By Dr. Scott Zarcinas | Author, Doctor, Wayfarer

What’s in this article:

• The 6-step Identity Loop that can repeat for years without being recognised.
• How experience becomes meaning, and meaning becomes identity.
• How identity creates a Perception Filter that affects what you see and sense.
• Why recognising the loop can begin to lessen the Invisible Weight it creates.

The Identity Loop

Most of us have patterns that repeat throughout our lives. We find ourselves responding to similar situations in similar ways, experiencing the same frustrations in relationships, or reaching familiar points of tension at work.

After enough repetition, the pattern can become so familiar that we stop recognising it as a pattern. It simply feels like reality:

This is how life is, this is how other people are, and eventually, this is who I am.

Over the years, I have become interested in how this happens. How does an experience become a pattern, and how does a pattern eventually become incorporated into our sense of identity?

One way of understanding this process is through what I call the ‘Identity Loop’:

→ Seeing / Sensing: We perceive something—a situation, person, event, or circumstance.

→ Feeling: What we perceive generates an emotional and physical response.

→ Behaviour: We respond through what we say, do, avoid, defend, pursue, or resist.

→ Meaning: We interpret what happened and give the experience meaning.

→ Identity: Repeated meanings become incorporated into our understanding of ourselves and others: I am… You are… Life is…

→ Perception Filter: Identity influences what we notice, how we interpret it, and what we expect to happen next.

The final step returns us to the beginning. The Perception Filter affects what we subsequently see and sense, which means we are already looking at the next experience through what previous experiences have taught us to expect.

The Identity Loop can therefore repeat and reinforce itself for years without us recognising what is happening.

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What the Loop Looks Like in Real Time

Consider someone who has learned to see themselves as the responsible one.

Something needs doing and they notice it immediately. Perhaps nobody else seems concerned, or nobody appears to be doing anything about it. Tension arises because the situation feels unresolved, and that tension generates an urge to step in. They take responsibility, solve the problem and perhaps become frustrated that nobody else acted first.

Meaning is then assigned to the experience:

No one else will do it. If I don’t step in, it won’t get done.

As similar experiences accumulate, the meaning begins to become incorporated into identity:

I’m the responsible one. I’m the one who has to hold everything together.

Once that identity has formed, it begins to influence perception. The person becomes increasingly sensitive to situations in which other people fail to act, while experiences that contradict the identity may receive far less attention. The next time something needs doing, the situation is already being seen and sensed through the Perception Filter created by previous experience.

What began as an experience has become part of the way subsequent experience is perceived.

When Experience Becomes Identity

This helps explain why longstanding patterns can feel so convincing.

We experience something, give it meaning, then incorporate that meaning into our understanding of ourselves. That identity then influences how we perceive what happens next, and the resulting experience appears to provide further evidence that the identity is true.

Over time, this keeps happening to me can become “this is my life”, and eventually “this is who I am”.

The role we repeatedly play becomes increasingly familiar.

• The responsible one keeps finding responsibility.
• The rejected one becomes alert to rejection.
• The overlooked one notices evidence of being overlooked.

Each experience appears to confirm what we already believe about ourselves and the world around us.

The loop is therefore doing more than repeating behaviour.

The Identity Loop is reinforcing the Self-Image through which life is being experienced.

The Invisible Weight

The Identity Loop itself is a mechanism. The Invisible Weight is found in the lived experience this loop can generate.

For the responsible person, that might be exhaustion, pressure, resentment, frustration, or the feeling that everything depends upon them.

Someone whose identity has formed around rejection may experience anxiety, defensiveness, withdrawal, or a persistent expectation of being rejected again.

Someone who sees themselves as overlooked may continually experience the frustration of feeling unseen.

From the outside, these people may appear capable, responsible, reliable, and successful. Their internal experience can be very different because the same loop keeps generating familiar feelings, behaviours, meanings, and identities.

After years of repetition, the Invisible Weight can begin to feel permanent. The pattern has become so familiar that we experience it as part of ourselves.

What Changes When You See the Loop

Recognition begins when we see the sequence that has previously been operating outside our awareness.

We can begin to notice what we are seeing and sensing, the feeling that follows, the behaviour it tends to generate, and the meaning we are already preparing to give the experience.

We can also begin to recognise the identity being reinforced and the Perception Filter through which the next experience will be viewed.

Seeing the sequence creates a different relationship with it. The feeling can still be real and the situation may still require a response, although we are now able to recognise the meaning and identity that have become attached to what is happening.

This is why recognition matters. A pattern that was previously experienced as who I am can begin to be seen as a pattern through which I have been experiencing myself and my life.