When Kathleen’s older brother passed away, she felt the need to step in and replace him for the sake of her parents. “I need to make up for this lost child,” she says. “I need to be this person that they lost.” But doing so caused an identity crisis as her world was wrapped up in being who she thought they wanted her to be rather than being who she, or God, wanted her to be.

This week on Overcome With Auntie Anne, I’m chatting with Kathleen Cooke about her journey towards stepping into her own identity and the struggles she faced along the way. Kathleen’s experience is varied, wide, and deep, and I know it’s something all of us can relate to. I’m sure many of us have asked at one point or another, “Who am I?”

Listen to the podcast to hear the entire conversation, or keep reading below to catch some of the highlights.

Growing up in Las Vegas

There’s so much I could say about Kathleen, about who she is and what she does. For starters, she and her husband live and work in Hollywood. They co-founded and are co-partners of Cooke Media Group, a production company they started in 1991. It’s taken them all over the world, and they’ve shot in over 60 countries. Kathleen says they’ve done all sorts of different things from “super bowl spots to feature films.” She’s also a speaker, writer, and editor. And she’s on the board of the Salvation Army.

But before all of this, she was a little girl growing up in Las Vegas. Her father was recruited to be a high school basketball coach, and when they moved there in 1949, only around 2000 people lived there.

Growing up, Kathleen loved to create stories and characters and would use an old trash can filled with “thrift store finds” to do this. Her mom would even make Victorian-style clothes for her Barbie dolls so she could create stories from that time period. Kathleen believes that God was planting seeds in her DNA even then for where she’d end up in life.

She describes growing up in Las Vegas to be very much like Los Angeles (where she currently lives). “People came to Las Vegas at the time to make their fame and fortune.” In the same way, she says, “We have a lot of people come [to Los Angeles] too to win their fame and fortune; a lot of desperate people; a lot of people looking for their identity; a lot of people looking for their worth.”

The struggle with identity

Kathleen’s brother, Robbie, a year older than she, was born without a valve in his heart. It was in 1954, and so the doctors performed an experimental surgery and put a pig’s heart valve into Robbie’s heart when he was a newborn.

Because it was experimental, there was a chance the valve could stop working at any moment. “My parents never knew from one moment to the next whether or not he would live or die,” Kathleen says. And one day, it happened. When Robbie was six years old, he died on the operating table.

Kathleen says that in the 50s and 60s, when this happened, there wasn’t the support system of counselors and psychologists that we have today to deal with tragedies such as this. “You just lived through it. You just struggle[d] through it.”

And as a young girl, Kathleen didn’t go to the funeral because her parents were advised against it. So for a long time, she struggled to understand where her brother went. Ultimately, she struggled to understand death. And this death that she struggled to understand would have a significant influence on Kathleen’s identity.

After Robbie died, Kathleen remembers hearing her mother reminisce about him. And as the younger sibling, Kathleen felt the need to fill the void left by her brother’s death. “I grew up then watching and wanting to replace the brother,” she says, “this son that my parents had lost. I wanted to be that person, and so my identity then became something else from what God really wanted me to become.”

She continues, “I tried to become what my parents wanted me to become rather than who God really wanted me to become.”

This is where Kathleen’s real struggle came: having an identity based on what others thought of her rather than what God thought of her. She wanted to please her parents. Even to the point of picking a major in college that she thought they’d like. Since her dad was a teacher, she got a double degree in Special Education and Elementary Education and became a teacher for a few years just to please her parents.

But again, all of this stemmed from the need she felt to make up for the loss of her brother. She doesn’t even think her parents realized how much this death affected her identity. And in such a way, she worked to be who they wanted her to be and not who she wanted to be. “I didn’t want to disappoint them.”

When she was 12, Kathleen remembers visiting her brother’s grave. Then, she says, “I totally broke down. I finally understood what death was all about, that it was eternal … that there was an ending to this life.” But this understanding only grew her need to be her brother’s replacement and please her parents.

Playing the Part

It wasn’t until Kathleen was married that her husband “Came home one day,” she says, “and he looked at me, and he said, ‘What do you want to do? What is it that God’s called you to do?'”

Kathleen admits she was drawn to theatrical acting because it allowed her to be someone else. “I didn’t have to take on my own identity. I could become a different character, and I could explore what it would be like [to be] whatever character was being presented.”

But becoming these characters also allowed her to see who she didn’t want to become. And ultimately, she realized that she wanted to be who God had called her to be.

“I think sometimes you have to just take on who you are in Christ, forgive yourself for what’s happened in your life or … how [you] lashed out or made some choices in your life that might not have been the best … and just ask God for forgiveness, ask the people around you for forgiveness, and learn how to forgive others, because we are not perfect.”

She realized that being who God wants you to be is better than acting the way the world wants you to act. Actors often get into character and live out that character to an extent, and we can do the same thing — live in character even if who we’re living as isn’t who we really are.

But Kathleen says, “God is calling us to be ourselves, to be who we are in Christ and not act like somebody else, not take on the image of the world, not take on the wealth and the surroundings and what the world tells us … [God] wants us to be who he’s called us to be.”

Kathleen has no resentment in her heart towards her parents. She says they were just trying to protect her and give her all they could. But she believes that what she went through and the negative things she experienced struggling with her identity can be turned into a positive to help others experiencing the same things.

“If we can turn it around and look at these struggles, these sufferings as opportunities, we can actually gain so much more and bring so much joy to other people and joy to [ourselves]; restoration to ourselves even. I think it was restorative for me to understand all of these things so that I could then continue to help others.”

Being herself

Today, aside from the production company, Kathleen leads Influence Women, which focuses on challenging, inspiring, and mentoring Christian leaders in media, entertainment, and the arts. And she’s working to raise up a new media-wise generation and inspire and equip professionals working in media and entertainment to engage their community or the larger culture with a message of hope and significance.

If you’d like to learn more about Kathleen, you can find her at kathleencooke.com. She does a weekly blog there, and she has a devotional book called Hope 4 Today that I encourage you to check out. Or you can find her on social media @kathleencookeofficial (Facebook and Instagram) and @kathleencookeLA (Twitter).

Also, the nonprofit that she works with in Hollywood is Influence Lab, and you can learn more about that at influencelab.com. She also does a weekly journal for that, so check that out.