intensity have spent years being told we are too much. Too emotional, too fast, too deep. And because we heard it so often, we learned to shrink, to soften everything we say in advance, and to treat our own nature as a problem that needed managing.In this episode I am the guest. Diann Wingert, a former psychotherapist turned business strategist for entrepreneurs with ADHD, interviewed me on her show, the ADHD-ish™ Podcast, where this conversation was first released as Episode 332. Diann was identified as gifted in the fourth grade and diagnosed with ADHD late, so she knows this territory from the inside.We talk about what intensity is and why it sits at the centre of ADHD, autism, giftedness, and high sensitivity without being any of them. We get into why intense people burn out and bore out at the same time, what it costs to carry responsibility without authority, why "if that makes sense" is a survival reflex that has expired, the compulsion to correct the people we love, and the Buddhist teaching of the second arrow, which is the suffering we add on top of the pain we cannot avoid.This conversation was first released on the ADHD-ish™ Podcast, Episode 332:https://www.diannwingertcoaching.com/blog/emotional-intellectual-intensityFind Diann at www.diannwingertcoaching.comEggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/08/27/travis/Many intense people have a high level of moral sensitivity. I wrote about this elsewhere before, but basically, they see something cruel or careless and cannot just move on from it the way other people seem to. They often lie awake thinking about whether they are doing enough, whether what they are doing even counts, and whether there is any point in trying when the world does not seem to care whether they try or not. They hold themselves to standards that others think are too high, and when they fall short, they feel extremely guilty. They try to honour their values, but then they watch the news and have to hold themselves back from despair. After long enough, they start to wonder whether the whole thing is a trap they built for themselves.In this conversation, I want us to see what we can learn from a moral philosopher who has spent his career working out how ordinary humans like us can try to do good even when it seems pointless at times. Travis Rieder teaches bioethics at Johns Hopkins and wrote a book called Catastrophe Ethics.  He holds that some people are purists;  once they find out they are part of something harmful, they get themselves out of it. Others are nihilists, and they think that when the problem is this big, nothing they do counts, so there is nothing they owe anybody. Travis has watched many students come in as purists, wear themselves out, and leave as nihilists. We also talk about the role of religion in all of this.  Travis says that if God could have commanded torture and that would have made torture right, the commands are not worth much, and if God commands things because they are already right, then you can work out what is right without him. Travis's thesis is that you have no duty to cut your carbon footprint, but you have good reasons to.What he leaves us with is this: sit down every so often and work out where our time and our money and our energy should go, because that is what gives our lives meaning.Eggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/07/30/frank/If you have searched for help with anxiety or overthinking, YouTube has probably offered you ten Stoic principles that will change your life, or Taoism explained as going with the flow, sometimes in an approximation of Alan Watts's voice.My guest is Frank P. Saunders Jr., a philosopher who works on Chinese thought and who has spent the past couple of years making videos about philosophy and public philosophy. We began with McStoicism, the version of Stoicism made to go down easily and keep you coming back. Of the distortions he identifies, the one he thinks does the most damage is the promise that this is not difficult. When the ten tips do not work, people conclude that Stoicism does not work for them, or that they are the kind of person for whom nothing works. His formulation is that the results were overstated and the effort was understated.The second thing that gets removed is God. Surrendering to a world that is indifferent to you is a different act from aligning yourself with a world that is going somewhere.On emotions, the Stoics did say you should let go of certain feelings, but only because they thought doing so would make you a genuinely better person, someone who could not be shaken by loss or circumstance. The popular version keeps the letting go and loses the point of it. Stoicism was about becoming brave, honest, fair, and useful to the people around you. Marcus Aurelius keeps saying you do this for your community, not for your own calm. However, these are rarely mentioned online in the fast food versions of Stoicism, which ask nothing of you, though they may also give little back. The second half of our chat turns to the problems with AI-generated Alan Watts video and perennialism. Watts would tell a Taoist story, then a Zen story, then something about a Christian choir, and make them all point the same way. Frank's objection is that the traditions are not saying the same thing.On wu wei: Frank argues that nothing done at an expert level is effortless. What changes with mastery is where the effort goes, because the expert knows what to attend to.  Eggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

Full text: https://eggshelltherapy.com/waiting-mode/Waiting mode describes the inner experience of being unable to do anything because something uncertain, or a future event, is pending. It could be an appointment, an exam result, a medical scan, a conversation that has not happened yet, a text message that may or may not receive a reply.Eggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

