Who Are You? Identity in Business Families

Two weeks ago, I spoke on the topic of identity in business families at the Private Wealth Network Family Office Congress on the Gold Coast, alongside Emily Hammon and Lahra Carey. I thought I'd share my insights here as well.

In my work as a family business psychotherapist, I work with family members who describe an identity challenge that governance cannot reach.

• "I love my family. I love this business. But I don't know who I am inside it anymore."
• "Everyone here has an opinion about who I'm supposed to be. I don't know which is mine."
• "From outside, I look successful. But something is screaming inside of me and I don't feel successful at all."

These are not the whimsical complaints of someone who is spoiled by wealth. They are identity collapses inside a family system that defined the person before the person could define themselves.

In this article, I explore what identity is, and what happens when it gets suppressed inside a family business. I then describe the work that helps each member claim it back.

What Is Identity?

Identity is not a feeling. It is not a label, and it is not something you have.

Identity is something you enact. In clinical terms, identity is the organisation of your beliefs, your values, and the actions you commit to over time (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1966).

In my work, two key elements define identity:

1. Core Values

Core values are the underlying drivers of who you are. They represent principles that you cherish so much that you would be willing to permanently struggle for them (Schwartz, 1992). Examples include honesty, justice, kindness, courage, and community contribution.

For example: you witness your manager bullying a colleague. In spite of the obvious risks to your career, you choose to confront him publicly. From this, others can infer that one of your core values is fairness—important enough that you would struggle for it even when that action might cost you.

Despite their importance to your identity, values cannot be observed directly. The only way to observe them is through your behaviours.

2. Behaviours

Behaviours are the actions through which we express our values. They include what we say, what we do, and just as importantly, what we choose not to say or do.

Behaviours are also the parts of ourselves that others can see, and the only part of us that we can see.

The research is clear—identity is built through repeated action, not through self-concept alone (Bem, 1972).

That's why we experience full meaning when our behaviour expresses our core values. We become inspired by knowing who we are, because what we do confirms what we believe in (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003).

But what happens when our behaviours don't align to our core values?

The Cost of the Gap

When our core values and behaviours stay misaligned over time, a significant risk emerges.

If we repeatedly behave in ways that differ from our actual values, our perception of identity drifts. We may develop a self-identity that is not actually who we are.

In my clinical experience, this misalignment can produce suffering in various forms:

• Depression. The distance from the self you hoped to become often produces disappointment, hopelessness, and grief (Higgins, 1987; Liu et al., 2015).
• Anxiety. The gap between who you are and who others require you to be often produces fear and tension (Mason et al., 2019).
• Anger. The gap between one's values and behaviours can surface as chronic irritability, sudden outbursts, or the slow-burning resentment of being silenced by the family system. Chronic suppression of emotion produces worse psychological functioning over time (Gross & John, 2003).
• Compulsive Overwork. Work often becomes an escape from the gap. The founder who cannot stop, the successor who out-performs to avoid their emotions, or the in-law who proves their worth on repeat. Workaholism is driven by internal pressures and emotional avoidance, not external demands (Andreassen, 2014).
• Addiction. The gap at its extreme can lead to addiction, including drugs, gambling, or affairs—any compulsive behaviour that quiets the pain. Experiential avoidance is one of the most reliably measured drivers of these patterns (Hayes et al., 2006; Bond et al., 2011).

These manifestations look different on the surface, but the mechanism beneath them is the same.

Why Does the Gap Persist?

We hold a core value. The behaviour that would express that value is right there, available to us.

But that behaviour would activate an emotion our family punished us for feeling—sadness, fear, or shame. So we avoid the behaviour. And in avoiding the behaviour, we avoid the emotion underneath it.

This is experiential avoidance: the cost of keeping the family's emotional rules intact is suppressing who we actually are.

The pattern usually begins in childhood, when speaking up was met not with warmth, but with control, coercion, or conditional love (Joussemet, Landry, & Koestner, 2008).

By the time we reach our thirties, it has been running for decades. The next-generation member cannot disagree with their father in the meeting because at age four they learned disagreement cost their belonging with dad.

Over time, this suppression of one's self produces the symptoms named earlier: depression, anxiety, anger, addiction, and other manifestations of our identity gap (Spendelow & Joubert, 2018).

What Feels Like Identity Is Often a Trauma Response

Here is the harder truth: much of what feels like identity is not our identity at all.

