We use the phrase so casually: me, myself, and I.

Usually, it is just a grammatical expression—a slightly emphatic way of referring to one person.

But perhaps there is more wisdom hidden in those three little words than we realize.

We all seem to live with several versions, layers, or aspects of ourselves. Psychology has described them in many different ways. Philosophers and spiritual traditions have wrestled with them for centuries. And most of us encounter them every day without giving them names.

There is the person we present to the world.

There is the person we believe ourselves to be.

And then, every so often, there seems to be another vantage point within us—the part capable of looking at both of those selves and asking:

For purposes of thinking about everyday life, I call them Me, Myself, and I.

This isn’t a formal psychological theory. It is a way of organizing something very human.

The goal is not to get rid of any of them.

Perhaps the goal is to bring them closer together.

When that happens, we use words like integrity, congruence, and authenticity.

And when they move too far apart, life can become surprisingly exhausting.

Me: The Person Who Meets the World

We all have a public self.

Actually, we probably have several.

There is the person who walks into a professional meeting.

The person who talks to the neighbor.

The person who answers the telephone.

The person who attends a family gathering.

The person who comforts a frightened child.

The person who argues with the cable company.

Hopefully, those people bear some resemblance to one another—but they are rarely identical.

Carl Jung gave us a useful word for this: the persona.

In Jungian psychology, the persona is the public face we present to the outside world. The word itself comes from the theatrical mask of antiquity.

That sounds a little sinister until we remember that masks are not necessarily lies.

Roles are useful.

A physician does not interact with a patient exactly as she interacts with her closest friend.

A teacher behaves differently in front of a classroom than sitting at the breakfast table.

A judge, minister, military officer, parent, therapist, salesperson, nurse, executive, or waiter adopts behaviors appropriate to the situation.

That is not necessarily inauthenticity.

It is social intelligence.

The trouble begins when we become so identified with the role that we forget there is a person underneath it.

Or when the role was never freely chosen in the first place.

Some of our personas were built very early.

A child discovers that being funny makes people like him.

Another discovers that being quiet keeps her out of trouble.

Someone learns to be exceptionally competent because mistakes bring criticism.

Someone becomes agreeable because disagreement seems to threaten love.

Someone becomes the caretaker.

Someone becomes the achiever.

Someone becomes the strong one.

Someone becomes invisible.

These adaptations may have made perfect sense at the time.

Eventually we may no longer think:

This is something I learned to do.

We think:

This is who I am.

And that is where Me begins to merge with Myself.

Myself: The Person I Believe I Am

If Me is the person the world encounters, Myself is the person I carry around inside my own head.

Psychologists might call much of this our self-concept—our ideas, beliefs, memories, evaluations, and assumptions about who we are.

I sometimes imagine Myself as a house.

Some rooms have their doors wide open.

Anyone can come into the foyer.

Friends may be invited into the living room.

Family may gather around the kitchen table.

A few people are allowed into the more private rooms.

And then there may be closets we rarely open.

Perhaps an attic full of things we have not examined in years.

Maybe even a locked room whose contents we have largely forgotten.

That does not mean the house is dishonest.

But it does mean that our conscious understanding of ourselves may not contain the entire house.

Jung believed that psychological growth involved greater integration of parts of ourselves that had remained outside awareness—a process he called individuation.

And some of what lives inside our house is not even current.

It is historical.

But when was that conclusion reached?

Last week?

Or in seventh grade?

The Looking-Glass Self

There is another complication.

We do not create Myself entirely by ourselves.

More than a century ago, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley wrote about what became known as the looking-glass self: our tendency to develop our sense of ourselves partly through how we imagine we appear in the minds of other people.

In other words, we partly learn who we are by looking into human mirrors.

A child repeatedly praised for intelligence begins to think, I’m smart.

A child repeatedly criticized for clumsiness may conclude, I’m incompetent.

Someone treated as attractive may incorporate attractiveness into identity.

Someone repeatedly ignored may begin to believe invisibility is a personal characteristic rather than an experience.

The reflection is not always accurate.

But we can absorb it anyway.

Round and round it can go.

Sometimes for a lifetime.

Until something interrupts it.

William James and the I Who Knows the Me

This is where William James enters the conversation.

