Abbie Schiller on Identity Grief: What It Is and How To Move Through It

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1:55Abbie Schiller:When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast.

2:34Bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers. Here to start conversations. because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. Today we're joined again by goal coach, author, speaker, and my very old friend, Abby Schiller. This is Abby's fourth time on the podcast, and in each of her conversations with us, she's explored different ways we move through change, whether it's processing emotions around

3:15life we like, or figuring out what's next at the end of a hard year. In this episode, she introduces the idea of identity grief, something that many of us experience but don't always have language for. It's the kind of grief that can show up when a role ends, when a chapter closes, or when the version of ourselves we've known for a long time disappears. And this time of year, graduations, transitions, the art of something new can bring that feeling into sharper focus. Abby walks us through why identity grief can feel so destabilizing, how our identity and our roles can become deeply intertwined, and what it looks like to move forward in a way that honors both what we've lost and what's still possible.

4:07Today I want to talk about identity grief, what it is, why it happens, and how to move through it in a way that actually leads you somewhere meaningful. If you've been feeling a little unmoored lately, this episode is for you. Somewhere in the last few years, maybe after your last kid became a senior in high school or when they just left for college, or after you quietly quit the marriage or went through the divorce, or after you got bored in your job or laid off or perhaps after a diagnosis or after your mother or partner died, you looked around and thought, I don't know who I am anymore. This is not what I thought it would be like.

4:54What happened? Who am I? How do I move forward? And it felt like the floor shifted out from under you. you cannot find your footing anymore. And there's a name for that. It's called identity grief. In this episode, I want to help you understand why change is so hard in the first place. We'll look at how identity grief shows up across an entire lifetime, not just midlife. You'll understand why it hits some of us harder than others. And I'll give you a real framework for moving through it, not around it, but through it. And when you're ready, I'll give you a few tips on how to lean toward what's next.

5:37Hi, I'm Abby Schiller. For the past decade as a goal coach, I've been helping women walk through the gap between who they've always been and who they want to become. Last year, I also became a certified death doula because of my own experiences around loss ever since I was young and also to help my clients process all the grief that is inherent to change that they are wanting. I've sat with people at the end of life, and I've watched what happens when we all finally let go of who we thought we were. And I've seen and experienced what happens when we choose to honor this emotional rite of passage and learn how to face forward.

6:21In case you're driving or walking or listening while doing a thousand other things, everything you need, all the tips and resources I'm going to offer are listed in the show notes. So let go of the need to hold tight to this and just listen knowing you'll click there at the end. If you felt unmoored after a major life change, if you've wondered why you just can't move on, if you've told yourself, I should be fine while something enormous feels lost, let's take that feeling seriously. Culturally, we are getting more comfortable talking about grief when someone dies. But we don't yet talk about grief when a version of ourselves dies.

7:01And that's what today is about. One of the most disorienting things about identity grief is that nobody calls it grief. You walk around feeling gutted, disconnected, crazy even, wondering what's wrong with you, telling yourself to pull it together, and you don't realize you're in a genuine mourning process. Identity grief is very real. It's the experience of loss that follows the end of a role or a life chapter or a version of yourself that you were deeply invested in. Maybe the role is shifting or completely gone. And with it goes a large part of how you've understood yourself, sometimes for decades.

7:45So allow me to share some light research. In 1969, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross outlined five emotional responses that she observed in people facing their own death. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Over time, this framework has been widely applied to grief, much more broadly than what she meant. And it was never meant to be a linear or universal process. There is no one size fits all form of grieving. But I share this as a framework for you to see what connects with your experience and then I'll build on it. So let me quickly walk through each step applied to identity loss.

8:34Denial. you might be thinking this isn't really that big of a deal I'm fine I just need to stay busy or you might be putting off thinking or processing the reality that is encroaching like I'll feel all the feelings after I drop the kid off at college but not now this is a protective coping skill anger anger at the role for consuming so much at culture for demanding it, at yourself for not seeing it sooner. You may find yourself distancing from people. You might be fighting more. Anger and grief is information. It's also one of the most suppressed emotions in women. So let that be data. One of my most common personal symptoms of grief is grumpiness.

