You are ‘a‘ self… yes, but the self I became was not one by choice. So can that really be your “self”?
The way I view
self-hood is pretty different to how I've heard others describe it, but maybe it might help to consider it from another perspective. Personally I think people mythologize this concept too much. The idea of a self is this intrinsic, spiritual quality that must be discovered or which can be destroyed or altered from its 'baseline.'
We see this when people talk about not knowing
who they are before trauma, or expressing that they believe trauma changed them from what their 'self' otherwise would have been. This is all
a priori knowledge, so this viewpoint isn't particularly
irrational or bizarre, but I don't really buy it. I don't think that there is a version of me that I would have been if I hadn't experienced trauma. I am my physical composition. My genes, my DNA, my atoms that make neurons and muscle fibers.
It's like if you take a cup and smash it on the ground. It is a smashed cup, and if we want to talk about this version of the cup that would exist if it hadn't been smashed, we wouldn't be talking about changing the cup's molecular composition, but rather its position in space-time (moving it from a reality where it is smashed, to a new reality where it is whole, wouldn't make it suddenly a blue cup if it were purple).
If I hadn't been traumatized, I might have different beliefs and a different personality, but that can happen without trauma. That can happen to you right now, you can change what you believe or create new habits. You can paint a purple cup blue. Who (or rather what) we are is where we are, at any given point on the space-time continuum. And these qualities are inherently malleable and transient, because change is an inherent process of existence.
So I don't bother mourning the person I could have been, because if I want to change my beliefs or make different choices I have the agency to do that now. The universe has some degree of pre-determination, which we have evidence for in the form of the
Bareitschaftspotential. If our brain is spinning up electrical activity to move our finger before we even know we want to move our finger, then our awareness of the desire to move our finger isnt the
cause of our finger moving. We are simply aware of our brain's activity. In this way, nobody is actually choosing who they are.
Our awareness of this neural activity influences our future neural activity. Consciousness exists due to neural quantum synchronicity, so free will and volition exist in a type of illusory, liminal space. So we aren't locked into a loop, and we can influence our own thoughts and beliefs, but our initial desires are essentially hard-wired. They're a product of our composition, the specific electrical and chemical and hormonal balances in our system that transport between sodium and ion channels in unique pathways.
Essentially, I just don't see the utility in wishing I was different. I have enough agency to be different if I choose, and trauma isn't the sole reason that I am the way I am now. A good bulk of that is determined by my biological composition.
). Because of my own background with JWs anger is a bad emotion and means you lack self-control. It is very difficult for me to get angry. But Pete Walker’s book talks about needing anger to “thought-stop” the inner critic and how use anger to combat fear and shame and to use it in concert with crying. 
