It's Okay Not to Recognize Yourself Right Now. Illinois Therapist on Perimenopause & Identity.

Apr 9

Perimenopause can bring more than physical changes. You may find yourself questioning roles, relationships, and a life you spent years building. That can feel unsettling, especially when you still care about the people and choices in that life. You can take those questions seriously without having to decide everything at once.

By Michaela Kozlik, LCPC · Therapist for women in midlife & perimenopause, Illinois

You are so tired of yourself.

Not in a self-pity way, but maybe in a deeper, more unsettling way. You're tired of performing, of showing up as the version of yourself that everyone around you recognizes... Tired of saying you're fine when you're not. And maybe you're feeling the loneliness of living a life that looks right from the outside and feels hollow or confusing from the inside.

You don't know when it started. There was no single moment. All of this just crept in...

The Self You Built Is Supposed to Stay

You expected that the identity you spend your 20s and 30s constructing to stay constant and consistent.

You work so hard to become someone. To figure out what you stand for, what you're good at, what your life is going to look like. And for a while that identity holds. It carries you. It gives you a sense of solid ground underneath your feet.

Then perimenopause arrives.

And it doesn't announce itself the way you'd expect. It doesn't tap you on the shoulder and say hey, I'm about to completely dismantle your sense of self, just so you know. It's much sneakier than that. And slowly the self you built starts to feel like it doesn't quite fit anymore.

What Does an Identity Shift During Perimenopause Feel Like?

It’s a strange feeling. You’re doing your life the way you always have, but lately it doesn’t feel quite like yours.

Maybe it’s like putting on a coat you’ve worn for twenty years and suddenly thinking, Wait. Do I even like this coat? You can’t remember choosing it. You’re just tired of wearing it.

You go to work. You talk to people. You say what you’re supposed to say. But somewhere in the middle of an ordinary day, you catch yourself thinking, How did I get here?

And sometimes you’re angry, really angry. At the dishes, at the noise, at being asked for one more thing. Then you feel guilty because you know it’s bigger than that.

Underneath it all, there’s a question you keep coming back to:

Is this who I am? Or is this who I became because everyone needed me to be her?

What We Don't Say Out Loud

We don't say: I look at my life and I don't know if I chose it.
We don't say: I love the people in my life and I am also, somewhere very deep down, desperate for something that is just mine.

We don't say: I am so tired of being who everyone needs me to be that I sometimes fantasize about disappearing entirely.

We don't say: I used to know what I wanted. I don't anymore. And I'm not sure I ever really did.

We don't say any of this because we're afraid of what it means. That wanting something different makes us ungrateful, or that not knowing who we are makes us unstable. And that the rage, grief, and restlessness mean something is fundamentally broken.

It doesn't.

It means you're human. It means you're in perimenopause. It means something real and significant is happening in your body and your brain and your soul, and it deserves to be spoken out loud.

What's Actually Happening and Why It Makes Sense

Here's what I know as a therapist, and what I had (and still have) to remind myself of when it was (is still) happening to me:

Perimenopause is a huge biological, psychological, spiritual transition. As I explain in You're Not Losing Your Mind. You're in Perimenopause. the hormonal shifts directly affect the brain's emotional processing, stress response, and capacity for the kind of suppression and compartmentalization that most of us have relied on for decades.

In other words: perimenopause makes it harder to keep the lid on.

All the questions you set aside because there was no time, the grief you moved around rather than through, and all the ways you made yourself smaller or more palatable or more manageable for the people around you...

Perimenopause brings them back because your system, you, your soul knows that you cannot carry this into the next chapter of your life.

And if underneath all of this there's old trauma adding to the weight, that's something I wrote about in When the Past Comes Back: Trauma Resurfacing During Perimenopause. The two are more connected than most people realize.

Can Perimenopause Change How You See Yourself?

It has changed how I see myself.

For years, I was the person who could handle things, be useful, and ask for very little. During perimenopause, I started to notice how much effort it took to keep being that person. At first, I thought something was wrong because parts of my life that used to feel familiar no longer felt comfortable.

I’m still figuring out what that means. I speak up more often now. I notice when I’m about to say “it’s fine” just to avoid a difficult conversation. And I’m starting to ask what I want before I agree to what someone else needs.

That doesn’t make every choice clear. Some days I miss how certain I used to feel. But I’m learning that I can question an old version of myself without having to know exactly who I’m becoming.

You Are Finding Yourself

I know that doesn't feel true when you're in it. I know it feels like loss because it is loss, real and significant loss, and it deserves to be grieved. But the self that's emerging from this is not smaller than the one that came before. It's actually more honest. More yours.

The confusion you're feeling is a sign that you are between versions of yourself where the old one has become too small and the new one hasn't fully shown up yet. That in-between place is hard and disorienting and lonely in a way that is really hard to describe.

It's also, I promise you, temporary. And it is also the beginning of something you will one day be grateful for.

You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone, Even When You Think You Do

Maybe you’re used to sorting things out by yourself. But when your life still looks familiar and you don’t feel quite at home in it, it helps to have someone sit with you while you find the words for what’s changing.

That’s part of what we can do in therapy. And if you want more time to stay with these questions, a therapy intensivegives us room to slow down and explore them together.

I know how personal this can feel. I’ve asked some of these questions in my own life, too. If you’d like to tell me what’s been happening for you, schedule a free consultation. We can talk about what kind of support would feel right.

