Sometimes a deep shift begins in a person’s inner world, a transition that happens not because of a bad mood or a rough patch but because something more foundational is moving. The way they see themselves, what they value, and how they relate to their own life all begin to feel uncertain, and the person they’ve been no longer seems to fit the life they’re living.
Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun started studying this process in the mid-1990s when they began interviewing people who had been through serious loss and trauma. What they found was that many of these people were changing in ways that went beyond their previous baseline, developing new perspectives and deeper relationships while gaining a different sense of what mattered to them.
Tedeschi and Calhoun called this post-traumatic growth, and their research has since been replicated across dozens of countries because the pattern they identified turns out to be common.
But here’s what makes it difficult to recognize from the inside. It doesn’t feel like growth. It often feels like falling apart, like losing your grip on the life you built without knowing what comes next. The signs that this process is underway can look a lot like something going wrong, which is why it helps to know what researchers have actually documented.
A Sense That What Once Worked No Longer Does
The earliest sign of a deep inner transition is usually a feeling that life has stopped fitting. Though not in any way that’s easy to point to. What made you feel engaged no longer holds your attention, and the metrics of success start to feel like someone else’s homework. The things that used to drive you forward have lost their pull, and you want things you can’t name yet.
What makes this confusing is that there’s often nothing obviously wrong. Everything functions, but functioning stopped meaning anything, and that’s the part that’s hard to explain to anyone else. Some people realize they never actually wanted what they built and just never stopped to question it. While others recognize they’ve simply changed, and their life hasn’t changed with them.
Either way, the gap between who someone has become and the structures they’re living inside tends to be the first signal that something larger is shifting. Even when the person experiencing it can’t name what’s happening yet.
A Pull Toward Solitude
Being around people requires showing up as a version of yourself that others can recognize and interact with, someone consistent enough to hold a conversation with and predictable enough to make plans around. When that version is in flux, the effort becomes exhausting because you’re performing a self you’re no longer sure is accurate, and the only relief is being alone, where you don’t have to perform anything.
This can look like depression from the outside, but the quality is different. Depression tends to flatten everything and drain interest across the board, while this pull toward solitude is more specific. A 2024 qualitative study on Israeli combat veterans by researchers Shai Shorer, Michael Weinberg, Yael Koko, and Doron Marom found that post-traumatic loneliness operates as both a source of distress and a coping resource.
The researchers found that solitude can offer trauma survivors a sense of safety. Though they noted this safety is paradoxical because it’s often built on emotional avoidance. The study also suggested that this aloneness can sometimes motivate people to act on their condition and move toward rehabilitation. Though the researchers cautioned that while solitude may be beneficial in the short term, it can become harmful if it persists too long.
The solitude isn’t necessarily a problem to solve, but may be part of how the process works. The question is whether someone is using it to rest and regroup or using it to avoid engaging with what’s happening inside them.
Emotions That Feel Bigger and Less Predictable
Many people report emotional swings that don’t match their circumstances. Tears arrive without any clear trigger, and anger flares over things that wouldn’t normally register. Waves of grief surface without an obvious loss attached to them, and the usual emotional regulation stops working the way it used to.
This can be alarming because it feels like instability, but Tedeschi and Calhoun found that distress and growth often coexist. A person can be struggling and changing at the same time, and the presence of difficult emotions doesn’t mean the process has gone wrong. The researchers noted that some degree of struggle appears to be part of how the change happens.
Old emotional material surfaces, things someone suppressed or never fully processed, and now they have to feel it. The internal reorganization stirs things up, and the volatility isn’t a sign of breakdown so much as a sign that something is moving. It’s uncomfortable and sometimes frightening, but it tends to be temporary because the emotional system is recalibrating rather than collapsing.
Questioning Beliefs That Previously Felt Solid
Tedeschi and Calhoun identified something they called core belief disruption as the engine of the entire growth process. When life disrupts someone’s assumptions about how the world works. They have to rebuild those assumptions, and the researchers found this rebuilding often catalyzed lasting change. The questioning itself drives the transformation rather than being a side effect of it.
In practice, this means a period where things that someone accepted without thinking suddenly feel uncertain. Beliefs about how life works, what success means, or who someone is supposed to be no longer seem as solid as they did, and ideas inherited from family or culture stop holding the same weight. The mental framework someone once used to navigate the world starts to feel like it belongs to a different person.
This phase can feel destabilizing because certainty is comfortable, and knowing what you believe provides a kind of security. But the questioning isn’t a crisis of faith so much as someone taking their foundation apart so they can reassemble it in a way that fits who they’re becoming. The old structures weren’t wrong; they just fit someone who no longer exists.