9:24It took me years to figure this out. I'm usually a very positive person. But when I get really grumpy, I have to ask myself if I feel like my agency feels like it's been taken away. Like, do I have control over what's happening? And if no, and I'm grumpy about it, I am likely grieving something. So chronic complaining can be sometimes a signal that we feel a lack of agency or don't yet see a way forward. And I remember years ago after my dad died saying, I don't want to go to his funeral. I don't want any of this. I don't want this day to even happen at all. And I know now that that was grief showing up as anger and grumpiness and completely understandably.

10:10For identity grief, it might show up as resentment, annoyance, frustration, which of course are all different forms of pain. Bargaining. This stage might sound like if I keep volunteering at the school, I can hold on to the mom identity. If I network harder, I'm still a professional. This is the mind's attempt to negotiate with a reality that it hasn't accepted yet. Depression. The flat, heavy, dark, and purposeless feeling when the loss feels fully present. This is not clinical depression, though it can tip there. This is the grief doing its work, The weight is proportional to the investment.

10:57And acceptance. This is the most commonly misunderstood stage. It's not happiness, and it's definitely not getting over it. It's the acknowledgement that this happened or is happening. Two grief experts that I admire have added something essential on top of this. In January 2025, I was evacuated from my home during the Palisades fires. In the middle of all of that, as someone who turns to service in crisis, I recorded my first Goop podcast with my friend Claire Bidwell-Smith, a grief therapist and author of Anxiety, the Missing Stage of Grief. Claire proposes that anxiety can function like a stage of grief.

11:41The hypervigilance, the something is wrong, but I can't name it, the nervousness about the future. That's what unnamed loss looks like in the nervous system. For identity grief, where so many women haven't been able to call it grief at all, anxiety is often the first symptom. And David Kessler, who co-authored On Grief and Grieving with Kubler-Ross and later wrote Finding Meaning, the sixth stage of grief, added a stage beyond acceptance, meaning. Moving through grief isn't just about surviving it. It's about eventually making sense of it in a way that lets you carry it forward. Meaning is a pivotal part of my work as a coach as well, and we'll come back to that.

12:32But I just want to emphasize that these stages are not a checklist. They are not linear. You will not move through them in order and come out finished on the other side. You may hit depression and then circle back to anger and then briefly touch acceptance before bargaining shows up again. Grief is messy. It's human. It's brutal. And sometimes it's beautiful. And it's a process. What's also important to say for women in midlife, we have that added complication of figuring out which symptoms are from identity grief and which are from perimenopause, menopause, which by the way, can also trigger its form of identity grief.

13:12It's a lot. The two can look nearly identical from the inside. Here's what I know. When we can't name what we're feeling, we can't grieve it. And when we can't grieve it, we stay stuck. We skip it, rush through it, push it aside, distract ourselves, minimize it, numb ourselves, shame ourselves to avoid just feeling it. You might recognize this as I should be fine or other people have it so much worse. When we do that, the grief follows us into everything we do, lurking under the surface, creating a dull, unsettling feeling of unhappiness. People come to me when they're so deep in it. Often they've avoided processing a form of loss.

14:06They've developed numbing or avoiding habits like overworking or overhelping or over anything to cope with the discomfort of the initial loss. They're unhappy with a life that looks great on paper, but feels like they've lost the plot. So before we go deeper into identity grief, I want to talk about change because identity grief lives inside change and change itself is hard in ways that have nothing to do with weakness or being stuck. It's actually just neurological. The human brain is wired for familiarity. Our brains are designed to scan for threat, to prefer the known, to stay within what feels safe.

14:53Uncertainty registers as risk. Change, even chosen change, even good change, activates the same stress response as danger. Because to the nervous system, the unknown and the unsafe feel identical. This brain design kept our ancestors alive, but it also means that every major life transition, regardless of whether you wanted it, will produce a version of resistance, fear, and grief. This is your brain doing exactly what it was built to do. Some change is chosen and some change is thrust upon us. Chosen change is when you want to change your habits, grow your business, start a family, start a new chapter.