 Eric Mathison is a philosopher and bioethicist and a former clinical ethicist. In this conversation, we discuss why the idea that medicine is about healing may be wrong, what the evidence actually shows about the effectiveness of mental health treatment, and what happens when the system has to label you as disordered before it can help you. We talk about diagnostic labelling and neurodiversity, the disturbing variation between doctors’ subjective judgement, and whose voice actually counts in psychiatric settings. We close with a conversation about the philosophy of death.https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/07/11/eric-mathison/Find Eric's writing at valuejudgments.substack.comEggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

Eric Mathison is a philosopher and bioethicist and a former clinical ethicist. In this conversation, we discuss why the idea that medicine is about healing may be wrong, what the evidence actually shows about the effectiveness of mental health treatment, and what happens when the system has to label you as disordered before it can help you. We talk about diagnostic labelling and neurodiversity, the disturbing variation between doctors’ subjective judgement, and whose voice actually counts in psychiatric settings. We close with a conversation about the philosophy of death.https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/07/11/eric-mathison/Find Eric's writing at valuejudgments.substack.comEggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

Gordon Smith is a therapist, coach, and creative instructor who has spent over 26 years working with gifted and neurodivergent adolescents and adults. Gordon came to centre giftedness in his practice after pulling out seven years of client notes and realising the people he had done his best work with all had one thing in common: they were intensely, unusually bright. That discovery sent him into his own gifted reckoning.We talk about what giftedness actually looks like when you pull it out of the narrow frame of IQ scores and school performance, and what happens to people who grow up intense, complex, and sensitive in environments that have no idea what to do with them.What we covered:What giftedness means beyond IQ, and why Gordon uses "intense, complex, and sensitive" instead of a fixed definitionGifted trauma as attachment wounding: chronic misattunement, rejection, and a self-concept built from other people's discomfort with youThe body keeping score: chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, IBS, nervous system hypervigilance, and why COVID was the last straw for manyWhy "underachievement" is better understood as other achievement, and Gordon's own story of deliberately cultivating mediocrity to protect his freedomFamily roles gifted people get stuck in: the over-functioner, the helper, the parentified child, the high achiever, the outcastThe loneliness where everyone thinks you are thriving and nobody actually knows youPerfectionism, guilt, shame, and the internalised belief that your productivity is your worthWhy conventional therapy keeps falling short for gifted clients, and what neurodivergent-affirming practice actually looks likeGordon's Gifted Adults Group Experience: co-created, non-scripted, iterative, and built around what participants bringThe nervous system shift when gifted people feel genuinely mirrored for the first timeWhat it costs gifted men to be tender, sensual, and creative in a culture that only permits anger and achievementImprov, play, and flow state writing as paths to growth through the creative rather than the purely intellectualGiftedness as heritable and traceable through family systems, often along the maternal line, and why you should look beyond your parents to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparentsEggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...

https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/05/26/grief/This is one of my favourite conversations I have recorded for The Intense Mind. As I was researching mortality and grief myself, I came across Professor Cholbi's Grief: A Philosophical Guide as a reader. I loved the book so much that I annotated it heavily. To go from reading the book to sitting with the author feels surreal, in a really wondrous way. Most of what we are offered when we grieve either asks whether something has gone wrong with us or hands us techniques to manage the pain. A philosophical approach does not try to diagnose grief. Instead, it gives us conceptual tools to understand and think about grief in a new way.  It gives us tools to make the experience feel less disorienting without pretending to solve it.Dr. Cholbi is Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and the author of Grief: A Philosophical Guide. In this conversation we discuss:— Why grief is better understood as a sustained form of attention than as a single emotion — Whose deaths we actually grieve, and why intimacy and love don't fully explain it — Ambivalent grief, and the relief that can sit beside sorrow — Why the pain of grief is not a cost we pay but part of how we understand what we have lost — His argument that we may have a duty to grieve, and that everyone is entitled to be grieved by someone — Why he resists treating grief as an illness to be diagnosed and shortenedProfessor Cholbi’s website: https://michael.cholbi.com Eggshell Therapy and Coaching: eggshelltherapy.com/Imi Lo:  imiloimilo.comSister Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zcl8ZUsu4AePugDoWtXcgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimers  Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.Disclaimer: The content provided is for informational purposes only. Please do not consider any of the content to be clinical or professional advice. None of the content can substitute professional consultation, psychotherapy, diagnosis, or any mental health intervention.  Opinions and views expressed by the host and the guests are personal views, and they reserve the right to change their opinions. The opinions of the guest do not reflect the position of this channel or Imi. We also cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is factual and completely accurate. Any action you take based on the information in this episode is taken strictly at your own risk.  For a full disclaimer, please refer to: https://www.eggshelltherapy.c...