Identity Crisis: What It Is and How to Work Through It

What an identity crisis actually is

This page explains what people commonly experience, what the evidence supports, and where to begin.

It is a description of an experience, not a clinical diagnosis. Most people who use the phrase are pointing at something specific. They can still do the tasks in front of them, and they have lost the short confident sentence they used to give when someone asked who they were. The work of the day is intact. The person doing it is unclear.

If your safety or daily functioning is affected, please speak to your GP or a qualified clinician. AURIS is education, and it is not treatment.

Who this page is for

It is written for people in one of these situations.

• You have left a role, a uniform or a service career and the ground still feels odd.
• You are changing career in your forties or fifties and it is not only about the job.
• A relationship, a routine or a caring role has ended and your answer changed with it.
• Nothing dramatic happened, and the sentence you used to give no longer fits.
• You support other people through changes like these and want the framework.

It is not for urgent help. If you are in crisis or your safety is at risk, contact your GP, NHS 111, or the Samaritans on 116 123.

Common signs of an identity crisis

• Describing yourself in the past tense without noticing you are doing it.
• Flatness rather than sadness, especially in the first few months.
• Difficulty answering simple questions about what you do now.
• Being busy and still feeling directionless.
• Missing people who understood you without explanation.
• Judgement that used to be automatic becoming effortful.

None of these on their own confirm anything. Together they are worth taking seriously rather than waiting out.

Why identity destabilises after a change

Social identity research offers a plain account. Haslam and colleagues (2008) argue that the groups we belong to carry real consequences for health and wellbeing, and Iyer and colleagues (2009) found, in longitudinal studies of people going through major life transitions, that adjustment was predicted by the number and compatibility of the group memberships people retained. Continuity matters. A change that requires you to drop everything about who you were is harder to carry than one that lets something come with you.

Making sense of the change matters too, though it is slower than people hope. Park (2010), reviewing the meaning-making literature, distinguishes searching for meaning from meaning actually reached, and finds that it is meaning reached that is more consistently associated with better adjustment after a stressful life event. That evidence is largely correlational, so it is a signal about direction rather than a promise.

What the evidence does, and does not, show

There is no established number of weeks an identity crisis lasts, and we will not teach one. The transition studies above are largely correlational, so they tell us that continuity and reached meaning travel with better adjustment, not that either causes it.

What is better supported is that small specific plans beat general intentions. Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006), reviewing 94 studies, found that specifying when and where an action will happen improves the chance of following through, compared with intention alone. So the useful first step is small, repeatable and attached to a part of your week that already exists.

How to work through an identity crisis, in order

AURIS is an evidence-informed framework for identity adaptation, built around five stages. The order is the point, because trying to answer who you are before you are steady enough to think clearly usually fails.

• Awareness: notice what has actually changed, without judging it.
• Understanding: understand what the old role was giving you.
• Regulation: steady yourself enough to think clearly.
• Identity: rebuild a present tense sentence about who you are now.
• Stability: make the new answer hold on ordinary days.

You can read more about how the AURIS Identity System works, about professional identity and why losing it destabilises people, or about career change at 40 or 50 and identity. If you support other people through these changes, see identity and transition coaching for practitioners.

Where to start

Introduction to AURIS is free, self-paced and takes about an hour. No payment is required to begin. It is the low-risk way to find out whether this way of thinking is useful to you before anything else.