Before I ever took an assessment, before I ever sat with a StrengthsFinder or a personality profile or a values inventory – the work had already started. It just didn’t look like work yet. It looked like a feeling I couldn’t shake.
I was in my early thirties. Freshly divorced. Tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. And carrying something I could only describe as fraudulency – this low-grade, persistent sense that what was on the outside didn’t match what was on the inside. That I was performing a version of myself I hadn’t consciously chosen.
I didn’t know where it came from. I just knew I was done, not knowing.
So I started digging. And the very first thing I found – the first puzzle piece that clicked into place – wasn’t a test result or a framework or a coaching session.
It was my name.
Blanche
My birth certificate says Blanche Coutu.
Not Lysa. Not Lisa. Blanche – my grandmother’s name. My mother’s mother.
My mom was eighteen when she was pregnant with me. Three months into that pregnancy, her mother died in a car accident. By the time I arrived, her father had already remarried, and there were other painful things happening in that home that I came to understand much later – after a lot of reading, a lot of sitting with hard truths, and eventually, The Body Keeps the Score, which helped me understand why people make the choices they make when they’re surviving.
My mom gave birth alone. Completely alone. She was terrified that if she listed a father on my birth certificate, that person would have a legal claim on me. So she didn’t. And she gave me her mother’s name — the woman she had just lost.
That act was love. Pure, protective, grief-soaked love.
But when she brought me home, my aunt took one look and said: “You can’t call her Blanche. That’s an old-fashioned name.”
My mom thought for a moment and said: “I really love the name, Lisa. But I want to spell it with a y.”
And so from two days old, I was Lysa.
The Drift
I went to school as Lysa… mostly…
Sometimes it was spelled with an i.
Sometimes a y.
When my daddy – the man who raised me, who married my mom when I was two – came into the picture, I became Lysa Coulombe. No adoption papers were ever filed. It was just what I was called while they were married.
They divorced when I was twelve. And the ambiguity continued.
In grade school, you don’t pay attention to paperwork. You’re just a kid with a name. It’s not until things have to be accurate – graduation certificates, driver’s licenses, official documents – that the paper trail catches up with you.
And when it did, I found myself staring at a name that didn’t feel like mine.
I met my biological father at sixteen. He’s Italian. That’s a whole other chapter. But even that – even adding another identity layer to the mix – didn’t resolve the core thing. The core thing was simpler and stranger than any of that.
Even my name wasn’t my own.
The Moment
I was in my early thirties when I finally stopped and looked at the full picture. The name on the birth certificate nobody used. The name I’d been called since I was two days old, spelled however anyone felt like spelling it. The married name I’d taken and then lost. The identity I’d been assembling from borrowed pieces for my entire life.
And something clicked.
Not dramatically. Not like a lightning bolt. More like a puzzle piece sliding into place after you’ve been holding it for years, turning it over and over, not understanding why it wouldn’t fit, and then suddenly it does.
Oh. That’s where it started. Your name.
The fraudulency I’d been carrying wasn’t a character flaw. It wasn’t a sign that something was broken in me. It was a reasonable response to a lifetime of identity that had never quite been fully, officially, unambiguously mine.
My sisters and brothers all have their names on their paperwork. Accurate, consistent, theirs.
I was the one born into a moment of grief and fear and love and chaos and named for a woman I never met, then renamed two days later, then renamed again at two, then again when the marriage ended.
The minute I saw it clearly, I felt something release.
And I wanted more of that feeling.
What I Did With It
When I got married and became Lysa Greer, something settled. And even when things came apart for a time, I didn’t hesitate for a second about the name: I’m keeping Greer. My children are Greer. I am a Greer. That’s what it is.
For the first time, I chose my name. And I kept it – through everything.
I still carry a Canadian passport with Blanche on it. Sometimes documents list me as Blanche Greer with no mention of Lysa at all. It’s something I genuinely need to sort out – to have my actual name reflected in my actual paperwork, finally, after all these years. That work is still unfinished (because name changes as a dual citizen is, well, a lot of paperwork and messy).
But the internal work? That one cracked open something I couldn’t close back up even if I wanted to.
There’s something the Bible understood long before psychology caught up: names matter. Deeply, cosmically, personally. There are entire chapters dedicated to naming – to lineage, to meaning, to what a name carries forward and what it leaves behind. The naming of a person is never incidental.
And the irony that is absolutely not lost on me: my primary language is words. It’s how I feel seen, how I give and receive, how I make sense of the world. Words are my love language, my appreciation language, my native tongue.
And my own name wasn’t even mine.
Why This Comes First
I’m writing the Assessment Series to share what I’ve learned from the tools I use – Myers-Briggs, CliftonStrengths, the Values Bridge, all of it. And I’ll get there. But I couldn’t start with a test result. Because the assessments didn’t start the journey.
This did.
The moment I looked at the story of my name and stopped running from it – that’s when the excavation truly began. Every assessment I’ve taken since has been another layer of the same work: figuring out who I actually am, beneath the borrowed pieces, beneath the roles and the names and the versions of myself I stepped into without fully choosing.
If any of this resonates – if you’ve ever carried something you couldn’t name, something that felt like fraudulency without a clear source – I want you to know that the work is worth it.
The puzzle piece moment is real. And once you feel it, you’ll want more of it too.