James has been part of my own intellectual life for decades, including work that informed my dissertation, and I continue to be struck by how contemporary many of his observations feel.

In The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, James devoted an entire chapter to “The Consciousness of Self.”

He made a distinction between what he called the Me and the I.

The Me was, broadly speaking, the self that could become an object of our own awareness—the things we identify as ourselves or ours. James described material, social, and spiritual dimensions of this empirical self.

The I was the knower, the experiencing consciousness—the subjective perspective from which the Me could be known.

My use of Me, Myself, and I is not identical to James’s formulation.

But the resemblance is fascinating.

There is the self being observed.

And somehow, there is also an observer.

Try it.

You can think:

I am anxious.

But then something rather remarkable can happen.

You can also notice:

I am aware that I am feeling anxious.

Those are not quite the same experience.

Or:

I am furious.

And then:

I notice how angry I have become.

Or:

I feel humiliated.

And then:

Something painful has happened, and I am watching shame arise in me.

A tiny bit of space has appeared.

And sometimes that tiny bit of space changes everything.

I: The One Who Notices

This is the aspect I call I.

I do not necessarily mean a mystical being residing somewhere inside us.

Nor do I mean that psychology has discovered a tiny wise person sitting behind our forehead supervising operations.

I mean something more experiential.

There appears to be a vantage point from which we can observe our thoughts, feelings, roles, habits, and impulses without being completely defined by them.

Modern Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, contains a concept called self-as-context. It refers to the perspective from which thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences can be observed rather than treated as the total definition of the person having them.

Consider the difference between:

The event has not changed.

But the relationship to it has.

Or:

The second statement gives anxiety less authority to write our biography.

That doesn’t make the emotion disappear.

The Balcony and the Stage

Another way to imagine this is a theater.

On the stage are all the characters who have played a part in our lives.

We often try to decide which one is the “real me.”

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

Maybe they are all real.

From the balcony, I can look down upon the entire cast.

I do not have to throw any of them out of the theater.

The frightened child doesn’t have to be ashamed for being frightened.

The angry person doesn’t have to be condemned for becoming angry.

The ambitious self does not need to apologize for wanting to accomplish something.

Even the parts of us we dislike usually developed for some reason.

From the balcony, perhaps we can say:

Our Better Angels

Abraham Lincoln gave us another beautiful expression for this.

In his First Inaugural Address in 1861, as the United States stood on the edge of civil war, Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature.”

I love that phrase.

Not because human beings possess only better angels.

Obviously, we don’t.

We have petty impulses.

Fearful impulses.

Self-protective impulses.

Competitive impulses.

Angry impulses.

We can be defensive, impatient, vain, frightened, jealous, selfish, generous, loving, courageous, and compassionate—occasionally before lunch.

Our better angels do not erase the rest.

That is close to what I mean by I.

Not perfection.

Perspective.

Wisdom Traditions Knew Something About This Too

Psychology is relatively young.

Human beings, however, have been observing their own minds for thousands of years.

Different philosophical and spiritual traditions use very different language, and we should not pretend that all of them are describing precisely the same thing.

But a recurring human insight appears across traditions:

Nor does every emotion require action.

Prayer, meditation, contemplation, confession, journaling, silence, retreats, philosophical reflection, and mindfulness all create opportunities—through very different pathways—to observe ourselves from a little farther away.

There is wisdom simply in asking:

What is happening in me?

rather than immediately asking:

What am I going to do about this?

That brief period of observation gives I a chance to enter the conversation.

When Me, Myself, and I Drift Apart

Most of us know what it feels like when these parts become badly misaligned.

Or Me is endlessly accommodating.

Myself is increasingly resentful.

And I knows perfectly well that a boundary is overdue.

Or Me is maintaining an impressive professional identity.

Myself is exhausted.

And I has begun wondering whether success still means what it meant twenty years ago.

This misalignment consumes energy.

Carl Rogers used the term congruence to describe an important form of psychological alignment and integration.

I like that word.

Congruence.

It does not demand perfection.

It suggests that the pieces increasingly fit.

The person I show the world resembles the person I understand myself to be.

And the person I understand myself to be increasingly lives according to the values I most deeply endorse.

