What is Self Concept

What does osteopathy for the brain look like?

For 30 years, I've been working with bodies. Finding misalignments, releasing stuck patterns, helping structures reorganise themselves into more efficient configurations. Someone comes in with a pelvis torsion, compensated shoulders, and a back that's been bracing for months. I put my hands on them, find where the system's stuck, and help it find a better arrangement.

The body responds remarkably well to this kind of work. Change the structure, and function changes automatically. You don't have to convince the muscles to relax or teach the spine to decompress. You reorganise the physical structure, and the rest follows naturally.

So here's the question I kept asking myself: what would this look like for the mind? Humans are a complete whole.

Not traditional talk therapy, which often works at the level of understand and insight rather than structural change. Not cognitive work—that's like trying to convince tight muscles to relax by explaining to them why they shouldn't be tense.

I mean actual structural work. Finding where someone's self-concept is stuck in an unhelpful pattern, and helping it reorganise into something that serves them better. The mental equivalent of what I do with bodies.

Turns out, that work exists. It's called Self-Concept coaching, and it's based on decades of research into how human beings organise their sense of identity. It works with thestructureof how you see yourself, not just the content of what you think.

OR put another way, content is the story you tell yourself (I'm xxx); structure is how that story is organised, reinforced and remembered.

This is the work I've been developing alongside my clinical practice for the last ten years. And over the next year, I'll occasionally bring these thoughts to the newsletters—not as the main focus, obviously, but as another lens for understanding how we get stuck and how we can change. Just so I don't reinforce this dualism of separate mind & body.

For now, just a taste of what this kind of work addresses.

When Problems become Identity

Here's something you've probably noticed: people have "issues" or problems. And then, mysteriously, they become their problems.

"I'm an anxious person." "I'm just a procrastinator." "I'm terrible with money." "I'm not good with people." "I'm always late." "I'm just like that."

Notice the language? Not "I experience anxiety sometimes" or "I've been procrastinating lately." It's "I am anxious." The problem has become identity. You're not someone who has anxiety—it's like you are an Anxious Person. Capital A, capital P. It's who you are now.

And once it's who you are, everything you do confirms it. You notice all the times you felt anxious and none of the times you didn't. You remember the deadlines you missed and forget the ones you hit. Your brain is absolutely brilliant at collecting evidence that proves what you already believe about yourself.

This is where most people reach for help. Self-help books. Therapy. Coaching. All good things, mind you. But in my experience, here's what usually happens: we focus on the problem. Why are you anxious? What triggers your procrastination? Let's analyse your relationship with money. Let's unpack your childhood. Let's understand the content of the problem.

And occasionally that helps. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you understand why you're anxious, you've got a PhD-level analysis of your procrastination patterns, and yet... you're still anxious. You still procrastinate. Nothing's actually changed.

What if there's a different way?

Here's a question worth sitting with: what if the problem isn't actually you?

What if "I'm an anxious person" isn't a fact about your identity, but just the current way your system is organised? What if anxiety isn't something you are but something that emerges from how your self-concept is currently structured?

Stay with me here.

Your self-concept—the way you see yourself, who you think you are—isn't static. It's not carved in stone. It's more like... internal scaffolding. A structure that organises how you perceive everything, how you interpret experiences, what you notice and what you ignore.

And like any structure, it can be changed.

Not by analysing why the structure exists. Not by thinking different thoughts about it. Not by understanding where it came from. But by actually changing thestructure itself.

Content vs. Structure

Here's the distinction that changes everything:

Content is what you're thinking about, feeling, or experiencing. "I'm anxious about the presentation." "I procrastinated on that project." "I don't like how I handled that conversation."

Structure is how your self-concept organises and categorises those experiences. It's the framework that determines what things mean to you, how they connect to your sense of self, and what patterns emerge.

Most approaches work with content. They help you think differently about the anxiety, understand why you procrastinate, and reframe how you see the conversation.

Structural work is different. It's like... imagine your self-concept is a filing system. Content-based work tries to change what's written in the files. Structural work reorganises the entire filing system so the same information gets categorised completely differently.

When the structure changes, everything changes. Naturally. Without force. Without convincing yourself of anything.

The teaser

I'm going to touch on this topic now and then in future newsletters, because this work—Self-Concept coaching using a specific structural methodology—is what I'm developing alongside the bodywork practice.

It's based on decades of research into how human beings actually organise their sense of self, and it works very differently from traditional therapy or coaching approaches.

Instead of asking, "Why do I feel this way?" or "How can I think differently about this?", structural self-concept work asks, "How is my system currently organising this experience, and can we reorganise it in a way that serves me better?"

The answer, it turns out, is almost always yes.

But that's for another time. For now, I just want to plant a seed: if you've been working on a problem for months or years—understanding it, analysing it, trying to think your way out of it—and nothing's fundamentally shifted, it might not be a 'you' problem.

It might be a structural problem.

And just like with the physical body and osteopathy, structures can be changed.