Dear Robi:

As I was reading and studying your earliest thread (“My story and my search for answers”, June 8, 2018- July 4, 2018, age 25) and part of the second, I came across a term called Identity Diffusion which may have applied to you back in 2018 and maybe still. It definitely applied to me for the great majority of my life.

Identity diffusion means the person doesn’t have a consistent sense of who they are across time, they feel like different people in different situations and their view of others swings between idealization and devaluation. This creates a self that feels fragmented, inconsistent, or hollow, especially under stress.

Identity diffusion forms when early caregivers were intrusive, inconsistent, emotionally absent, frightening, and/ or unpredictable, and it leads to unstable relationships, shifting self‑image, intense emotions that feel unmanageable, idealizing then devaluing others, feeling empty or unreal, and difficulty making decisions or commitments

It’s the adult expression of a childhood where the child had to ADAPT to the emotional environment instead of DEVELOPING an inner center. The child grows up without enough emotional space to develop an inner center, suppressing their own preferences, feelings, and impulses because expressing them either doesn’t matter or creates conflict. Over time, the child oriented around the parent’s moods, expectations, and needs, building a self that is externally shaped rather than internally rooted.

This produces an adult who feels blank, indecisive, easily overwhelmed, and dependent on relationships or external structure to feel real, shifting identity depending on who the person is with, mistaking intensity for connection, and collapsing when alone because there is no stable inner “me” to return to.

Identity diffusion feels like blankness when someone asks what you want, fog when you try to make decisions, and collapse when you’re alone. You might feel intensely connected to someone one day and disconnected the next. There’s a constant sense of being pulled by external forces — partners, expectations, moods, fantasies.

Identity diffusion shows up in relationships as a kind of shapelessness — a person who becomes whoever the relationship needs, then collapses when the role becomes too heavy. It looks like shifting preferences, values, or desires depending on the other person. It shows up as clinging when alone and avoidance when intimacy gets too close, because both closeness and distance feel destabilizing when there’s no inner center.

It creates cycles of idealizing a partner, then feeling suffocated, then feeling guilty, then feeling empty — not because the partner changed, but because the person’s internal structure is too thin to hold steady. It also shows up as romantic over‑investment after minimal connection, or sudden doubt and emotional numbness once the initial intensity fades.

The above, Robi, is general information. Does it resonate?

Anita