Let's Talk

📞 773-343-5005 🌐 inpsychotherapy.com 📧 Michaela@inpsychotherapy.com

Michaela Kozlik, LCPC — Licensed therapist in Illinois specializing in trauma, anxiety, burnout, and nervous system regulation for women in perimenopause and midlife transitions. Offering individual therapy and therapy intensives virtually throughout Illinois and in person in the Chicagoland area.

FAQ: Perimenopause, Identity Confusion & Therapy in Chicago & Chicagoland Illinois

Is it normal to feel like I don't know who I am during perimenopause?

Yes. The identity confusion of perimenopause is one of the most common and least talked about experiences of this transition. The hormonal shifts of perimenopause directly affect the brain's emotional processing. When that lid comes off, and it almost always does, the questions that surface are real and they deserve real attention.

I have a good life. So why does it feel like it doesn't fit anymore?

This is one of the most painful and confusing parts of perimenopause identity confusion. The honest answer is that a life can be good and still not be fully yours. Many of us built our lives around what was expected, what felt safe, what was needed from us before we were old enough or free enough to ask what we actually wanted. Perimenopause has a way of showing us the difference between a life that looks right and a life that feels right.

I feel like I'm watching my life from outside myself. Is that part of this?

Yes. That sense of watching yourself from somewhere just outside your own body or going through the motions is incredibly common and is directly connected to what is happening in the brain. When the nervous system is under significant load, dissociation and depersonalization can show up as a protective response. I know it's disorienting and scary when you don't understand what's causing it. Understanding the context, which I write about in You're Not Losing Your Mind. You're in Perimenopause. can bring some relief. And it is absolutely something that therapy can help with directly.

I feel a rage I can't explain. Is something wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you. The rage that surfaces during perimenopause is one of the most honest things your body has ever produced and sometimes one of the most scary exactly because we are so deeply conditioned as women to not feel it and show it. What I have found, both in my own experience and in my work with women, is that the perimenopause rage is almost always grief underneath. Grief for how long you have been holding everything together. Grief for the wants and needs and truths that got set aside over decades of managing and accommodating and making yourself smaller. The rage is not the problem. The rage is the signal, and it deserves to be heard.

I'm afraid that if I start asking who I really am, my whole life will fall apart.

This fear makes complete sense and I want to take it seriously rather than brush past it. Here is what I can tell you from years of doing this work with women: good therapy does not blow your life up. It helps you see your life more clearly.... what's working, what's not, and what you actually want to do about it. You are always in the driver's seat. Nothing changes without your full agency and intention.

What therapy does is give you a safe and contained space to ask the questions that have been building, so that you can make conscious, intentional choices about your life. Clarity is not destruction. It's the beginning of actually choosing your life rather than just living the one that accumulated around you.

What's the difference between a midlife identity crisis and depression?

They can look very similar on the surface and they very often coexist, especially during perimenopause. Low mood, loss of meaning, isolation, loneliness, flatness, a sense that nothing fits can be symptoms of depression, and they can also be the experience of an identity in genuine transition. The important thing is that both deserve attention and neither should be treated in isolation. Treating depression without addressing the underlying identity shift often produces incomplete and frustrating results because the mood and the meaning-making are deeply connected. A thorough assessment is always part of what we do together early in the work.

Is the identity confusion of perimenopause connected to trauma?

For many women, yes. Perimenopause doesn't create identity confusion out of thin air. It surfaces what was already there like the ways you learned to be in the world in response to what happened to you earlier in your life. The identity you built was partly authentic and partly built around survival, around keeping yourself safe, around becoming who you needed to be in the environments you grew up in. Perimenopause makes those survival identities harder to maintain. And for women who carry unresolved trauma, that process can be particularly intense. I wrote about this in depth in When the Past Comes Back: Trauma Resurfacing During Perimenopause, If this resonates, that article will feel important to you.

I feel so alone in this, like nobody around me understands.

The loneliness of perimenopause is real and it has a particular quality that is different from regular loneliness. It is the loneliness of carrying our internal experience that has no adequate language in most of the conversations happening around you. The culture doesn't create a lot of space for women to say out loud: I don't know who I am and I need help. You are allowed to say that. And you deserve a space where someone actually hears it without trying to fix it, minimize it, or rush you through it.

Why does a therapy intensive make sense for identity work specifically?

Because identity work takes time, in a therapy intensive, we have hours of uninterrupted space to actually go somewhere. That territory requires time and safety to enter, and a therapy intensive provides both. Many of my clients describe leaving an intensive with a clarity about themselves that they haven't felt in years, or possibly ever.

I don't have hours to spend in therapy. I can barely manage my regular life right now.

I hear this and I want to reframe it gently. A therapy intensive is not hours added on top of an already impossible schedule. It is a concentrated investment focused block of time that often does what months of weekly sessions cannot. Many clients find that a single half-day or full-day intensive moves things further than a year of weekly appointments. It is not more time, it's more focused, more efficient, more likely to create the kind of real movement that actually changes how you feel day to day. And many women find that after an intensive, everything else in their life gets easier.

How do I know if I'm ready for this kind of work?

Readiness rarely feels like feeling ready. Most women who do this work feel scared, exhausted, uncertain, and not at all sure they have what it takes. What readiness actually looks like is this: a part of you knows that what you've been doing is not working anymore. A part of you is tired enough of the status quo to try something different. A part of you, even a very small part, suspects that there has to be more than this. If that's where you are, that's enough. Reach out and let's figure out the rest together.

How do I get started?

Just reach out. We'll set up a free consultation call. No pressure, no commitment, no agenda beyond having a real conversation about what's going on and what might actually help. You don't need to know exactly what you need. You just need to schedule a call or send an email. Everything else we figure out from there.

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