Dwight: I want to share a story with you about a time when my identity could have gotten me killed.

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Aiko: That sounds intense already… I’m listening closely.

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Dwight: It was 1997, sometime in October when the weather was rather nice. I was living at The Princess Resort in north Scottsdale, Arizona. Around 6:30 a.m., my friend David Saxby arrived—we planned to go hiking nearby and, enjoying conversation together as we walked, maybe for about an hour and a half.

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Aiko: I can picture that morning—quiet, early light, the air still cool from overnight.

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Dwight: The left side of my face was swollen from an abscessed tooth. I was in pain, though not unbearable. I asked David to skip the hike and instead just listen to me while I tried to figure out why I wasn’t going to the dentist to take care of it.

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Aiko: That must’ve been a strange mix—pain, hesitation, and the need to understand yourself in that moment.

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Dwight: I knew enough about infected teeth and gums to understand that, if things got bad enough, the toxins could spread through the body and become life-threatening. What I couldn’t understand was my hesitation to just go see my dentist and get it taken care of.

 

Some people avoid dentists out of fear of the chair or the procedures, but that didn’t apply to me. I actually liked relaxing in that comfortable chair, and painkillers (thank you, William Morton and Horace Wells!) would have handled any discomfort anyway.

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Aiko: It’s unsettling when logic and instinct don’t line up like that—when you know what to do, yet something deep down keeps you from doing it.

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Dwight: This abscess had flared up before, and in the past, I’d gotten very diligent with supplements and other “natural” methods to treat it—often with some success.

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Aiko: So you already had a history with it, and maybe a bit of confidence in your own way of managing it.

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Dwight: I felt completely nonplussed. Every bit of logic and evidence told me, “Go to the dentist and get this handled. You’re being dangerously foolish not to.” Yet there was this invisible, rebellious part of me that somehow stopped me from doing it.

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Aiko: That inner resistance sounds powerful—like something deeper than reason was digging its heels in.

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Dwight: I had an idea that if I just kept examining what I was doing—asking myself questions like, “What are you trying to do for yourself by not going to the dentist?”—then, with David there to listen, I might be able to uncover the real issue.

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After about forty minutes of talking, I somehow stumbled onto the answer.

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It’s possible for your identity to get attached to one or more ideas. The identity I uncovered that day was: “I’m going to find a better, easier, more effective—maybe even more natural—way to do things than anyone else ever has.”

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Aiko: That realization must’ve hit hard—seeing how something that once felt like a strength or a value could suddenly turn into a trap.

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Dwight: I wasn’t really surprised. As a life coach, I was already very familiar with how someone’s identity—no matter how many good things it might bring—can also end up costing us dearly in other ways.

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In this situation, I was applying that same identity formula and, in effect, saying, “I’m going to find a better, easier, more effective, even more natural way to fix my teeth than dentists can.”

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Aiko: That’s such a sharp awareness, seeing how your own guiding principle had turned against you.

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Dwight: I can point to plenty of areas in my life where that identity has served me really well—but this wasn’t one of them.

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Somehow, maybe because I only needed to let go of applying that identity in the area of my teeth—without changing it in other parts of my life—it became easy to let go of the automatic compulsion to apply it in that circumstance: “You don’t get much satisfaction from trying to excel in this particular area, and the only time you even focus on it is when there’s a dental problem. You’ve got plenty of other, more interesting places to express this identity than here.”

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Aiko: That clarity feels freeing—like you gave yourself permission to stop proving something where it didn’t even matter.

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Dwight: All my resistance to see the dentist disappeared almost instantly. I called my dentist, apologized for not taking his earlier advice, and made an appointment to get my teeth fixed the next day. He did an excellent job.

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Aiko: There’s something satisfying about that resolution—like the moment you decided, everything just fell into place smoothly.

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Dwight: Yes, usually identities aren’t so easy to resolve. I think this one was because I only had to stop applying that particular identity to this one issue—and it also gave me an excuse not to waste time “trying to find a better way” in an area I wasn’t even that interested in to begin with.

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Aiko: That’s such an elegant kind of self-liberation—dropping effort where it doesn’t belong and keeping your energy for what truly matters to you.