Relationships Beginning to Shift
When someone is changing internally, the people around them tend to notice before they do. Connections that used to feel effortless might start requiring effort neither person can explain, and conversations that once flowed become stilted without any clear reason.
Tedeschi and Calhoun’s Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory measured specific changes in how people relate to others after moving through this process. The “Relating to Others” domain captures shifts including a greater willingness to express emotions, increased compassion for others, more effort put into relationships, a greater sense of closeness with others, and a deeper acceptance of needing people.
People build the relationships that survive or form around these new capacities rather than around who they used to be. So some connections adapt while others quietly fall away as the social world shifts to match the internal changes.
Feeling Caught Between an Old Self and a New One
A common description is the sensation of being between identities. The old self no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t arrived yet. People describe being unable to go back to who they were while also having no clear picture of who they’re becoming. It’s a disorienting place to be because there’s no solid ground on either side.
This in-between space has a name in psychology. Liminality refers to the threshold state between what was and what’s next, a transitional zone that’s inherently unstable. The word comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, the space you pass through between one room and another. You’re not in either room. You’re in the doorway.
The discomfort of liminality isn’t a sign of being stuck. It may be the transition itself. People often want to rush through this phase. To get back to feeling like themselves again. But the in-between time seems to be where the actual change happens. Trying to skip it or speed it up tends not to work. Someone crosses the threshold at their own pace and tolerates not knowing where they’re going until they get there.
A Quiet Sense That Something Larger Is Happening
Despite the confusion, many people describe a thread of something underneath all the disruption. It’s hard to articulate, but it shows up as a sense that the process is leading somewhere, even when they can’t see the destination. This isn’t optimism exactly. It coexists with the difficulty rather than replacing it. But it seems to function as an internal signal that the upheaval has direction.
Tedeschi and Calhoun found that people who move through this process often emerge with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Not because the pain was justified or the struggle was good for them. But because they built something new from what fell apart. The researchers identified this as one of the consistent outcomes across the five domains they measured. A reorganization of priorities around what actually matters to the person, rather than what they were taught should matter.
This quiet knowing, when it appears, seems to be the growth beginning to take shape. It’s not a guarantee, and it doesn’t make the process easier. But it suggests someone is building something even when everything feels like it’s falling apart. The signal is faint, but people who notice it describe it as a kind of trust in a process they don’t fully understand.
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Why This Process Happens
The signs described above appear to be part of a documented process that researchers have tracked across thousands of people.
Tedeschi and Calhoun found that this kind of growth typically follows disruption. Loss, illness, the end of a relationship, a career collapse, sometimes just a slow accumulation of dissatisfaction that finally reaches a tipping point. The event itself doesn’t cause the growth. The struggle to make sense of it does.
Their research showed that these experiences often begin with something painful or disorienting. The old identity has to loosen before a new one can form, which is why the process so often feels like falling apart before it feels like anything else. The structures that held a person’s sense of self together start to dissolve, and there’s a period of confusion before new structures emerge.
This doesn’t mean suffering is required or that pain should be welcomed. It means that when disruption happens, something beyond mere recovery becomes possible. The breakdown creates conditions for reconstruction, and the person who emerges often isn’t just healed. They’re different in ways they couldn’t have planned or predicted.
How To Get Through It?
People who have been through this describe a few things that helped. A transition this deep, one that rearranges your inner world, doesn’t respond well to being rushed or treated like a problem to fix. Forcing it tends to create resistance because the process has its own timeline. And fighting that timeline usually makes things harder. What helps is patience, even when patience feels like doing nothing.
Support helps too, but not from advice-givers or people who need to fix things. What people describe needing is someone who can witness the process without requiring it to resolve quickly. Tedeschi and Calhoun called these people expert companions, and their research suggested that having even one makes a measurable difference.
The destination doesn’t need to be clear for the process to continue, either. Demanding certainty too early can actually stall things out because the questions are supposed to stay open for a while.
The instinct to return to normal as quickly as possible tends to work against what’s trying to happen. Because normal may be exactly what’s being outgrown. What looks like falling apart from one angle might look like making room from another, and the old self has to dissolve before the new one can take shape. That dissolution, uncomfortable as it is, appears to be how people become who they’re becoming.
Faith & Spirituality Disclaimer: Articles exploring faith and spirituality are intended to encourage reflection and understanding, not to define doctrine or assert factual certainty. Spiritual beliefs and experiences differ across individuals and traditions and exist alongside scientific and real-world perspectives. Readers are invited to approach these topics with openness, discernment, and respect for differing viewpoints.
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