How Incomplete Perceptions Can Reshape Identity – An Interview with Marisa Conway

Marisa Conway is a registered nurse, certified lifestyle medicine coach, author of Shattered Bonds, Resilient Heart, founder of Presence & Persistence Life Coaching, and Executive Contributor at Brainz Magazine. Her work explores how people form conclusions about others from incomplete information and brief, stress-driven reactions and how those conclusions can influence behavior, self-perception, and identity.

In this interview, she discusses the Misinterpretation Loop, a framework she developed to explain how inaccurate perceptions can harden into defining narratives and contribute to identity disruption.

Marisa Conway, Coach, Founder and Author

What first led you to explore identity disruption as the thread connecting so much of your work?

The idea didn't begin as an academic interest. It emerged from an unexpected collision between my professional life and my personal one.

There's an old proverb that says, "Don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes." For years I appreciated its wisdom. It wasn't until I lived through profound adversity myself that I truly understood it.

For more than a decade, I worked as an emergency nurse, caring for people during some of the most difficult moments of their lives. I learned early that human beings are rarely understood through their worst day, strongest emotion, or most difficult circumstance. Every patient had a story that extended far beyond the moment I encountered them.

Then, in 2023, I unexpectedly found myself navigating prolonged personal adversity following the end of an abusive marriage. I experienced years of conflict, separation from my children, reputational challenges, and circumstances that profoundly altered how I viewed myself. What struck me most wasn't simply the hardship itself, but how quickly narratives formed around incomplete information and how those narratives began influencing both how others perceived me and how I perceived myself.

That experience led me to ask a much larger question: What happens when prolonged adversity doesn't just affect our circumstances – it begins affecting our identity?

That question became the foundation of my work on identity disruption and, eventually, of what I came to describe as The Misinterpretation Loop.

How did your years in emergency medicine change the way you understand resilience beyond what most people see?

I often say that emergency medicine gave me two gifts. The first was perspective. It exposed me to every imaginable expression of the human condition and reminded me that adversity doesn't discriminate.

The second was humility. It taught me that every patient arrives with a story we cannot fully appreciate during a single interaction. Some of the kindest people I met had endured unimaginable hardship. Some of the most difficult encounters made complete sense once their history became clear.

Most people think resilience is about extraordinary strength or perseverance. I met people from every imaginable background during some of the worst moments of their lives – moments marked by illness, addiction, violence, grief, poverty, mental illness, and profound loss. Yet time and again, I witnessed people continue moving forward despite circumstances most of us hope never to experience.

What surprised me wasn't simply their ability to endure. It was realizing how little any of us can understand about another human being from a single encounter.

That experience cultivated a deep respect for context. It taught me that resilience often looks far quieter than we imagine. Sometimes resilience isn't overcoming adversity overnight. Sometimes it's simply choosing to keep showing up, one day at a time, despite extraordinary hardship.

More than anything, emergency medicine reinforced my belief that compassion should never depend on whether someone's life makes sense to us.

Of all the experiences that have shaped my worldview, none influenced me more profoundly than my years in emergency medicine. They changed not only how I cared for others, but how I came to understand humanity itself.

What inspired you to develop The Misinterpretation Loop, and what does it help people recognize about themselves?

The development of the Misinterpretation Loop was largely accidental – I was living it before I had language for it. As an emergency-trained nurse, I was taught not to confuse a patient’s presentation with the mechanism producing it. Yet outside medicine, I observed how easily a person’s brief reaction to prolonged stress could be interpreted as evidence of their character, without adequate consideration of what preceded it. Once that interpretation was repeated and reinforced, it began influencing how others responded to the person, how the person subsequently behaved, and eventually how they perceived themselves.

The Misinterpretation Loop is not a diagnosis; it is a conceptual framework for understanding that recursive process. It asks the observer, “Have I mistaken a reaction for an identity?” It also asks the person being judged, “Have I begun to internalize an interpretation that was never complete?” Research on narrative identity similarly suggests that adversity can alter how people organize their life stories and maintain a coherent sense of self over time.

Why do you think identity disruption is still largely overlooked in conversations about trauma and chronic stress?

Identity disruption is not a single diagnosis, and that may be one reason it is so frequently missed. Clinical systems are understandably designed to identify symptoms, assess risk, and reduce acute distress. We are accustomed to asking whether someone is anxious, depressed, hypervigilant, withdrawn, or emotionally dysregulated. We ask less often, “Does this person still recognize themselves?”

Identity disruption is difficult to quantify because it is often gradual, relational, and hidden beneath apparently functional behavior. A person may continue working, parenting, meeting obligations, and appearing capable while privately feeling estranged from their former judgment, confidence, values, or sense of continuity. Their visible symptoms may be treated individually without examining the larger question of what prolonged adversity has done to their understanding of who they are.

