Sam you should grow a plant very early on and watch it grow to full maturity and apply that analogously to people's personalities. The plant is still the same plant at the beginning but through its life it takes many forms and branches off in multiple directions. It's the basic idea of growth/development.

That's just my thinking, you seem a little bent out of shape over the idea of loosing your personal integrity -- I personally think that's impossible, but that's just me -- I think when people attempt to not be themselves, their real self will leak out subconsciously. People that push imitation/acting to the extreme will eventually start to inhabit a sort of dissociative state in which they are in a trance watching their outer self from within and that becomes their reality, stress is created when this self accidentally finds its way out through subconscious ticks and natural tendencies. The entire dissociative state is self-imposed though, because people are born self-possessed but condition themselves out of it. Since it is a self-imposed prison, people can escape it and inhabit their own self once they are brave enough to venture outside of their isolation and tear down the facade.

I'm just saying, because really I think no one is ever at risk of destroying themselves -- they just are.

That's my take.