Identity Difficulties: When You’re Not Sure Who You Are Anymore

Identity is one of those things that tends to be invisible when it is stable and very loud when it is not. Most of us move through daily life without consciously asking ourselves who we are. But there are periods and experiences that interrupt that settledness. That make the question feel urgent, unclear, and not easily answered.

The simple fact that day by day we are navigating our way through our ever-changing lives, maturing through different life stages and phases, means that our identities are constantly in flux.

Identity difficulties are common and they take many different forms. What the different types of identity difficulties share is a sense of uncertainty or discontinuity about the self. A feeling that the person who you were, that you are, that you are supposed to be, or the person who you are becoming, is not quite as clear to you as you may have hoped.

The many shapes of identity difficulty

Someone questioning their gender or sexuality may be navigating an identity that they have sensed for a long time but have not yet had the language, the safety, or permission to name. The process of coming to understand and articulate that identity (to yourself and to others) is rarely straightforward or linear, and it tends to involve a significant period of uncertainty that can be isolating to navigate alone.

Someone who has recently received a neurodiversity diagnosis (ADHD, autism, or AuDHD) is often in the process of rewriting a personal history that suddenly looks different in the context of new information. The behaviours and patterns that were previously attributed to character or failure are rewritten to include something neurological. That reappraisal is valuable and often relieving. It is also a genuine identity disruption, which requires a new relationship with a self that has been understood wrongly for a long time.

Someone in midlife may find that the identity constructed over the first half of adult life (built around career, certain friendships, relationships, family, achievements, or a particular social position) no longer quite fits. The roles and relationships that provided definition are shifting. The question of who you are beyond those roles is one you may not have had occasion to ask or answer until now. And the answer may not be immediately available.

Someone navigating a significant loss (of a relationship, a role, a person, or a specific version of one’s future) often finds that the loss has reorganised their sense of self in ways that they did not anticipate. The identity needs somehow to be rebuilt, and that rebuilding takes time and deliberate attention.

For people navigating professional and social environments that were not built with them in mind (for example because of race, class, neurodiversity, or sexuality), identity is often an active and sometimes exhausting negotiation. The question of who you are tends to feel more pressing when the environment reflects back a version of you that does not quite match your own sense of yourself.

The arrival of a child (whether a first or subsequent) reorganises identity in ways that are rarely fully anticipated. The person you were before, defined by work, relationships, independence, and a particular freedom of self-determination, does not disappear. But you are required to make room for a new version of yourself whose needs, rhythms, and priorities are now fundamentally altered. For many people, particularly those who have invested heavily in a professional or creative identity, the transition to parenthood raises questions about who you are outside of those roles, and who you are allowed to become now that the landscape of your life has changed so completely.

What identity difficulty actually feels like

Identity difficulties do not always feel like an existential crisis. More often they bring with them a low-level, persistent sense that the life being lived is in some way not quite aligned, or that the self being presented to the world is not quite authentic. You may feel as if an important part of yourself has been set aside or has not (yet) been returned to. Identity difficulties can feel like flatness, or restlessness, despair, anxiety, low mood, or a quality of going through the motions without quite knowing what it is all for.

Identity difficulties can also feel like grief: for a version of the self that is changing, being let go of, newly emerging, or that has never quite felt allowed to exist in the first place.

 

What therapy can offer

Therapy offers a space to understand yourself more fully. To hold the questions of who you are with kindness, care and honesty so that something real can emerge, rather than something performed, inherited or adopted by default.

Therapy can offer a space to examine the identities that have been taken on, suppressed, left behind, or those that are newly emerging. There is no pressure or expectation for you to have everything figured out.

Identity work in therapy is rarely linear or quick. But it does tend to produce an exhale: an experience of embracing all the yous of you and giving you space to clarify and work things out. Therapy can allow you to explore the delight and any challenges linked to arriving in your fully authentic self.

If you are sitting with questions about who you are, whether they have arrived recently or have been present for a long time, therapy can provide a safe space to think out loud and explore your experiences.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.