The Roles We Don't Know We're Playing
How the parts of ourselves we rehearse can become the lives we inhabit.
Most of us think of identity as something we are.
I am strong.
I am difficult.
I am the responsible one.
I am too much.
I am not enough.
I am the one who always screws things up.
But what if some of what we experience as identity is actually a role we've practiced for so long that we no longer recognize it as a role?
In my work, I often see people living inside identities formed during very different chapters of their lives.
At one point, these roles made sense.
Being hypervigilant kept you prepared.
Being invisible kept you safe.
Being indispensable protected you from abandonment.
Being funny kept anyone from seeing how frightened you were.
Over time, something subtle happens.
The role stops feeling like something you learned to do.
It starts feeling like who you are.
When a Part Becomes an Identity
In The Untangle Method™, I call the part of us organized around old protective patterns the Tangled Part.
I don't think of the Tangled Part as bad, broken, or something we need to fix or eliminate. It has a biological logic. It developed beliefs about what was required to survive, belong, stay connected, or remain safe.
But we can become so identified with this part that we no longer recognize its beliefs as beliefs.
They simply feel true.
I can't handle this.
If I become visible, something bad will happen.
I have to stay in control.
People like me don't get to have this kind of life.
These beliefs don't necessarily arrive as thoughts. Sometimes they show up in the body and behavior.
Urgency. Withdrawal. Defiance. Perfectionism. Collapse.
A sudden desire to disappear.
Or an impulse to destroy the very thing we've worked so hard to create.
Because the response feels immediate and convincing, we can mistake a temporary state for the whole of who we are.
Putting the Role Onstage
One of the experiential practices I use in The Untangle Method™ is a form of immersive role work.
Rather than trying to quiet the Tangled Part or replace it with something more positive, we do something counterintuitive.
We magnify and theatricalize it.
I may invite someone to fully inhabit that part for a moment.
How does it sit?
How does it speak?
What does it believe?
What is it protecting?
What is it loyal to?
By exaggerating the role, we can begin to see what has been operating quietly beneath everyday behavior.
It is a little like doing a play.
An actor doesn't understand a character simply by analyzing the script. They step inside the role, discovering its posture, impulses, assumptions, and motivations.
And then they step out again.
That movement matters.
When we can play a role consciously, we are no longer required to live it unconsciously.
When the Tangled Part Meets the Creative Part
The work doesn't end with understanding the Tangled Part.
In The Untangle Method™, we work with three parts. The Organizer Part acts as an integrative bridge, building coherence, connection, and compassion with the Tangled Part while helping us access the Creative Part—the part of us capable of connection, possibility, curiosity, expression, and growth.
The Creative Part isn't a perfect self or a heroic alter ego. It doesn't arrive to defeat the Tangled Part or tell it that it's wrong.
It is another lived experience of who we are.
In this immersive work, we can experience these different parts without becoming completely identified with any one of them.
The Tangled Part speaks in the language of I can't or I won't.
The Creative Part creates in the language of I can or I want to.
And the Organizer helps us remain connected to both.
The Organizer doesn't decide which part wins. It creates the conditions in which both can be understood, and something more integrated can emerge.
Something interesting can happen in this interchange.
A belief that seemed absolute begins to soften.
An identity that felt fixed begins to reveal itself as a position.
Someone who has spent years saying, "This is just who I am," may begin to experience something different:
This is one part of me.
And that distinction can be profound.
Why Experience Matters
Research from experiential traditions such as psychodrama, chairwork, and schema-based therapies helps illuminate why this work may matter.
These approaches use role enactment, dialogue, and perspective shifts to explore internal experiences that can be difficult to access through conversation alone. Research suggests potential benefits for emotional awareness, perspective-taking, and the exploration of deeply held beliefs, although the evidence varies by approach.
This research doesn't validate The Untangle Method™ itself, but it helps illuminate something I've observed repeatedly:
Sometimes we cannot fully see an identity while we're standing inside it.
Stepping outside a role allows us to become curious about it. Inhabiting another part of ourselves offers something beyond an intellectual counterargument.
It gives us another experience.
We Rehearse Identities, Too
We tend to think of rehearsal as practicing what we will do.
What will I say when the difficult conversation happens?
What will I do when the craving comes?
How will I respond when I want to disappear?
But perhaps we also rehearse who we believe ourselves to be.
Each time we automatically enter an old role, we may reinforce the familiar ways of thinking, feeling, and responding that keep it available.
The caretaker. The outsider. The addict. The failure. The invisible one.
The person who cannot tolerate success.
These identities become convincing partly because we've inhabited them so many times.
Untangling creates an opportunity to rehearse something different.
Not a fake self. Not positive thinking. Not pretending our protective parts no longer exist.
Instead, we practice moving between parts consciously, discovering that no single one has to define the whole person.
The Tangled Part can speak without running the entire show.
The Creative Part becomes something we experience rather than merely aspire to.
We aren't trying to create a new person. We're making enough room for more of who we already are to come forward.
The Question Underneath the Behavior
When someone is struggling, we often ask:
Why did I do that again?
Sometimes a more revealing question is:
Who did I become in that moment?
What role did I enter?
What did that version of me believe?
What was it trying to protect?
And what other part of me might have something to say?
The goal isn't to eradicate the roles that helped us survive. It's to recognize when we're inside one.
Because when we can see a role, inhabit it consciously, and step outside it again, something becomes possible that wasn't available before.
Choice.
We are no longer simply repeating a character whose lines were written a long time ago.
We can begin rehearsing the life—and the self—we are becoming.
Research & Further Reading
The following research explores experiential and dialogical approaches related to the ideas discussed in this article. These studies do not directly evaluate The Untangle Method™.
1. Experiential Therapies Including Chairwork: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials (2026)
Lenka Ottingerová, Júlia Halamová & Dagmar Szitás
Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1692630.
A systematic review of randomized controlled trials examining chairwork-based interventions. The findings suggest that experiential dialogue can be a promising therapeutic approach, although effectiveness varies across outcomes and settings.
2. Psychodrama: Implementation, Study Design and Effectiveness — A Systematic Review (2025)
Jesús Maya, Miriam Pérez-Berbel, Laura Giraldo-Arroyave & Irene Hurtado
BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 25, Article 232.
A review of 27 studies exploring psychodrama techniques, including role reversal, mirroring, and enactment. Several studies reported positive outcomes, but methodological limitations and small samples mean stronger research is needed.
3. Self as a Society of I-Positions: A Dialogical Approach to Counseling (2014)
Hubert J. M. Hermans
The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, 53(2), 134–159.
A theoretical exploration of the self as a collection of internal positions that can enter into dialogue. The paper examines how coherence can emerge through relationships among different aspects of the self.
