In Other Words... Why Some People Try to Become Someone Else

The information in this piece is based on research detailed in the linked YoungFamilyLife essay. Researchers and frameworks are named where they add weight to what is described; the full academic sources and references are available there.

What the brain will not let go of

From the moment a child is born, connection is not optional. The infant brain cannot regulate itself, cannot sustain itself, cannot survive without another human being — not as a preference, but as a physiological requirement. Research into what happens to infants who lack consistent human contact shows the consequences clearly: growth fails, development stalls, and in severe cases the body itself begins to shut down. This is not sentiment. It is biology.

That need does not disappear with age. What changes is the strategy. Adults who have learned, through experience, that connection is unreliable or unsafe may organise their lives around the appearance of not needing it. But the appearance is a strategy, not an absence. The need goes underground. It does not go away.

This matters because it explains something that looks, on the surface, like a preference or a habit, but is actually something much more fundamental: the human tendency, when ordinary belonging is out of reach, to reach instead toward another person’s identity.

What reaching toward someone else’s identity actually looks like

Most people have experienced a version of this. The person at school or at work who seems to navigate social situations with an ease that feels out of reach. The colleague who speaks in a meeting with a confidence that others wish they could access. The friend whose life appears to have a coherence and a comfort that the observer experiences as absent in their own.

The pull toward these people is not simple admiration. It is something more active. Developmental research describes it through the concept of the ego ideal — the internal image of who a person is reaching toward becoming. The ego ideal is the brain’s forward-looking function: here is what is wanted, here is what is not yet present, here is the direction of travel. In childhood it is typically projected onto parents and older siblings. As the social world expands, it shifts toward peers, then toward public figures, then toward whoever currently seems to embody what is most urgently wanted.

This forward reach is not a flaw. It is the engine of development. The person who notices the qualities they want in someone else and is drawn toward them is using admiration as a resource. In this form, it serves growth.

The picture changes when the belonging gap — the distance between the connection the brain requires and the connection actually available — becomes wide enough that the admiration stops being a resource and starts being a solution.

A spectrum, not a switch

The reaching toward another person’s identity runs along a spectrum. It does not jump from healthy admiration to harmful obsession. It moves — usually gradually, often imperceptibly — through four recognisable positions.

Interest is the baseline. A person notices someone who appears to have what they want and is drawn toward them. The self is intact. The admired other is a reference point, held at a useful distance. This is entirely ordinary — so ordinary that it rarely registers as anything significant at all.

Fandom is the organised social form of interest. The relationship with an admired figure — a musician, an athlete, a public figure, a fictional character — becomes a shared identity. The fan typically knows the relationship is one-sided: the celebrity does not know the fan exists. But the fan community around the figure provides something real: a sense of belonging, a social world organised around shared enthusiasm, a low-stakes entry point into connection. Research consistently finds that fan affiliation tends to support identity development rather than replacing real-world connection. The self remains intact and recognisable. The community delivers genuine belonging.

Obsession is the point at which the gap becomes acute enough that the mechanism shifts from resource to management. The admired figure occupies an expanding share of mental life — returning to the centre of attention repeatedly, outside the contexts where they would naturally be relevant, with an insistence the person did not choose. The self begins to filter its own preferences through the admired other’s standards. Not as a deliberate performance, but as the natural expression of a self increasingly organised around an external reference point rather than an internal one. The body registers this shift too — the anxiety of perceived distance, the physiological drop of rejection, the effort of maintaining a self-presentation calibrated to someone else’s world rather than one’s own.

Assimilation is the far end. The borrowed identity has substantially replaced the original. Interests, social affiliations, ways of speaking and presenting — these have been reorganised around the admired other to the point where very little of the original self is visible. This does not typically happen suddenly and it is rarely experienced as a loss. It feels, from the inside, simply like being who one is. What is not available from inside the borrowed self is the recognition that the self doing the experiencing was not always this — and that the one it replaced has not gone, only become very difficult to find.

What moves a person along the spectrum

The size of the belonging gap is the primary driver. A child who feels genuinely known and wanted — within their family, their peer group, their school community — has less reason to reach beyond what is available. A child for whom those ordinary routes to belonging are unreliable, conditional, or absent has a wider gap to manage, and the mechanisms for managing it are more likely to intensify.

Attachment research — particularly the body of work originating with John Bowlby and developed across decades of subsequent study — shows that the internal model a child builds from their earliest relationships typically travels with them. A child whose early experience established a basic expectation of being welcomed tends to approach social situations with a working assumption that reaching out is likely to be met. A child whose early experience built an expectation that connection is conditional or precarious approaches new social situations with a different orientation — one already calibrated toward the possibility of not being enough. For that child, the admired other who appears to belong effortlessly becomes not just a model but a solution: perhaps their identity will do what mine has not.

Research also identifies that the major transitions of life — the move to a new school, entry into a professional world, the loss of a significant relationship or role — can reopen the belonging gap at any age and reactivate the mechanism at whatever point on the spectrum the gap’s size and the available strategies place a person.

The self that was there before

The most important thing the research suggests about the far end of the spectrum is not that the borrowed self is the problem. It is that it is a response to a problem that preceded it. The reaching toward another’s identity is what the social brain tends to do when ordinary routes to belonging are insufficient. The intensity of the reaching is a signal about the size of the gap, not a verdict on the person doing the reaching.

The self that gets suppressed along the way is not destroyed. It is waiting — less accessible, harder to find, but present. What tends to bring it back is not removal of the admired other, or argument about the borrowed identity, or direct intervention on the reaching. What tends to bring it back is the experience of being known and wanted without condition — the thing the reaching is typically trying to find.

Understanding the spectrum does not resolve it. But it changes the question from what is wrong with this person to what gap is this reaching trying to close — and that is a more useful starting point for anyone trying to make sense of what they are seeing.

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Topics: #InOtherWords #Belonging #Identity #Fandom #Idealisation #EgoIdeal #AttachmentTheory #SocialBrain #ParasocialRelationships #Adolescence #ChildDevelopment #YoungFamilyLife

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Related YFL Content

The Social Brain and the Lonely Child: Friendship, Belonging, and What the Research Actually Shows — the evolutionary and developmental account of why the social brain treats belonging as non-negotiable, and what happens when ordinary routes to it are unavailable.

In Other Words… When a Child Says They Have No Friends — the plain-speak companion to the loneliness essay; the belonging gap in childhood described from a different angle.

In Other Words… How Attachment Styles Shape the Way People Handle Life and Relationships — the four adult attachment patterns in plain language; the internal working model described in this piece in its longer-term form.

Learning to Survive — How the Brain Navigates Opportunity and Danger — the three-brain model underlying why the social brain’s needs are felt in the body as well as the mind.