Identity Abuse: A Proposed Clinical-Theological Framework for Acquired Identity Injury, Self-Perceptual Maintenance, and Chronic Self-Doubt

Identity Abuse is proposed as a clinical-theological framework for understanding an acquired injury to self-perception in which identity-relevant meanings derived from relational, developmental, or traumatic experience are incorporated with sufficient depth, conviction, and centrality that they function as truths about the self. The framework distinguishes exposure from internalization: adverse experience does not by itself constitute Identity Abuse. Rather, the proposed injury occurs when self-referential meaning becomes incorporated into the person’s self-concept and begins to organize the interpretation of later self-relevant information. Existing research independently links childhood maltreatment with poorer self-concept and self-esteem, adverse childhood experiences with early maladaptive schemas, trauma with negative self-appraisals, and negative self-evaluation with transdiagnostic psychopathology (Melamed et al., 2024; Pilkington et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2023). The distinctive hypothesis advanced here is that a sufficiently incorporated negative identity conclusion may become an organizing or governing self-perceptual framework. Once established, information congruent with that self-view may be experienced as more credible, while contradictory corrective information may be discounted, devalued, reinterpreted, or experienced as incongruent. Self-verification, self-referential processing, cognitive-immunization, belief-updating, and social-feedback research provide convergent but incomplete support for component processes of this proposed mechanism (Collins & Winer, 2024; Gregg, 2009; Swann et al., 1992a, 1992b; Würtz et al., 2024). Identity Abuse Theory proposes that this self-maintaining process contributes to chronic self-doubt and constrains identity revision, agency, relationships, opportunity, and authentic self-expression. A further hypothesis is that identity-incongruent information may acquire affective and physiological salience; current evidence supports physiological arousal during cognitive dissonance and social-self threat, but does not yet establish the complete Identity Abuse sequence (Croyle & Cooper, 1983; Gruenewald et al., 2004). For Christian clients, the framework additionally distinguishes distorted self-perception from intrinsic worth, locating restoration within a theological anthropology of the imago Dei. The paper identifies testable propositions, clinical implications, and priorities for empirical study.