Why Grief Can Make Us Feel Like a Different Person

Dockside, Painting by James Gummerson, 1970’s

After a significant loss, people may feel unfamiliar to themselves, as though their personality, priorities, reactions, or sense of identity have changed. Activities that once felt meaningful or important may seem empty, relationships may feel different, your self may feel different, and there can be a different understanding of the world. From a psychodynamic perspective, this can happen because important relationships can often become deeply embedded into the way individuals understand themselves.

When someone important is lost, people are not only grieving the person or relationship itself but may also be grieving the version of themselves that existed within that relationship. Different relationships can bring forward particular parts of the self, such as feeling cared for, needed, understood, protected, admired, or connected. When that relationship is no longer present in the same way, individuals may temporarily feel as though part of their own identity has disappeared with it.

Grief can also bring previously contained emotions and conflicts out. In addition to sadness, people may experience anger, guilt, relief, resentment, longing, fear, or even numbness. These emotions can sometimes feel confusing, particularly when they do not match what someone believes grief is supposed to look like. Psychodynamic thinking recognizes that relationships are rarely emotionally simple, and grief may involve mourning both what was loved and what was difficult, disappointing, hurtful or unresolved.

Please Don’t Leave, Painting by Mia Bergeron, 2022

Loss can also change how individuals experience other relationships and the future. Some may become more afraid of separation, more protective of the people around them, or more hesitant to depend on others, and others may withdraw, reassess their priorities, or begin questioning long-held assumptions about themselves and their lives. These changes do not necessarily mean that someone has permanently become a different person; they may reflect the psychological process of trying to reorganize a sense of self after an important attachment has been altered or lost.

In psychodynamic psychotherapy, the patient can explore not only the loss itself, but also what the relationship represented emotionally and how its absence has affected their sense of identity. Therapy may provide space to understand complicated feelings, unresolved aspects of the relationship, and changes in how the patient now experiences themselves and others. Over time, the goal of therapy would be to integrate the experience of grief into a developing sense of self while maintaining an internal connection to what the relationship meant, instead of making the patient to return to exactly who the patient was before the loss.