Thus, since our selves, our personalities, our identities are social products, they are also cultural mircocosms. Their content is culture-specific and includes most of the definitions, language, values, norms, art, methods and life ways of the particular culture of our socialization process. And if our primary, and later, our secondary socialization processes contain elements from not just one but two or more cultures, then we may become multicultural persons with multicultural identities. These psychopathological diagnoses are applied to describe illnesses, extreme disorientation, impaired intellectual and emotional functioning. We don't just behave differently as, say, parents, employees, lovers, church service, party or conference participants, but in many ways we exhibit different identities, we are different persons.
Most people are also multicultural at least passively, in another sense.
Their culture may contain elements adopted from other cultures. In the United States we write with the Roman alphabet and use the Arabic numerals. But truly and actively multicultural people are usually those who have, as parts of their identities, internalized and who simultaneously maintain larger portions of the definitions, language, values, norms, art, methods and life ways of different cultures. Such multicultural identity maintenance is not without its difficulties and conflicts but it also can be the source of invaluable assets. Some of the difficulties may be caused by the differences between the two or more cultures possessed by the same individual.