Losing Yourself: Definition & Examples

By Kelsey Schultz, Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Though our identities are the center of our existence, they are not as assured as we might hope. Learn more about what it means to lose yourself, what causes it, and how to respond.
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Our identities are dynamic and fluid. It’s normal and healthy for identities to evolve with age, circumstance, and changing interests. Sometimes, however, our identities change without our control or awareness. The concept we formerly held of ourselves based on our interests, relationships, values, and behaviors becomes incoherent and incompatible with our observations of ourselves. The object of the declarative “I am” becomes vague and ill-defined (“Am I?”). In other words, we lose ourselves. 
When you lose yourself you might feel disconnected from your behaviors, confused by your reflections on reality, or like you don’t understand your motivations. Losing yourself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, sometimes people seek to lose themselves on purpose, and losing yourself can be a profoundly meaningful experience, but only when you find yourself again. If you want to grow in response to losing yourself, it is critical that you don’t stay lost. Reconnecting with ourselves is easier when we understand how and why we’ve lost our sense of self. Let’s talk about what it means to lose ourselves and some common examples of losing ourselves so we can find ourselves more readily in the future.

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What Is Losing Yourself? (A Definition)

Before we can get into what it means to lose yourself, we need to clarify what we mean by ‘yourself’. The self is a cryptic term that we use to refer to multiple facets of our existence as a human. Taking a high-level approach to understanding the term, ‘self’ can be used to refer to two experiential themes : (1) Our bodily self that is the center of our first-hand experience of the world, and (2) our narrative self that weaves together our history, experiences, interests, social roles, relationships, values, and aspirations into a fluid but coherent identity (Milliere, 2017).

Each of these elements around which our identities are organized provides a set of behavioral standards and expectations, a sort of framework that helps shape our actions and perceptions (Eifert et al., 2015). When we lose one of our pillars of self we’re left with a void in our identity and buckling of the structure that mediated our interactions with the world. This leaves us feeling distant or disconnected from ourselves—like we’re losing ourselves.

Causes of Losing Yourself

The sense that you are losing yourself is caused by anything that erodes, severs, or extinguishes any pillars of your identity. For example, someone might feel lost following retirement from a meaningful career (e.g., I identify as a scientist and I stop doing science, who am I?). Changes in relationships can also induce a loss of self. For example, if part of my identity is being a spouse and I get divorced, I might feel like I don’t know who I am or how I am supposed to move through the world.

Examples of Losing Yourself

There are many situations in which we can lose ourselves. Let’s take a look at a few common examples: relationships, service to others, illness, and grief.

Losing Yourself in a Relationship

Being part of an intimate relationship is accompanied by the assumption of a social role such as companion, partner, or spouse. Embedded in a social role are the standards, meanings, and expectations associated with it, which ultimately contribute to identity construction (Eifert et al., 2015). When you lose yourself in a relationship, often it’s because the contribution your role in the relationship makes to your identity is disproportionate to the contribution of all the other things that make you who you are.  In other words, we lose ourselves when we allow someone else to determine who we are (even when that someone else is someone we love very much).

Losing yourself in a relationship isn’t necessarily a reflection of an unhealthy relationship. In fact, this process can be catalyzed entirely by good intentions. For example, making sacrifices and compromises to accommodate your partner is theoretically an admirable act of love and commitment, but we can easily lose ourselves if we don’t know when to stop. Renowned psychotherapist, Esther Perel, argues that the well-intentioned desire to be everything for someone is also a risk to an independent identity (Perel, 2022):  

“As almost all of our communal institutions give way to a heightened sense of individualism, we look more frequently to our partner to provide the emotional and physical resources that a village or community used to provide. Is it any wonder that, tied up in relying on a partner for compassion, reassurance, sexual excitement, financial partnership, etc. that we end up looking to them for identity or, even worse, for self-worth?”
For more on losing yourself in a relationship, check out these videos:

Video: Codependency: Do You Lose Yourself in a Relationship?

Video: How To Love Without Losing Yourself

Losing Yourself in the Service of Others

While many forms of service can create a loss of self, disruptions in the sense of self are a particularly prevalent issue among informal caregivers and parents.

Caregivers​
Informal caregivers are usually family members or friends that help someone with their activities of daily living such as cooking, bathing, dressing, mobility, etc. Researchers suggest that the role of caregiver can consume the majority of our time, leaving little opportunity to engage in activities or behaviors that may have once been a part of our identity, which ultimately disrupts our sense of self.  In the instance of children caring for their parents, the shifting of roles from child to caregiver can also have an impact on identity (Eifert et al., 2015).

