The Space Between Me and My Anxiety

When I first heard someone ask,"Did you ever have to go through a de-identification process to rebuild your identity?" my immediate response was an emphatic "yes."

Then I realised I'd absolutely no idea what de-identification meant. My brain recognised the experience long before I found the language.

As often happens, curiosity took over. I disappeared down a research rabbit hole and discovered that various psychological traditions use terms such as de-identification, disidentification, self-distancing, decentering, and cognitive defusion to describe related processes.

While the terminology varies, the central idea remains remarkably similar: we're not our thoughts, our emotions, our roles. We're not even the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Sometimes growth requires creating enough distance from these identifications so we can relate to them differently.  See them from a wider perspective.

When I first encountered this idea, I realised I'd accidentally stumbled upon it years earlier.

The Pianist and the Panic

When I was seventeen, I was studying piano performance at the Conservatorium in Adelaide. On paper, this was exactly what I wanted. In reality, I was suffering from severe performance anxiety. The full catastrophe. Shaking hands. Nausea. A pounding heart. The overwhelming conviction that I would rather disappear than walk onto the stage.

Today there are countless books, podcasts, courses, and therapeutic approaches addressing performance anxiety. Back then, resources were scarce and I felt deeply ashamed of what I considered a personal weakness. Everyone else seemed capable. Everyone else seemed calm. Everyone else appeared to belong on the stage.

I sought help from my doctor, who prescribed beta blockers. Unfortunately, they did little to reduce my anxiety and mostly left me feeling strange and unable to sleep after performances.

So I did what creative people often do when they run out of conventional options. I started experimenting. One day before a performance, I found myself thinking about my sister. She was a primary school teacher. In my imagination, she was probably having a perfectly ordinary day. Teaching children. Chatting with colleagues. Living her life. I began wondering what she might be thinking and feeling in that moment. And then an odd thought appeared. "Why don't I pretend to be her?"

So I did.

Almost immediately, something shifted. The anxiety didn't disappear, but I was no longer completely immersed in it. A small space opened between me and my fear. Looking back, I can see that I had accidentally discovered a form of psychological distancing. By temporarily stepping outside my own perspective, I loosened my identification with the anxious performer. I was no longer being anxiety. I was experiencing anxiety. That distinction may sound subtle, but changed everything.

The Difference Between Being and Experiencing

Many contemporary psychological approaches recognise the importance of this shift. Researchers sometimes call it decentering or self-distancing: the ability to observe thoughts and emotions as experiences we're having rather than as definitions of who we are.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy refers to a similar process as cognitive defusion. Instead of saying: "I am anxious." We learn to notice:"I am experiencing anxiety."

Instead of: "I am a failure." We notice: "I am having the thought that I am a failure."

The content remains. The relationship changes.

Suffering often intensifies when we become fused with a particular identity. The perfectionist. The failure. The rescuer. The gifted one. The successful one. The anxious one. The wounded one. The performer.

The moment we become completely identified with one aspect of ourselves, our perspective narrows. We lose access to the wider landscape of who we are.

De-identification Isn't Dissociation

Healthy de-identification isn't emotional avoidance or pretending our feelings don't exist or suppressing, denying, or bypassing difficult experiences. In fact, it often requires greater honesty.

Rather than being overwhelmed by an emotion, we learn to sit beside it. Rather than becoming consumed by a role, we learn to hold it more lightly. Rather than disappearing into a story, we remember we're larger than the story.

The goal isn't distance from life but freedom within life.

Freedom to respond rather than react. Freedom to choose rather than compulsively repeat. Freedom to recognise that our thoughts, emotions, roles, and identities are real, but they're not the entirety of who we are.

The Three Stages of Transformation

Looking back, I can now see that my experience followed a simple developmental arc.

Stage One: Identification

At seventeen, I wasn't merely a pianist. I was a pianist. My sense of worth became entwined with performance. Perfection was a requirement. Mistakes felt catastrophic because they threatened my identity. If I performed badly, perhaps I was bad. If I failed, perhaps I was a failure.

Many of us know this territory. The identity becomes the cage.

Stage Two: De-identification

The strange exercise of imagining myself as my sister created a small but meaningful interruption. For a moment, I stepped outside the habitual story. The performer wasn't gone, the anxiety wasn't gone, but they no longer occupied the entire stage.

I gained enough distance to experiment with alternative perspectives. Like, perhaps nerves could be energy. Perhaps excitement and anxiety were close cousins. Perhaps I could work with the activation instead of fighting it. Perhaps perfection wasn't the point. The goal wasn't to eliminate anxiety. The goal was to loosen its grip.

Stage Three: Re-identification

This is the stage many discussions miss. Nature abhors a vacuum. When old identities loosen, new possibilities emerge. Over time, I became less interested in performing perfectly and more interested in expressing something meaningful.

I became curious about emotional connection, creativity, authenticity, about what music was actually for. Eventually I encountered a more difficult truth. I wasn't really a performer, not in the way the Conservatorium required. The identity I needed to relinquish wasn't anxiety. It was the performer identity itself. This was painful, but it was also liberating because letting go of one identity created space for others to emerge.

Rebuilding Identity

Once we loosen our attachment to an old identity, a different process begins.

Self-discovery.

We start asking new questions. What do I value? What genuinely matters to me? What energises me? What feels alive? What am I becoming?

Psychologists who study narrative identity suggest that much of adulthood involves revising the stories we tell about ourselves. While the past doesn't change, the meaning does. A chapter that once looked like failure may later reveal itself as redirection. A detour may become a doorway. A breakdown may become a beginning. This certainly proved true for me.

After graduating from the Conservatorium, exhausted and burnt out, I moved towards pursuits that felt more aligned with my deeper nature. Writing. Art-making. Psychology. Reflection. Curiosity.

The things that began as hobbies slowly became vocations, and the thing I once thought was my vocation became a hobby.

How the tables turn.

The Freedom Beyond Identity

Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, wrote extensively about disidentification. His famous insight was deceptively simple:

"We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves."

I don't think he meant domination in the modern sense. I think he meant freedom.

When we're completely identified with a role, belief, emotion, or self-concept, it unconsciously governs us. When we create space around it, we regain the ability to choose.

This idea has always resonated with me because it mirrors themes found in many developmental models, including K. Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration.

Growth often requires the dissolution of identities that once served us because they've become too small. The old self cracks. The wider self emerges.

The Space Between

Today, I think of de-identification less as losing oneself and more as recovering perspective. It's the recognition that there's a space between us and our thoughts. A space between us and our emotions. A space between us and our roles. A space between us and our fears. And within that space lives something precious: choice.

The ability to decide who we wish to become. The freedom to release identities that no longer fit. The courage to embrace identities that do.

Perhaps, beneath all of it, is the possibility that we're something larger than any identity could ever contain.

Not the performer, writer, artist, psychologist – not even the anxious seventeen-year-old standing backstage waiting to perform – but the awareness capable of holding them all.