15:38The hardest change is the one that's thrown at you, that removes your agency, when the layoff comes, when the diagnosis arrives, when the relationship ends, when the kid leaves. You didn't choose these things. That loss of agency is its own grief layered on top of the identity grief. When we don't get to choose what ends or when, we also lose the assumption that life unfolds in a predictable order if we do things right. It's disorienting, to say the least. All change, whether we choose it or not, contains loss and gain. I'll tell you a personal story. When my daughter was a senior in high school, I spent the entire year anticipating the grief of her being gone.

16:27I lived the entire year noticing all of the lasts. Her last first day of school, her last birthday at home, her last soccer game, her last dinner with us at the kitchen table. I was in a kind of nostalgia for the moment I was currently living. and loss was all I could see. And it was so heavy. When she was getting ready to move across the country for college, I could not see what I was also about to gain because my brain had narrowed its entire focus to what I was losing. But four years later, I can see that what I gained was an adult relationship with my daughter that is completely different from what we had.

17:15And it's extraordinary. I got back time, time for my work and for my friends and for myself, time I hadn't even had when she was home. We even got a rescue dog, which I did not see coming and which has been one of the unexpected joys of this chapter. My brain had focused solely on the loss, but so much has been gained. So if you're deep in it, you might not be able to see it yet. But please know that gains are a-coming. When you're ready, start to notice what's also arriving alongside the loss. Your brain won't do it automatically, but it's there. I call it my practice of looking for the good.

18:00Look for the good. Identity grief can happen every time we fundamentally change. every time we go through the gap of who we've been and who we're becoming at every stage of life, scan back and see if you can pinpoint all the times it's happened for you. Think about when you graduated elementary school or high school and certainly college. Maybe you felt that panic of, oh God, now I'm an adult. my daughter is certainly going through that and so many others are about to experience it when you close out those four years you're not just leaving a school you're formerly ending your identity as a student often for the first time completely that structure that role and that ready-made community and sense of daily purpose gone and nobody calls it grief everybody calls it exciting.

19:03It's so much. If you're sending a kid off to their first job right now or watching them leave their college years behind and land in the formlessness of early adulthood, they may be in this. The disorientation of no longer knowing who you are when you're not in school, that's identity grief. I certainly felt it when I got married. I loved planning the wedding. I wanted to get married and after our wedding, I found myself awkwardly adjusting to thinking of myself in a new role as a wife. What kind of wife was I supposed to be? Who was I within this new title? I kept trying to rationalize that it was just a piece of paper, a legal commitment, but it was much deeper than I'd anticipated.

19:51There was a real adjustment in my head, in our relationship, and I noticed it in how society saw me, and that all went unnamed. So I felt identity grief, even with the change I'd chosen. I was changed. The former version of me was gone. And then there it was again when I became a mother. I remember thinking, who even am I anymore outside of keeping this baby alive? What body is this? Where am I within this new role? I felt like for at least six months I was an onion whose every layer had been laid bare and I had to physically and mentally put each layer back and they never quite fit right again.

20:40Eventually I grew into it, but it was so scary and raw and I was wholly unprepared for that experience and nobody talked about it. Midlife is when identity grief often hits loudest because there are more roles ending simultaneously. And because by that point, we've been enmeshed in them for longer. And of course, our sense of our own mortality starts to get our attention. Every major life transition, student to adult, single to partnered, childless to parent, employed to unemployed, married to divorced, mother of young kids to empty nester, employed to retired, as well as major life milestones that don't meet expectations or getting a diagnosis, leaving a home or hometown, or any time we've been grappling with a seismic shift of who we are or who we thought we would be, contain the potential for an identity death and an identity birth.

21:45Often at the same time, usually without a ceremony, usually without anyone naming or acknowledging what's actually happening, and no one bringing you a casserole.