Parents
Parents are also especially prone to feeling like they have lost themselves. This may not be terribly surprising considering the responsibilities of a parent. Our kids become our whole world, we organize every facet of our lives around their happiness and well-being, and that’s beautiful, but it can also distance us from ourselves in a way that is more of a loss than a sacrifice. Time is tragically finite and it is all too easy to spend all of it on our children, but the less time we spend reaffirming the pieces of our identity with our actions, the more our identities crumble.

Losing Yourself During Illness

Illness can decimate our sense of self by limiting our ability to engage in activities by which we define ourselves, diminishing our autonomy over our lives and our future, and making us feel unsafe in our bodies. Being incapacitated by illness and needing help can make us feel like a burden which can challenge our previously held conception of ourselves as capable and independent as well as dramatically change our roles in our social relationships. Illness also commonly creates financial crises and family strain, which negatively impact self-esteem and self-concept (Charmaz, 1983).

Losing Yourself After Loss

The loss of a loved one can have a profound impact on our identities. When we lose someone who was central to our lives, we lose a piece of our relational identity or the part of our identity that is organized around our relationships with others. The space that once held our identity as parent, child, sibling, or friend becomes vacant when we can no longer fill the role associated with that identity.

The psychological pain, or grief, that accompanies loss can also significantly affect our self-concept. Grief can be debilitating, leading us to perform poorly or stop engaging entirely in activities that were once a central part of our personal narrative. It can also diminish our capacity to care for ourselves and leave us needing assistance, which often disrupts our sense of self. Additionally, grief can change our temperament and perspectives so dramatically that we feel unrecognizable to ourselves.

Am I Losing Myself?

It can be hard to tell the difference between healthy changes to your identity that occur as a function of age and losing who you are. Sometimes losing yourself happens suddenly and dramatically, other times it is a gradual, more subtle process. If you feel like you might be losing yourself but aren’t sure, here are a few signs to look out for:
  • Not giving yourself enough alone time
  • Negative self-talk
  • Not taking care of yourself
  • Seeking approval from others
  • Losing interest in things you used to care about
  • Not knowing what your preferences and needs are
  • Feeling powerless

How to Not Lose Yourself

Though sometimes we need to allow our identities to evolve with our ever-changing circumstances, we can try to avoid losing connection to them. Here are a few ways you can try to avoid losing yourself:

Losing Yourself to Find Yourself

We get so wrapped up in our identities, in our desire to be accepted by those around us and to live up to our own standards that in the morass of expectations we lose touch with our true nature. The burden of the narrative we construct for ourselves and constantly seek to maintain can obscure what it is that actually moves us, fulfills us, and brings us to life.
​
This is where we might benefit from losing ourselves for a little bit. If we temporarily shed our narrative identity, we might be able to get back in touch with our authentic selves. Researchers and clinicians refer to the shedding of our narrative self as ego dissolution. One way that people commonly experience ego dissolution is through psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, or DMT. Sufficient doses of these and similar drugs will change the way the brain processes information related to ourselves, known as self-referential processing. Ego dissolution occurs when the brain networks that support self-referential processing are temporarily offline (Lebedev et al., 2015). When the narrative self is quiet, we are left with pure subjective experience—what might be considered our true, authentic self.

In studies that explored the effect of psychedelics administered in a therapeutic context, participants often reported experiencing a loss of subjective self-identity, unity with the universe, loss of boundaries between self and the environment, and feeling unreal or detached from their mental processes (Milliere, 2017). Importantly, research also shows that time spent in this egoless state is associated with a stronger sense of self, greater self-compassion, and reductions in depression and anxiety in the days and weeks after the experience of ego dissolution (Wellander, 2022).

Quotes on Losing Yourself

  • “A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.”  Alan W. Watts
  • “When you lose touch with yourself you lose yourself in the world.” – Eckhart Tolle
  • “One of the greatest tragedies is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.” – K.L Toth
  • “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” – Ernest Hemingway
  • “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison
  • “Once you don’t have freedom and you’re obliged to do many things you don’t want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be – and you can lose yourself.” – Ingrid Betancourt
  • “The surest way to lose your self-worth is by trying to find it through the eyes of others.” Becca Lee

Articles Related to Losing Yourself

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:​​​

Books Related to Losing Yourself​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Losing Yourself

Losing yourself can be a formative experience, but it can also be frightening and insidious. Throughout our lives, we will encounter limitless opportunities to lose touch with ourselves, so it is important that we understand when our sense of self might be vulnerable, like when we’re in a relationship, after becoming a parent or caregiver, during illness, and after loss. Being aware of the vulnerabilities in our identity can help us protect ourselves from losing it and can help us regain it in times when we can’t maintain it. Losing yourself can take a lot of different forms and can be caused by many different factors and life events, but there is always a way to find yourself again.

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