What we experience as identity usually includes a large set of survival responses we developed in childhood. We repeated these behavioural adaptations so many times that we mistake them for who we are.

Research confirms that adverse childhood experiences produce durable mental representations of one's self, and others, that operate in adulthood—as if they are our true identity (Pilkington, Bishop, & Younan, 2021).

Examples:

• The next-generation member who identifies as responsible may not value responsibility—they may be running a parentification response they learned at seven when asked to care for their younger siblings.
• The successor who identifies as steady under pressure may not value steadiness—they may be running an emotional-suppression response they learned at four when crying was punished.
• The founder who identifies as driven may not value drive—they may be running a worth-through-achievement response installed in childhood, when love arrived only through accomplishment."

These responses are not values. They are adaptations. They feel like identity because they have been with us so long, and because we have built our lives around them.

But underneath, they are powered by the avoidance described above. We run the response to avoid the emotion the family system never permitted us to feel.

This is where I ask the discriminator question: would you permanently struggle for this even when no one was watching? A real value would still be worth the struggle. A survival response only makes sense in the context of the threat that installed it.

Why Business Families Are Especially Vulnerable

Business families are especially vulnerable to avoidance. Personal identity and business identity blend in family businesses in a way they do not in any other organisation (Wielsma & Brunninge, 2019).

When these are fused, the gap can be enormous. The next-generation member cannot quietly become themselves outside work—there is no outside work. The founder cannot retire without retiring from the self they have been for decades.

This is why identity issues in business families look like business problems: the founder who cannot let go, the successor who shrinks, and the sibling who keeps blowing up strategy meetings.

The Interventions

Note: what follows are simplified illustrations of my clinical work and should only be undertaken with the guidance of a trained psychotherapist.

The Paradoxical Theory of Change

"Change occurs when one becomes what one is, not when one tries to become what one is not."

The Gestalt therapist Arnold Beisser wrote these words in 1970, and they remain foundational to how I work.

Beisser did not believe that we can change through deliberate attempts to change ourselves. Instead, he believed we can change only when we abandon what we want to become, and invest the time to be who we are.

It is only in that moment that freedom to change appears.

Research on authenticity confirms it: people who live more authentically experience meaningfully better wellbeing (Sutton, 2020).

The following interventions move the client toward who they actually are.

Intervention #1: Who Are You?

I begin with a question that sounds simple: "Who are you?"

The first answers are often demographics-based: "I'm a father, a husband, and a shareholder in this business." But these are roles, positions, labels. They are not identity.

When I gently ask again, the usual response is "I don't know, Tom". That, right there, is a big moment for both my client and myself.

If my client struggles with the question, I ask sharper questions:

• What are you willing to permanently struggle for?
• What are you willing to be fired for?
• What are you willing to be humiliated for?
• What are you willing to die for?

That's when the whispers begin to surface, even when they are mixed in with doubt or dismissal:

I think I value fairness, especially for the underdog. I also love honest communication, but I know I avoid that a lot. And I cherish the idea of being of service to my community...I just don't know how.

These are one's core values, the way they sound as they emerge. They are often surprising to the client. The next exercise takes what surfaced here and deepens it.

Intervention #2: Behavioural Activation

The final step is translating the filtered values into behaviour the family will resist.

I ask: "What is one behaviour that would express this value, that you have avoided because of how the family would respond?"

The answers are often concrete. Telling my brother I disagree before the board meeting, not after. Refusing to take a side in my parents' conflict. Saying no to the project I've been resenting for two years.

Before the client tries the behaviour in real life, we rehearse it in session.

I place an empty chair in the room. I ask the client to speak to their sibling—out loud, in the present tense, as if they were sitting there. The client hears their own voice making the disagreement. They feel the activation in their body. They discover that they can survive saying it.

The client then begins acting from their own values in real life. Identity is reclaimed through behaviour, not insight.

Why This Matters

Identity is upstream of every relational pattern in family business. Scapegoating, multi-role conflict, triangulation, or succession failure—all sit on top of unresolved identity issues running since childhood.

This is not a gap in advisor competence. It is a gap in the discipline assigned to it.

Lawyers cannot help a family member claim the identity the family has not permitted. Accountants cannot help a founder claim a self that is not fused with the business. Wealth advisers cannot help a successor claim the values the next conversation will require.

The advisors you work with manage the business structure. Family business psychotherapy is the discipline trained to work at the identity layer beneath it. Each member can then claim who they are—and live it through behaviour the family can no longer suppress.

I hope you find this helpful.

References

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