Untangling your work from who you are

It's common for some part of your identity to be entangled with your career or J-O-B. So when you or your institution or organization changes gears, it feels like you're losing a part of yourself. Let's talk about the four phases that follow identity ruptures, .

As institutional promises fray, and downright betray many folks, the limits of those systems, the complicitness of them, become harder to ignore.

Right now, I’m hearing a lot of disorientation from betrayal, grief, and career shocks. You cared. You believed there were shared values mutually held. You felt you were living your purpose, calling, or impact through your work.

What’s going on is more than the erosion of a dream or the closing of a program or the loss of a job. It’s the collapse of you.

The collapse of who you thought you were, of who you see yourself as. It’s your identity shaken to what you thought was your core. Over the years, through my research on institutional identity formation, my own unraveling, and my work with clients navigating career grief and betrayal, I’ve come to see that identity untangles in iterative phases.

But when ruptures happen, the gap they create demands something fill the void. In career identity work, what fills that void can be intentional, or it can take over, leaving you in spirals, paralysis, and stuckness. 

Here are the four (cyclical, not linear) phases I see again and again:

The Identity Untangling Process

Phase 1: Disruption

Feels like: A heartbreak. Betrayal. A breakdown of dreams. Cognitive disorientation. Disillusionment when the veil drops.

Phase 2: Career Grief

Invites you: To process the loss of belonging and certainty. To feel the powerful emotions of rage, love, and sorrow. To ride the waves of grief in your body and emotions.

Phase 3: Differentiation

Asks questions like: What is mine? What was institutional conditioning? Where can I deinstitutionalize another layer? What was trained loyalty masquerading as identity? It’s a season of essentializing.

Phase 4: Reclaiming Authorship

Requires of you: Who am I now? Choose what stays. Release what doesn’t. It’s the time of discernment.

This month inside The Grove, we are focusing on the third phase, the differentiation and the essentializing work. But before we go there, we have to name where you might be in the process. With my clients, we’ve been naming the ruptures and processing their career grief.

Where do you see yourself in this process? Can you name your identity ruptures? Do you know where in your body your grief moves?

And if you’re not sure, or you are, consider joining us.

Because if you’re in Disruption, clarity and forward movement often feel impossible. If you’re in Grief, anger and sorrow feel destabilizing or want you to compartmentalize. If you’re in Differentiation, everything feels uncertain but strangely honest. And that raw honesty is powerful, like we talked about last month in the Fallow Grounding practice to listen into the stillness.

It all just means something is being untangled.

What parts of your identity are institutional constructs?