Authenticity Does Not Mean Telling Everyone Everything

There is a popular misunderstanding about authenticity that deserves attention.

Authenticity does not require complete disclosure.

You do not owe everyone access to every room in your house.

I can be authentic and private.

I can be authentic and reserved.

I can decide that certain experiences belong only to me or to people I deeply trust.

I can behave differently at a funeral and a birthday party without becoming two different people.

The front porch does not have to look exactly like the bedroom.

That is quite different from performing a life designed entirely around other people’s expectations.

The Price of Being Acceptable

Many of us learned early that some versions of ourselves were more acceptable than others.

Perhaps intelligence was rewarded but vulnerability was not.

Maybe obedience was rewarded but curiosity was inconvenient.

Perhaps achievement brought approval.

Maybe emotional restraint was admired.

Perhaps we learned that being helpful made us valuable.

Or that being beautiful brought attention.

Or that being strong prevented other people from worrying.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those qualities.

The difficulty comes when acceptance feels conditional:

Then Me becomes a security system.

We keep presenting the approved version because somewhere inside us, Myself is not entirely convinced that the unedited version would be welcomed.

This is where trust becomes essential.

We gradually discover that authenticity requires some confidence that the entire house is survivable.

Even the messy rooms.

Growing Older and Becoming More Whole

There may be a particular gift in getting older.

Early in life, acceptance matters enormously.

We are trying to find our place in families, schools, friendships, professions, relationships, and communities.

Then adulthood gives us roles.

And those roles can become so substantial that we build much of Myself around them.

But life eventually begins taking some of the roles away.

Careers end.

Children grow up.

Parents die.

Relationships change.

Bodies change.

Titles disappear.

Organizations move on.

People whose approval once mattered enormously may no longer even be present.

And eventually we encounter a strange question:

At first, that can feel like loss.

But perhaps it can also become liberation.

There is less need to audition.

Less need to convince.

Less reason to maintain an identity simply because we spent thirty years constructing it.

Growing older does not automatically make anyone wise.

We have probably all accumulated sufficient evidence to dispose of that theory.

But experience gives us material from which wisdom can be built.

We begin seeing patterns.

We discover which things mattered far less than we thought they did.

We discover which things mattered far more.

We recognize old defenses.

We forgive some mistakes.

We finally understand some choices.

We stop needing everybody to understand us.

And, perhaps most importantly, we become a little more capable of allowing all the people we have been to belong to the same life.

Integrity as Wholeness

We often use the word integrity to mean moral uprightness or honesty.

But I like thinking about integrity more broadly as wholeness.

Integrity does not mean that every part of me is admirable.

It means I am no longer required to pretend that the less admirable parts belong to somebody else.

And also:

They can all be true.

A Small Everyday Practice

This does not have to remain philosophical.

We can practice it in very ordinary moments.

The next time you have a disproportionately strong reaction to something, become curious.

Ask three questions.

Sometimes I may agree completely with Myself.

Yes. You are angry. Something genuinely wrong happened. Let’s address it.

Other times I may say:

I know you’re frightened, but this situation is not the situation you remember.

Or:

I understand why you want that person’s approval, but we don’t need to purchase acceptance at that price anymore.

That is everyday integration.

Becoming Someone We Already Are

Perhaps personal growth is not primarily about constructing a better person.

Maybe much of it involves removing the distance among the people who are already there.

Me does not have to disappear.

We need a self capable of meeting the world.

Myself does not have to become completely transparent.

We need privacy, memory, identity, and a coherent sense of personal history.

And I does not need to become a stern supervisor policing the other two.

Perhaps I is most useful as a compassionate guide.

A place from which we can see more.

A place from which we can choose.

A place from which we can say:

Yes, that is part of me too.

And perhaps that is what makes transformation possible.

Because the frightened self changes more easily when it feels safe than when it is despised.

The defensive self can relax when it no longer has to protect the entire house.

The persona can become more flexible when acceptance no longer depends entirely upon performance.

And Myself can gradually emerge from behind some of those walls.

Then Me can go into the world without so much pretending.

Myself can live with fewer locked doors.

And I can accompany them both—not as judge or warden, but as witness, compass, and friend.

Perhaps that is what authenticity ultimately feels like.

Not finally becoming perfect.

Finally becoming whole.