The domain House is one of the six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. The Hidden Hero’s Journey explores how identity, perception, emotion, instinct, culture and awareness influence your experience.
The domain House is concerned with identity: the person you believe you are, the roles you take on and the qualities you feel you must keep showing.
You’re the capable one. The calm one. The one who can handle it.
Lovely qualities.
Potentially a dreadful job description.
What happens when you need to be something else?
You arrive intending to ask for help. Someone tells you how well you’re managing, and you hear yourself agree.
The need is still there. But expressing it now feels like contradicting the version of you they admire.
The domain House asks what has become difficult to express because of who you’re expected to be.
A house has more than one room.
You probably don’t behave identically with a close friend, a client and a relative whose opinion still gets under your skin. Different parts of you become easier or harder to express.
The imagined rooms of the domain House give those differences a setting. Where do you speak freely? Where do you become careful? What would you like to say without preparing a defence first?
You can be dependable and unavailable this weekend. Independent and in need of help. Good at your work and interested in doing something else.
You’re allowed to disappoint a description.
Role looks at the expectations involved. The domain Ocean, also part of the Hidden Hero’s Journey, explores the family, culture and history in which a particular way of being became useful.
Psychologist Dan P. McAdams’s Self and Identity, published by Noba, distinguishes roles, goals and life stories. It offers another way to ask why one familiar description can’t contain everything about a person.