What Is Gained or Lost by Maintaining More Than One Identity?

Source: Krystine I. Batcho

Psychology has devoted substantial attention to the nature, development, and importance of the self. How a person understands their identity can influence their self-esteem, social interactions, and behaviors that affect their own wellbeing and impacts others.

Someone who identifies as talented, compassionate, and devoted to helping others might pursue a career in medicine, social work, or teaching. Someone who identifies as talented and introspective, with a preference for solitude, might be attracted to a career in laboratory research or a solitary art such as writing. Of course, people don’t fit into neat categories.

But traits, beliefs, preferences, and other characteristics are viewed as concepts. It isn’t uncommon for someone to consider their talents within sports, music, science, etc. People understand their identity also in terms of relationships and social and community groups.

Someone might identify as a ‘small town’ or a ‘big city’ person. They might identify with their membership in a religious, political, ethnic, or ideological group. But of course, people don’t fit neatly into social groups. For example, the number of people who identify in multi-racial categories has increased dramatically in the United States. The number of children with parents of different racial ancestry has grown from 500,000 in 1970 to nearly 7 million in 2000.

What are the effects of understanding oneself as one of different, contradictory, or incompatible personal or social realities? What are the implications of having a ‘dual identity’? Thomas Mann’s fictional character Tonio Kröger was the son of a father of “Norse temperament: reflective, thorough, Puritanically correct” and a mother described as “passionate, and of an impulsive and unprincipled mind.” Tonio explained: “I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it.”

The challenge of being of two worlds is not limited to fictional characters. Born in 1892 to American missionaries, author Pearl S. Buck described her childhood in China and her return to the United States during the Boxer Uprising. Buck spoke English and Chinese and was taught by her mother and a Chinese tutor. In her autobiography, Buck explained: “I grew up in a double world . . . When I was in the Chinese world, I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.”

However, Buck’s two worlds were split by political and social upheaval when Buck was eight years old. Secure in her Chinese world, Buck had also understood that she was not Chinese in an academic sense. The upheaval in China radically changed the social context in which Buck had enjoyed her double identity. She recounted:

I had never known what hatred was. I had neither been hated nor had I ever hated anyone. I could not understand why we, still ourselves and unchanged, should be lumped with unknown white men from unknown countries who had been what we were not, robbers and plunderers. It was now that I felt the first and primary injustice of life. I was innocent, but because I had the fair skin, the blue eyes, the blond hair of my race, I was hated, and because of fear of me and my kind, I walked in danger.

Is the challenge of maintaining dual identities predominantly detrimental or beneficial? What is gained or lost by being a person of two worlds?

Research on the psychological impacts of dual identity is progressing and beginning to shed light on the complexities of identity and how individual identity interacts with social conditions. Early research suggested that multiracial individuals can feel doubly rejected, receiving messages from society about who they are not but few signals about who they are. Mixed messages can lead to feelings of isolation, confusion, anxiety, and depression. Conflicting messages from others can lead to uncertainty about social interactions and relationships with others.

Feeling that one’s identity is not respected or understood by others can pressure a person to deny that part of their identity. Denial has been associated with lower feelings of autonomy, greater conflict, and lower levels of belonging. When someone is rejected because of their behavior, they can choose to modify those behaviors. When someone is shunned for who they are, they have no pathway to acceptance. Respect, understanding, and support from the community are essential for people to feel included.

However, dual identity doesn’t have to lead to negative consequences. In itself, dual identity is a healthy resource full of promise. Whether dual identity is beneficial or detrimental can depend upon the responsiveness of others. In fact, recent research has shown that the challenge of dual identity can provide a wealth of benefits to the individual and the greater social community. Experiencing the opportunities and ambiguities of different identities can nurture creativity, flexibility, and a rich appreciation of the value of diversity among people, cultures, and world views.

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Pearl Buck described how her exposure to the different values and beliefs of two cultures encouraged her to become ‘mentally bifocal’: “I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even, in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety.” Being able to experience the ‘kaleidoscope’ of lived truth enhances the ability to cope with the inevitable adversities and noble responses to them inherent in life.

As a young child, Buck witnessed hardships of famine and social turmoil. Buck recounted how she developed resilience, compassion, courage, and the ability to cope with ambiguity and paradox by identifying with both worlds:

I learned early that trouble and suffering can always be relieved if there is the will to do it, and in that knowledge, I have found escape from despair throughout my life . . . my heart was only made more tender . . . sorrow and death take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.

There remains a great need for further empirical research on the psychological and social ramifications of dual or multiple identities. With research, personal accounts of lived experience highlight the importance of a society that welcomes and nourishes the fabric of identities that grow beyond boundaries of arbitrary discrete categories.

Society needs to resist attempts to put individuals into rigid categories. It may be tempting to encourage others to choose among competing options. But how much more can be learned from efforts to go beyond superficial choices to deeper insights. When individuals are encouraged to thrive in unique mosaics of self, everyone benefits.