The strange experience of rebuilding your identity after unhealthy relationships.
Recently, I watched a TV programme that I’d first watched years ago.
It was exactly the same programme. The same characters. The same relationships. The same storylines.
But somehow, I was watching a completely different show.
Things I hadn’t noticed before jumped out at me. Behaviour I might once have accepted without question looked completely different. Relationships I may once have understood one way, I now saw through an entirely different lens.
And it made me think about something I still find quite difficult to put into words.
I don’t see the world in the same way anymore.
And sometimes, when I think about the woman I used to be, it almost feels as though I’m remembering somebody else.
The breakdown that changed everything
I was in my forties when I had what I would describe as a breakdown.
I’d been through three abusive relationships and eventually reached a point where the way I’d always lived simply couldn’t continue.
Looking back, I can see how much of my life had been lived externally.
What does this person think of me?
Are they happy with me?
Do they love me?
What do they need?
How can I make this relationship work?
How can I fix things?
I didn’t realise at the time just how little I was asking a completely different set of questions:
What do I think?
What do I need?
How do I feel?
What do I want?
Is this actually okay with me?
I now understand much of my behaviour through the lens of codependency. My attention was constantly directed outwards.
And when that way of living finally collapsed, it wasn’t simply my relationships that I had to reconsider.
It was me.
When your old identity stops making sense
We often talk about healing as though we simply recover.
As though something happens to us, we do the work, and eventually we return to the person we were before.
That hasn’t been my experience.
I didn’t go backwards.
I changed.
There are psychological ideas that can help make sense of this. One is identity reconstruction — the process of rebuilding our understanding of who we are after experiences that disrupt our previous sense of self.
Another is post-traumatic growth. This doesn’t mean trauma is somehow a good thing, or that everybody should emerge from painful experiences grateful for what happened. It simply describes the fact that some people experience profound changes in their priorities, relationships, values and understanding of themselves following adversity.
There’s also a concept called transformative learning, which I find particularly interesting.
Sometimes we don’t simply learn something new.
The framework through which we understand things changes.
And once the framework changes, the same world can look completely different.
The programme hadn’t changed. I had.
Perhaps that’s why watching that old programme affected me.
I was seeing exactly the same material through a completely different internal lens.
And I realised that I do this with memories too.
Sometimes I look back at things I tolerated, things I believed, things I desperately tried to fix, and I struggle to understand the woman who made those choices.
Why didn’t she see it?
Why did that feel normal to her?
Why was she so frightened of losing people who were hurting her?
Why did she keep looking to somebody else to tell her she was enough?
But I’m increasingly aware that judging her from where I stand today isn’t fair.
She didn’t have the eyes I have now.
She hadn’t learned what I know now.
She was operating from the beliefs, wounds, coping strategies and understanding available to her at the time.
Of course she made different choices.
She was looking through a different lens.
Maybe it was an existential crisis
For a long time, I’ve simply called what happened to me a breakdown.
And perhaps it was.
But I wonder now whether there was also something existential about it.
Because underneath the emotional collapse were much bigger questions:
Who am I if I’m not trying to be what somebody else needs me to be?
Who am I if I stop measuring my worth through relationships?
What do I actually believe?
What do I want the rest of my life to look like?
When you’ve spent years looking outward, turning your attention inward can initially feel less like freedom and more like losing your bearings.
The old map has gone.
And you haven’t drawn the new one yet.
Grieving someone you don’t want to become again
There’s another part of this that I don’t think we talk about enough.
Sometimes healing involves grieving an old version of yourself.
Not because you want to go back to being her.
I don’t.
But she was still me.
She lived my life. She raised my children. She had friendships, hopes, fears and dreams. She made decisions that shaped everything that came afterwards.
There can be compassion for her alongside sadness.
And sometimes disbelief.
I can remember exactly how she thought, yet I can’t quite access that way of seeing the world anymore.
That’s a strange feeling.
Coming home doesn’t mean going backwards
Perhaps that’s why the phrase ‘coming home to yourself’ means so much to me.
I used to think healing meant finding the person I was before everything happened.
Now I don’t think it does.
Because there isn’t necessarily an untouched version of us waiting somewhere underneath all our experiences.
We are shaped by what happens to us.
Healing isn’t about erasing that.
For me, coming home has meant slowly learning to live from the inside out rather than the outside in.
To notice what I feel.
To trust what I see.
To have boundaries.
To recognise my own needs.
To understand that another person’s approval isn’t the same thing as safety, love or worth.
And perhaps most importantly, to stop abandoning myself in order to hold onto somebody else.
If you don’t recognise the old you
If you’ve been through something similar, you might occasionally look back at photographs, memories, old messages — or even an old television programme — and wonder:
How was that me?
Maybe you don’t need to choose between “I’m still the same person” and “I’m a completely different person.”
Both can contain some truth.
You are the person who lived through all of it.
And you’re also the person who now understands it differently.
There can be something incredibly disorientating about that.
But perhaps there is something beautiful in it too.
Because sometimes the clearest evidence that we’ve changed is that we can look at exactly the same thing we once looked at…
and see something entirely different.
Andrea, x