Trauma research increasingly recognizes that negative identity, narrative fragmentation, meaning, and self-continuity are central to recovery. Yet these dimensions do not always fit neatly into symptom-based conversations.

How has social media changed the way people form conclusions about others without understanding the full context?

Social media did not invent human misjudgment; it accelerated, amplified, and monetized it. A person’s private and professional identities, past and present behavior, and different social relationships can now be compressed into one searchable public space. Researchers refer to this as “context collapse”: audiences and circumstances that would ordinarily remain separate are flattened together, often leaving viewers to interpret isolated content without knowing its original setting, history, or intended audience.

At the same time, emotionally charged and morally provocative content tends to travel farther than measured explanation. This creates an environment in which confidence can appear more credible than accuracy and public reaction can be mistaken for corroboration. Research has found that moral-emotional language and expressions of outrage can be rewarded through greater diffusion and social reinforcement online.

A screenshot may be authentic and still be contextually misleading. A reaction may be real and still be unrepresentative. Social media gives us unprecedented access to fragments of other people’s lives while creating the illusion that we have seen the whole person.

What is one simple question people can ask themselves when they feel defined by a difficult chapter in their lives?

I would ask: “What are the qualities I possess that no amount of adversity can diminish or extinguish?”

The purpose of that question is not to deny what happened or force a prematurely positive interpretation of suffering. It is to separate the circumstances a person has endured from the enduring qualities with which they have endured them.

Adversity may temporarily obstruct someone’s access to their courage, integrity, discernment, creativity, compassion, or capacity to love, but obstruction is not erasure.

A difficult chapter can change how we function and how clearly we perceive ourselves. It does not automatically invalidate everything that was true about us before it began. Reconnecting present experience to enduring values and autobiographical meaning can help restore a sense of continuity between the person someone was, the person surviving the present, and the person they are still becoming.

If someone feels they've lost sight of who they are after prolonged adversity, where is the best place to begin rebuilding?

The best place to begin is not with explaining yourself to everyone else. It is with becoming internally legible to yourself again.

I encourage people to identify three things: what remains true about their values, what remains within their control, and what small action would allow them to behave in alignment with those values today. Identity is rarely restored through one dramatic declaration. It is rebuilt behaviorally, through repeated acts of congruence – keeping a commitment, regulating before responding, returning to a neglected interest, caring for the body, or communicating in a way that reflects the person one wants to be.

My nursing background reinforces this approach: stabilization precedes reconstruction. When someone is overwhelmed, demanding that they immediately rediscover their purpose can become another burden. First, we restore enough steadiness for them to observe themselves accurately. External credibility may take longer to recover, particularly when relationships or reputations have been damaged. Internal coherence must not remain dependent upon that outcome.

Research on recovery similarly emphasizes identity, meaning, hope, connection, and empowerment rather than symptom reduction alone.

You often say that certainty is the enemy of compassion. How has that belief shaped both your work and your life?

That statement is not an argument against truth, accountability, discernment, or decisive action. It is a warning against becoming prematurely certain about another human being.

In emergency nursing, decisions sometimes have to be made quickly, but responsible clinical judgment remains open to revision as new information becomes available. I believe human judgment should operate with the same humility. We naturally try to explain behavior, but people frequently overemphasize personality while underestimating situational forces. Once we become certain that we know what someone’s behavior “proves” about them, curiosity ends and compassion often ends with it.

This belief has shaped my work by teaching me to look beneath presentation without excusing harmful conduct. Compassion does not require agreement, and context does not eliminate accountability. It simply means refusing to confuse partial evidence with a complete person.

It has also shaped how I view myself. I try not to make permanent conclusions about who I am from the most distressed period of my life. We owe ourselves the same interpretive humility we hope to receive from others.

What do you hope readers remember long after they finish Shattered Bonds, Resilient Heart?

I hope readers remember that a person can be deeply affected by what has happened to them without being accurately defined by it. Prolonged conflict, estrangement, character assassination, and institutional misunderstanding can alter how someone speaks, reacts, trusts, and perceives themselves. Those changes should not automatically be mistaken for evidence that the person’s original character has disappeared.

For readers experiencing parental alienation or family estrangement, I hope the book provides recognition without making false promises. Resilience does not guarantee reunification, vindication, closure, or a particular legal outcome. It is the gradual recovery of clarity, dignity, self-trust, and purpose even when important outcomes remain beyond our control.

More broadly, I hope readers reconsider the stories they form about people during their worst chapters. Human beings are more complicated than the narratives constructed about them. What happened to us may become part of our story, but it should not be granted final authorship over our identity.

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