I used to feel like I was a “perceived” personality type. I mean, I was someone who would think that I was a “persona” (the person who did the things), but the truth is that I didn’t feel like one. I didn’t feel like a real person at all.
A person with a perceived self is someone who believes their thoughts and actions are real and that they’re able to control them. Someone with a perceived self cannot use their thoughts for anything other than “I am!” or “I am right!” they cannot do the things that someone with a real self can accomplish.
When you perceive yourself, you can actually control what you do. Just like a car could control the speed in which it ran, a person can control their thoughts and actions. It is a form of self-awareness.
We can and do use our thoughts to control our surroundings. Sometimes we use it to do something good, like cleaning up the streets. Other times we use it for ill. For instance, if we perceive ourselves as being in danger, we might use our thoughts to make our body move in a way that will help us survive. If we perceive ourselves as in a bad place and we need to get ourselves out, our thoughts can propel us to act.
For instance, we might perceive that we are in a bad place and we need to get out of there. Or we might perceive that we need to get back to the party.
We perceive that we need to get ourselves out of a bad place and into a good place. And we use our thoughts to move our body.
According to research published in Psychological Science, we perceive ourselves as being in danger when we are facing extreme stress. The research has been conducted on volunteers (like you!) and in real-life situations. When I was a child, I was always afraid of the dark. I would jump into the dark and disappear. Or I would jump into a corner of the house and disappear. I would jump into the toilet and disappear. I would jump into the kitchen and disappear.
The idea that we are actually perceiving ourselves as being in danger is a well-known concept to psychologists. You may recognize the “perceived self” concept from the movie “Groundhog Day.” In that movie, Bill Murray’s character is so afraid of his self that he will jump in front of a moving car. In fact, this same concept is used by psychologists to study our moods.
For many people, the concept of the perceived self is the same as the self-concept. But while the self-concept is really just a shorthand for the overall understanding of ourselves, the perceived self concept is used to describe when we have a sense of self-awareness. In other words, if you can recognize and describe your own moods, you have a self-concept.
For example, imagine you’re a child and you’re in the car with your parents and the situation starts to get a little heated. The car is moving so fast that you can’t really tell which one of you is being a good parent and which is being a bad one. You can see yourself clearly, the good parent, and your parents can see you clearly too. The bad parent, meanwhile, is confused because he can’t see himself clearly.