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24:01Here are a few more subtle examples. When a goal has been achieved and we lose the pursuit of that goal, we can enter what's been called an identity crisis or a now what phase. when we've lost or moved on from a group of friends or community and neighborhood workplace in which we felt belonging. A dream that we realize won't happen, a book that isn't written, a career success level that didn't unfold, a relationship that didn't materialize, a child that didn't come. You are grieving the life you had hoped for. Retirement can be rife with identity grief because you are suddenly wondering if how you spend your time matters, which is one of the most crucial elements of a good life.

24:49A body identity shift, menopause, a health diagnosis, an injury, gender transition for both the person transitioning and the parent. All this to say that grief is real even when you choose the transition, even when you wanted the divorce, even when you raised your kid to leave. Choice and loss coexist. I hope with this episode you now know what it's called and that you feel comforted by its normalcy. Also, I hope you buy yourself the flowers. Just buy the flowers and remind yourself of your own self-love for navigating all this. So why such differences? Why does this profoundly affect some people and barely touch others?

25:34Why can one woman move through the empty nest with relative ease while another is unmoored by it? Part of it comes down to how we think about ourselves and our roles, people, or things that we're losing. The external circumstances, the layoff, the divorce, the diagnosis, those are major life moments, no doubt. but how we understand ourselves in relation to what we've lost, the meaning we make of it, that is where we have agency and power. So looking at the research, one of the biggest factors in how deeply identity grief hits is something called enmeshment. Enmeshment is when our sense of self becomes overly entwined with a person or a role or a relationship and the boundaries between them become blurred.

26:25When we think we are the role versus being in the role, our identities become enmeshed. There's a real difference between being a mother and being the mother, between having a career and being your career, between being a wife and organizing your entire identity around being a wife. Research indicates a strong correlation between identity enmeshment in a role and intense identity grief when that role is lost, which makes sense because when the role shifts or goes away, people experience a loss of self, severe identity confusion, and anxiety. Their external source of validation and meaning is gone.

27:13Now, this is not to blame a caring parent who has devoted her life to her children. This is to explain why it's so painful and disorienting. Women are socialized to build identity through relational roles. Caregiver, partner, mother, supporter, fixer, helper. The culture praises this merger. We hear she lives for her work or she's so devoted. We are often not taught to maintain a separate self, to protect a core self beneath the role, to find worth by just existing as humans, rather than in relation to what we're giving away. So many of us don't build that sense of belonging to ourselves, that identity separate from how we serve.

28:02And when the role ends, the self that was beneath, it turns out to have gone very quiet. it. One more thing about enmeshment to mention. When a long role ends, work, human, whatever, we don't just grieve the loss of the other person role or work that we lost. We grieve ourselves, the version of ourselves that we lost inside it. A woman who's been in a 20-year marriage didn't just lose a partner. She lost the person she used to be before that partnership. her opinions habits preferences sense of what she wants all of it shaped within that relationship over years when it ends the work is not just to mourn the split it's to find her way back to herself the irony the very quality that made you extraordinary in those roles your total commitment your capacity to give, to love, to sacrifice is exactly what makes the ending feel like annihilation.

29:09The more you gave, the more you cared, the more you lost yourself in it, the harder it lands. So what do we do with all of this? How do we move forward? Beyond just validating the grief and feeling it, and I do walk you through that process step-by-step in my first podcast for Goop called Processing the Emotions of Loss, and we'll link it in the show notes. People always want to know what to do. How do we navigate the challenges of building back to ourselves? Here's what I've learned from years of coaching women through major transitions and from sitting with people at the end of life. Grief is not a phase to get through.

29:54It's a practice to move through. A phase implies an end point. A practice implies something you return to, tend to, and eventually get stronger at or more familiar with. And here's the framing to think about. Moving forward from identity grief requires a shift in thinking and feeling. from loss-oriented coping, where you're focused on the pain and the past, to restoration-oriented coping, where you're building a new sense of self. Both modes are necessary, but eventually, when you're ready, you will move from what was and start being more comfortable with what is, and then building what's next.