Leave your empathy behind part 3

 To create a new self-awareness, you need a safe environment where you can learn, affirm cultural heritages and practise advocating for yourself. Having a sense of who you are, in the context of culture and community, may help you see how you matter and can contribute to the world.

We do not shed our personalities, our life views or our habits when we retire. These become the basis of building our new understanding of our new role and our new responsibilities that we are adjusting to as we move through the stages of retirement.

The terms self-concept and self-identity define how we see ourselves. This division might also be labelled as “personal identity” and “social identity. Although each human’s existence appears to have constancy overtime in that it is the same person, the human body is in a state of continual, if not continuous, change (e.g., Scientists have found that the body's cells largely replace themselves every 7 to 10 years. In other words, old cells mostly die and are replaced by new ones during this time span. The cell renewal process happens more quickly in certain parts of the body, but head-to-toe rejuvenation can take up to a decade). This reality makes acceptance of a static identity doubtful, but there may be some aspects of our identity that are relatively stable over time.

In any life, there may be times when we believe we have lost our bearings. At this point, some of us may experience a potential identity crisis. Mid-life and retirement are two periods in which one phase of life ebbs, and we have to dig deep to replace what we believe has been lost.

Patterns of changes in identity are not necessarily correlated with age; nonetheless, certain crises do tend to occur within particular age ranges (e.g., mid-life crises and retirement).

One example is a necessary change in the parenting role that occurs when children reach adulthood and they leave home, leaving some of us with the “empty nest syndrome”. Aging, as another example, can bring physical limitations or outright elimination of some activities such as hard labour or playing contact sports.

Although we have developed an identity during adolescence and young adulthood, retirement can cause us to once again struggle with identity issues.  Many of us can be surprised by the ways in which retirement adjustment can evoke past issues. Self-awareness is a critical influence on an individual’s ability to assimilate or accommodate feedback, especially feedback received from their social environment.

Reviewing those factors that influenced the development of one’s personality in previous stages of life is not necessarily an action taken by all of us who retire. Taking stock of one’s life upon becoming a retiree, however, is a common phenomenon.

Our reflections upon the past can take various forms. Some of us may be consumed by nostalgia while others can be troubled by regret for lost opportunities. Some may never have been interested in or conscious of formative psychological influences upon their personality development; others could be aware of critical incidents in their personal history but unaware of how those incidents have affected their personality.

Others of us might be aware of such influences but have made the wrong attributions of how certain episodes shaped our identity. Increased awareness of how one’s identity has developed might better equip present and future retirees to understand and cope with the challenges to identity that are triggered by retirement. Adjustment is not so much a regression, as it is an updating of the foundations of identity laid in prior years.