Problems develop when people internalize conversations that restrain them to a narrow description of self. These stories are experienced as oppressive because they limit the perception of available choices.
– Kathleen S.G. Skott-Myhre

We spend so much of our lives trying to figure out who this “I” is—this constellation of stories, habits, wounds, longings, and flashes of wisdom that moves through the world in our name. Some days the “I” feels solid, knowable. Other days it dissolves, slipping through our fingers like water. And perhaps this is the point: the self is not a possession we hold, but a living process we learn to relate to with increasing honesty, courage, and grace.

Jung: The Necessary Ego and the Larger Self.

Carl Jung wrote that becoming ourselves is both the simplest and the most difficult task of a lifetime. Individuation, he said, is the work of gathering up the scattered pieces of who we are—the conscious stories, the shadowed memories, the unlived potentials—and integrating them into a coherent enough center from which we can move through the world. “Coming to selfhood,” he called it (CW 7, para. 266).

And yet Jung was equally clear that the ego is not the whole story.

The Self—the deeper, organizing principle of the psyche—is both personal and more-than-personal. “The center and the circumference,” Jung wrote, holding together our conscious intentions and the vast underground rivers of the unconscious (CW 9ii, para. 44). We need a strong “I” to navigate the world, but when the ego hardens into the belief that it must control everything, suffering tends to follow. The psyche begins to whisper—through dreams, symptoms, longings—that something larger is calling.

Buddhist Wisdom: Loosening the Grip of the ‘I’.

Buddhist psychology enters here like a clearing wind. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha offers a startling invitation: “All phenomena are without a self; when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering” (verse 279). The self, in this view, is not a fixed monument but a fluid, ever-changing process—shaped by conditions, relationships, ancestry, culture, and time.

Three teachings soften the ego’s rigid edges:

Non-self: We are not the unchanging essence we imagine; the “I” is more like a story than a structure.
Impermanence: Everything moves, shifts, ripens, fades. Identities, too.
Interdependence: Who we are arises through connection—family, community, memory, love, harm, hope.

These insights don’t erase the personal self; they simply remind us that clinging tightly to it can become another form of suffering. In clinical work, this view helps clients who have over-identified with roles—parent, achiever, helper—or who believe the ego must forever keep life from unraveling. Through the Buddhist lens, identity becomes more porous, flexible, and humane.

Narrative Therapy: Reauthoring the Story.

Narrative therapy adds yet another doorway into the mystery of who we are. Michael White and David Epston remind us that identity is not built from facts but from stories—the interpretations we inherit and rehearse, often unconsciously, for years. Some of these stories are thin, restrictive, and soaked in shame: “I was the problem,” “I should have known better,” “I’m too much,” “I’m not enough.”

Reauthoring thickens the story. It asks:

Where did you resist?
Where did you create small pockets of safety?
Where did you show tenderness, courage, imagination?
Who offered even a fleeting moment of care that proves you were worthy of it?

Consider someone shaped by childhood trauma. Their story may have calcified around self-blame: I caused it; I deserved it; I failed to stop it. Narrative therapy widens the frame. It places the trauma back into context—family systems that could not protect, adults who carried their own wounds, developmental stages that left children with no power to change what was happening.

The narrative becomes less about the trauma itself and more about the person who survived it—the creativity, the endurance, the refusal to give up longing for something better. In this sense, narrative therapy dovetails beautifully with both Jung and the Buddha: identity is not fixed but re-claimable, re-weavable, capable of more texture and truth than the problem-saturated story allows.

Frankl: The Call Toward Meaning.

Viktor Frankl’s existential lens offers yet another turn in the spiral. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes that the self is never fully realized by turning inward alone. Meaning arises when we reach beyond ourselves—toward a cause, a person, a value, a responsibility that asks something of us. “The more one forgets himself,” he writes, “the more he actualizes himself” (p. 133).

This is not self-erasure. It is self-transcendence.

A reminder that the ego—the planner, the worrier, the identity-keeper—is not the only seat of freedom. Even in limits, even in suffering, something within us can choose a stance, orient toward purpose, and discover a deeper layer of selfhood.

In therapy, this helps clients distinguish between the goals of the ego (control, perfection, approval) and the aims of the deeper Self (meaning, connection, integrity, compassion). Meaning softens fear. It steadies the nervous system. It reveals that we are part of something larger than our own narratives.

The Dialectic: A Self Both Held and Released.

Across Jung, Buddhism, narrative therapy, and Frankl, a paradox emerges:

We must become someone—solid enough to stand, speak, love, and choose.

And we must also learn to loosen that someone—making room for mystery, change, sorrow, connection, and meaning.

This is the dialectic at the heart of psychological and spiritual growth:

The ego is necessary, but not sovereign.
Identity is important, but not permanent.
Our stories are powerful, but not final.
Meaning arises when we both honor the personal and open to the universal.

We are creatures of memory and imagination, woundedness and resilience, individuality and belonging. The work is not to perfect the self, but to be in right relationship with it—to let it breathe, shift, soften, expand.

To walk, as the buffalo does, straight into the weather of our lives, guided by an inner strength that knows storms are not to be outrun, but moved through with presence, courage, and a larger sense of who we are becoming.