Why Am I So Different Around Different People?
Terms & Conditions series; Context
It wasn't until I was introduced to social constructionist approaches to therapy that I found a way of understanding people while honoring the complexity of being human. Rather than simply offering a method for working with clients, postmodern philosophy provided a backbone for understanding the world, in which the therapy room becomes a microcosm of the larger social environment. Therapy shifted away from an individualized understanding of human experience and toward our innate capacity to relate, make meaning, and grow through relationships.
The client is no longer a subject to be interpreted by the therapist. Instead, a client is an expert of their own lived experience. Therapy transforms from a process of uncovering hidden truths into a collaborative effort to make meaning, develop language, and explore possibilities together. A word that tied a lot of this together is context.
Context orients me to the person in front of me and the environment in which they are living. It invites me to understand what the world looks like from their perspective rather than what the world should look like according to a particular theory, treatment plan, or benchmark for healing.
Context is similar to how Buddhists speak about karma; not as punishment or destiny, but as an acknowledgment that we are shaped by causes and conditions. Context helps us locate ourselves within time, space and the language of our stories. It helps us understand how we’ve been shaped and the countless influences that continue to mold who we are and how we move through the world.
Context includes our political climate, culture, religion, family histories, socioeconomic realities, relationships, and social identities. It reminds us that we do not exist in isolation but become who we are through our relationships with others. With this understanding, we become active participants in a web of histories, institutions, communities, and cultural narratives that shape what feels possible, desirable, normal, or even imaginable.
When I took a writing course on storytelling, I encountered the concept of situated context.
The premise is that every story is shaped by the context in which it's told. We naturally emphasize certain details, leave out others, and frame experiences differently depending on who we're speaking to, where we are, and why we're sharing the story in the first place.
A story told to a close friend may sound very different when told to a colleague, a parent, a room full of strangers, or a therapist. Even our stories emerge in relation to who is on the receiving end.
We’re influenced to shape our story in a way that will relate to our audience, but this naturally changes the story itself. If we are presenting ourselves differently depending on the context, we’re not being more or less authentic, but we’re shapeshifting to fit a certain norm or societal standard.
Now, a third term I want to call your attention to is context collapse. Researcher Danah Boyd coined this term to describe a phenomenon common in our digital life. In essence, it describes the phenomenon of how our online audiences converge in a way that they would not naturally.
Your grandmother, your coworker, your closest friend, a former employer, and a stranger will encounter the same post, caption, essay, or website that has your name on it. Contexts that would typically remain distinct collapse into a single audience.
This collapse creates tension with everything I've described so far. If identity is relational, if stories are situated, and if we naturally adapt ourselves to different contexts, then social media asks us to do something remarkably unnatural: create one version of ourselves for everyone that encounters us.
The result is often a pressure to become more articulate, more consistent, and more trustworthy. Yet most of us experience ourselves as multidimensional. We contain different stories, different roles, and different ways of relating depending on the context we're inhabiting. We're being asked to compress a complex, contextual self into a single profile.
Taken together, these ideas have reshaped how I think about identity.
If context reminds us that we are shaped by our environments, and situated stories remind us that we naturally adapt our storytelling to the relationships we're in, then identity begins to feel less like a fixed persona and more like a living, adapting conversation.
Much of our suffering comes from expecting ourselves to remain unchanged regardless of where we are, who we're with, or what is being asked of us.This perspective challenges the popular idea that authenticity means presenting the exact same version of yourself in every setting. The question becomes less, "Who am I really?" and more, "What aspects of myself become possible in this context?"
The longer I practice, the less interested I become in fixed explanations and the more interested I become in the conditions that make certain ways of being possible. Context has become a useful lens in understanding our ever-adapting selves.
