The Person We Used to Be

Reflections on identity, loss and grieving the self

By:Olga Hom

Health & Life
Science and Consciousness

In clinical practice, certain themes tend to recur with surprising regularity. Many people arrive describing persistent fatigue, a vague sense of dissatisfaction, or the unsettling feeling that, over time, something important has been lost without being able to say exactly what it is.

As the work progresses across sessions, many people eventually find themselves asking the same question.

What happened to the person I used to be?

At this point, a psychological process begins to become visible that is still rarely recognised: grieving for oneself.

Who am I really?

In psychology, when we speak of grief, we almost always refer to the death of a loved one. Within this field, relatively well-established theoretical frameworks exist. From the stages described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to William Worden’s model of the tasks of mourning, the clinical literature has long attempted to understand how individuals process loss after death.

But grief is not limited to death.

Psychologist Pauline Boss introduced the concept of ambiguous loss to describe losses that receive no official recognition, no clear rituals, and no socially recognised spaces in which the pain can be acknowledged.

The end of a marriage.
Leaving a profession that once defined a person’s identity.
The moment a chronic illness alters what the body is able to do.

These losses are real. Yet because there is no funeral and no shared social language to describe them, they often remain unnamed.

And what remains unnamed often remains unprocessed.

Grieving the self

Among these experiences there is a form of grief that is particularly rarely recognised: grief for oneself.

It is the grief of identity. Of who we once were at earlier moments in life. The person who existed before a serious illness, before a professional failure, or before the gradual accumulation of responsibilities reduced the space we once had to explore, create or simply exist.

Psychologist Dan McAdams has spent decades studying what he calls narrative identity. According to this perspective, identity is not only the set of traits we describe as the self, but also the story we construct in order to make sense of our lives.

This personal narrative provides continuity between past, present and future.

When that continuity breaks down, it becomes difficult to integrate who we once were with who we have become. The psychological cost is not merely symbolic.

The way we interpret our own story influences emotional regulation, the perception of safety or threat, and even the functioning of the nervous system.

Identity is not only who we are. It is also the story we tell about who we have been.

Identity, body and continuity

Grieving for oneself is not simply a psychological matter. It concerns the way a person reorganises identity, emotional experience and the relationship with the body.

These three dimensions do not operate independently. Understanding how identity is lost is one step. Understanding how the body carries that loss is another.

In the following articles we will explore what happens in the body when parts of our identity disappear, how personal narratives can fragment across the course of a life, and what forms of work may help individuals rebuild a sense of inner continuity after such transformations.