Why the Identity Work Seems to Have Made Things Worse

Something genuinely confusing happens in deep identity work: you start the becoming process and for a period, things feel worse rather than better. More uncomfortable, more visible to yourself, more painful in some ways than before you started.

If you’ve had this experience, you’ve probably wondered whether the work is making things worse, whether you’re doing it wrong, or whether you’ve opened something that would have been better left closed.

The answer to all three is almost certainly no. What’s actually happening is specific, and it has a name.

The Excavation Effect

Genuine identity work doesn’t only build the new. It first uncovers what’s been there — the old patterns, the defended beliefs, the held tensions in the body. This uncovering is often experienced as things getting harder before they get easier.

Before beginning the work, you were experiencing the effects of the pattern without full awareness of the pattern itself. The undercharging was happening, the visibility avoidance was happening, the self-sabotage was running — but there was a layer of unconsciousness that made it feel like “just how things are” rather than a pattern with specific mechanics.

Identity work removes that unconsciousness. Now you see the pattern clearly. You see the belief underneath it. You see when it runs and how it runs. That visibility is progress — and it often makes the discomfort more acute in the short term, because you can no longer be as unconscious about it.

This is the excavation effect. It’s a sign the work is working, not that something is wrong.

The Nervous System Activation Effect

When identity work targets the nervous system — which it needs to — the system often activates more in the period of direct engagement with the work.

This activation is appropriate. The work is touching what needs to be touched. The threat responses that have been running on automatic are being brought into awareness, which means they’re being felt more consciously.

This is temporarily more uncomfortable than the unconscious version. And it’s necessary. The self-concept shifts that are lasting require the pattern to be conscious, felt, and worked with — not suppressed or bypassed.

The Relationship Disruption Effect

As identity shifts, the relational field around you sometimes reorganizes. People who were comfortable with the old version of you may be less comfortable with the new one. Relationships that were based on the old identity — its availability, its deference, its over-giving, its smallness — can become strained.

This disruption can feel like things getting worse. And in one sense, it is: the relational stability that was organized around the old identity is changing.

In another sense, it’s progress. Relationships that require the old identity to be maintained are not relationships with you — they’re relationships with the pattern. As the pattern changes, the relationships reorganize around what’s actually there.

What “Worse” Usually Means in Timing

The “things are worse” experience almost always correlates with a specific period: after awareness has expanded significantly but before the new patterns have become stable enough to provide their own sense of ground.

It’s the liminal period between the old identity loosening and the new identity consolidating. This period is real, it’s uncomfortable, and it passes — when the work is sustained with appropriate support.

What Helps During This Period

Naming the phase. Knowing that the excavation effect, the activation effect, and the relationship disruption effect are normal — and typically temporary — changes the experience of them.

Maintaining or increasing relational support. This period is not the time to do the work more alone. It’s the time to be more in community, with more support.

Maintaining nervous system self-care. The excavation period requires more resource, not less. Prioritize the practices that maintain baseline nervous system regulation — sleep, body-based practices, nature, rest.

Trusting the trajectory. The discomfort of this period is the feeling of the identity shift happening. Not of it failing.

The Abundance GPS community on Skool provides support specifically for the challenging phases of identity work. Join free for the first week.