You might be very serious about reading alone in your room and the funny one in class. Or you could be the best helper at home and the kind friend at school.
Social identity refers to your sense of who you are based on your membership in certain groups.While there are many different social groups, some of the main ones include ability, age, economic class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, language, race and religion.
Scientists who have researched social anxiety have found that CBT and other therapies are just a piece of the puzzle. Knowing your community and your social identity also help you manage anxiety.
It's like taking a plant that grows or an animal that lives in the forest back to the lab; looking will only give you a snapshot of its life. You have to know the ecosystem in order to understand the plant or animal.
You are the plant or the animal. What is your ecosystem?
Even though you have unique bits that make you YOU, there are outside influences, or things that change you. These things are mostly nouns. People, places, and things.
For instance, if you grow up Irish Catholic in Pittsburgh, PA, with 12 brothers and sisters, your identity will differ from a Polish Catholic with 2 siblings in rural Ohio (that’s how our Nana and Pop grew up). Even though there are similarities like religion, skin color and eye color, the differences in experience shape who you are and how you approach the world.
What are your connections? How do they shape who you are? Download our free worksheet to get started!
Why is it important??
Now that we know our social connectedness, how do we use this information?
First, having a lot of different “communities” helps you get a lot of support. So, if you only have one or two communities, get some more. Start a collection.
Second, the longer you participate in a community, the better it is for you. You will develop better social relationships and a better social identity. It will make you feel safe as you grow and change to express yourself!
Third, as you grow and change, your social identity will grow and change. Having support systems in place will help you feel safe to find new communities if you find you want to try new things.
Telling Anxiety Who Is In Charge.
Remembering that you are a part of different communities can have surprisingly positive effects on emotional and cognitive health. It's important that you identify your nouns: helper, soccer player, creator, student, sister, etc. You have a lot of social identities and remembering this helps you be more creative and flexible in your thinking.
Identifying your communities helps you gain a sense of who you are, your culture and your community. This helps you see how you matter and how you can contribute to the world around you. When you identify your nouns, you show yourself all the different things you are OUTSIDE of social anxiety. You are not just a socially anxious person, you are many things. Go ahead and tell your anxiety to take a back seat because you are a busy person with lots of communities to belong to.
Social Identity
Identity refers to our sense of who we are as individuals and as members of social groups. It also refers to our sense of how others may perceive and label us. We develop ideas about our identities and the identities of others through our interactions with people close to us, like our family and friends, our schools and other institutions, the mass media, and our encounters with other individuals. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we have these ideas because we don’t remember learning them.
We are all born into social groups, and as we grow up, these social identities can stay the same or change. Our membership in these social groups helps give meaning to our lives. Sometimes we have a choice about which social groups we are associated with, and sometimes we get placed in groups we don’t identify with. For instance, you could make a joke in class and everyone calls you the funny one but you believe you are better at writing poems. You don't have to stress because identities change!
While our membership in social groups is an important part of who we are, we still have control over how we define ourselves and what aspects of our identities we want to emphasize over others. This concept is called individual or personal identity. Learn more about your personal identity here.
Research
Evidence that a social-identity intervention that builds and strengthens social group membership improves mental health