You got the promotion you worked toward for years. You should feel accomplished. Instead, you’re lying awake at 2 AM wondering who you are now that you’re not striving anymore.

Or your youngest just left for college, the house is quiet, and you’re thinking, “Who am I if I’m not needed in the same way?”

These aren’t just logistical transitions. They feel like identity earthquakes.

Here’s what most people don’t talk about: not all transitions hit the same way. Some people navigate job changes, relationship shifts, or role changes with relative ease. They feel sad, they adjust, they move forward.

But for others, particularly high-achievers and people-pleasers, certain transitions don’t just feel hard. They feel destabilizing in a way that’s difficult to explain. Like you’re not just changing circumstances, but losing the thread of who you actually are.

The difference isn’t about resilience or strength. It’s about how deeply you’ve tied your sense of worth to the role you’re leaving behind.

When your identity has been built on what you do, who you take care of, or how you perform, transitions that change those roles don’t just alter your daily life. They threaten the foundation of how you know yourself to be valuable.

If you’re someone who’s always been the capable one, the high-performer, the person others count on, you probably have a very specific relationship with your roles.

You’re the employee who stays late and delivers exceptional work. The parent who shows up to every game and remembers everyone’s schedules. The partner who anticipates needs and keeps everything running. The friend everyone calls in a crisis.

These aren’t just things you do. They’re proof that you matter.

Somewhere along the way, you learned that your value isn’t inherent—it’s earned. It lives in your productivity, your usefulness, your ability to meet needs and exceed expectations. You learned that being “good” means being accomplished, helpful, low-maintenance, successful. That your worth is something you have to continuously prove.

So you built your identity around the roles that let you prove it.

Then life does what life does. It changes.

Your company restructures and suddenly the job that defined you is gone. Your kids grow up and don’t need you to manage their lives anymore. You achieve the goal you spent years working toward and feel… empty. The relationship ends. You retire. Your health changes and you can’t do what you used to do.

The role that held your sense of self together is no longer available in the same way.

And this is where the real crisis begins.

Because without the role, you don’t know how to be valuable anymore. You don’t know who you are when you’re not achieving, producing, caretaking, performing.

Let’s name the fear that sits at the center of all of this:

This is exactly the kind of work that therapy is designed for—not surface-level coping strategies, but the deeper work of understanding where this pattern came from and what it would look like to build a sense of self that isn’t dependent on roles.

In therapy, we start by understanding how you learned to tie your worth to what you do rather than who you are. We explore the roles you’ve been playing and what they’ve been protecting you from feeling.

Then we work on separating your worth from your roles. This means learning to recognize when you’re seeking validation through productivity or caretaking, and building the capacity to sit with the discomfort of not performing.

Over time, you develop an internal sense of value that doesn’t collapse when circumstances change.

Here’s what becomes possible: Transitions still feel significant, but they don’t feel like you’re disappearing. You can sit in the space between roles without panicking. You can ask yourself what you want, not just what you should do next or how you can be useful.