What if your career identity was survival mode?

Sometimes the identities we build at work are really survival strategies. Differentiation is the phase where you start separating who you are from what the institution rewarded.

Differentiation is the most disorienting phase of career identity untangling.

It’s when you begin to ask:

What parts of me were shaped by institutional reward systems?

What parts were adaptations to my own beliefs and behaviors that I internalized?

What parts are actually mine based on my core values and impact work?

This is where essentializing becomes a practice of deinstitutionalizing your identity as separate and more authentic than your career and J-O-B roles. Essentializing is choosing depth over breadth in response to the wisdom of changing seasons. It’s true deep wisdom that is born out of what your career grief teaches you, which is why you can't emotionally or spiritually bypass this phase.

Ten years ago, I stepped into an office as a new therapy client. I was on the cusp, unknowingly, of the physical breakdown that would begin my great unraveling.

In hindsight, that injury of my neck’s herniated discs (caused by a hefty dose of chronic stress living in my shoulders) planted a seed. I can see 2016 as the moment that was a seed sowing for my career grief and deinstitutionalizing work. It was the injury that has had me pleading with you ever since: please do not be 2016 Me!

At that first meeting, my new therapist said, “Tell me about yourself.”

I immediately launched into, well, I’m a professor…I study higher education and teach graduate students…I’m a mom to a toddler…

“No, Tamara, tell me about YOU. Not your job and roles.”

What? Deer in headlights. Who?

The physical pain in that breakdown that came soon after that appointment meant I couldn’t bullshit myself anymore. The veils dropped. I had to essentialize.

I had very limited capacities (of mind and body), so I had to become hyper-focused rather than hustle-focused. And that meant identities had to drop. Ouch.

Being supermom, juggling the career ladder, the always-accessible graduate student advisor, the supportive listening colleague, the enabling do-it-for-you partner, all the identities that had been rewarded. No boundaries and no true understanding of myself got all tangled up AS my career identity.

These identities were about survival. Previous unhealthy, toxic relationships prepped me in maladaptive survival. Putting all these identities to work for my professional J-O-B was rewarded. Higher education's ‘do more with less’ culture counts on you being comfortable in toxicity that erodes your true sense of self. It demands your overing and you over because it’s who you are (or so you think).

Notice which identities for you might be survival strategies.

Differentiation is tender work. It’s also decisive work that requires embodied action.

It’s the phase where you stop trying to fix the institution and start asking who you are beyond it. This is the work I do with clients navigating career grief, identity rupture, and institutional untangling.

If you’re ready to move from reflection into intentional untangling or if you’ve been living and working in survival mode, let’s talk. Set up a consultation call. You don’t have to break down as many times as I did. There are other ways forward.