At a glance
Not knowing who you are usually means your own preferences have gone quiet, not that they have gone. This article looks at how that happens with no crisis to point at, what being the dependable one costs, and why a second country makes it harder to hear yourself. It offers ways to start listening again.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- It arrives without an event. Most clients who tell me they no longer know who they are cannot name a thing that went wrong, which is part of why they doubt themselves for raising it.
- Preference goes before identity. Clients lose the ability to say what they want in small matters long before they notice that anything larger has gone quiet.
- Competence hides it. The clients who can least find themselves are often the ones other people rely on, and the ones nobody worries about.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why can’t I say what I actually want?
When you cannot say what you want for dinner, you have not run out of preferences. You have run out of practice having them in front of someone.
A preference is not only a private fact. It is something you say out loud and then live with having said. If saying it has reliably cost you something, mild disappointment on someone else’s face, an argument that runs for days, the sense of being the difficult one, then the most comfortable move is to stop forming the preference at all. Not to hide it. To not have it. That is a skill, and people get good at it.
So when someone asks what you want, there is a gap where the answer used to be, and you fill it by reading what is wanted of you. From outside this looks easy-going. From inside it is an absence you cannot explain to anyone, because nothing is wrong and you are not unhappy in any way you could point at. You end up suspecting you are making a fuss about nothing, which keeps you quiet for another year.
Why has this happened with nothing obviously wrong?
Losing a clear sense of yourself is usually gradual, and gradual change leaves nothing to grieve.
Clients often arrive apologising for having no reason. There was no bereavement, no betrayal, no breakdown. There were years of sensible decisions, each one defensible, which together removed the parts of life where you were the one choosing. A job taken for the money. A city chosen for someone else’s work. A friendship kept up because ending it would be unkind. None of that is a crisis. It is a slow handing over of small decisions, and it is almost invisible while it happens.
Research on how clearly people can describe themselves finds that a vaguer sense of self sits alongside low mood and anxiety, and that it is not a fixed trait.1 The review gathering that evidence is careful: most of the studies measured people at a single point in time, so which comes first is unsettled, and the strongest forward-looking findings come from younger samples. I read it as company for something I see rather than proof of it. The vagueness is not who you are. It tends to lift in the order it arrived, smallest preferences first.
Did I lose myself by being the dependable one?
Being the person everyone relies on is a real achievement, and it is also the most rewarded way to disappear.
If you are the one who holds things together, your attention lives outward by default. You know what your partner needs before it is said, which colleague is struggling, which friend to check on. That attention is genuine and it is not the problem. The problem is that it has nowhere to turn around. Nobody asks what you need, partly because you have made that unnecessary, and partly because you answer so quickly for everyone else that the question never reaches you.
You do not want to stop caring for the people you care for. You also cannot keep being the only person in the room who is not in it. Those two things do not cancel each other out, and the way through is rarely caring less. It is usually that someone close to you has no idea any of this is going on, because you have never said it, because you were not sure you were allowed to want anything in particular.
Why is it worse since I moved to Copenhagen?
Here, nobody remembers who you were, and the version of you they met is the one that fitted.
Living abroad removes most of the mirrors. The people who knew you at 22, who would say that is not like you, are in another time zone and hear an edited version on a video call. In a second language you say the simpler thing rather than the exact thing, many times a day, and the simpler thing rarely carries you in it. Clients often tell me that social life here asks for a certain evenness, which is restful and gives very little back in the way of reaction. You cannot tell whether you are being yourself if nothing comes back.
If you also came for someone else’s job or someone else’s family, there is a further layer worth separating out. Your days are arranged around a decision that was not fully yours, and that is a practical arrangement, which can be renegotiated. It is not the same question as who you are, though it feels identical from the inside. The loss of identity that follows a move abroad often turns out to be a loss of standing and of witnesses, which is a different problem with different solutions.
What helps when I don’t know who I am any more?
Start where the stakes are low enough that being wrong about yourself costs nothing. Not a search for the real you. Something much smaller and more repeatable.
- Answer the small questions first. What you want to eat, which way to walk home, whether you actually want to go. Say it out loud, even if you then do the other thing.
- Notice the flinch. The half second before you say it does not matter to me is information. Something was there, and it withdrew.
- Follow what you resent. Resentment usually marks a preference you never said out loud, arriving late and sideways.
- Keep one thing nobody else benefits from. Not a project and not self-improvement. Something that would be pointless to explain.
- Say one true sentence to one person. Not the whole account. One sentence, to someone who will still be there afterwards.
These are starting points rather than a method, and in some situations they are not enough. If the flatness is constant, if you have felt almost nothing for weeks at a time, or if the not knowing started with one event you can name, then what you are carrying may be closer to depression or to grief than to an unused preference, and small experiments will not reach it. If you are in a relationship where saying what you want has been met with punishment rather than disappointment, the question is not what your preferences are. It is what happens when you voice them, and that is not something to practise alone.
Most of what I do with this is slow and specific. We take an ordinary moment from your week, the one where you said it was fine, and we find out what was there instead. The answer is usually particular to you and not very grand, and it is yours, which is the part that matters.
Questions people ask
Is this worth starting therapy for, when nothing is actually wrong?
Yes, and not being able to say what is wrong is one of the better reasons to come. Much of the early work is finding language for something you have so far only felt.
What would we actually do in the sessions?
We follow what you want and what stops you saying it, using ordinary situations from your week. It is more concrete than it sounds, and it usually begins with very small things.
What if I get there and have nothing to say?
That is a normal way to begin, and working with it is my job rather than yours. Having no words yet is not the same as having nothing.
Which kind of therapy suits this?
Work that follows your immediate experience suits it better than work aimed at correcting your thoughts. I draw on psychosynthesis and on the British school of object relations, which both treat the parts of you that went quiet as the subject rather than the obstacle.
Should I wait until I am clearer about what I want from it?
No, because getting clearer is the work and not the entry requirement. Arriving uncertain is the ordinary way people start.
If you have lost track of who you are, I offer time and space to find your way back in identity crisis therapy.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
