Sara Kuburic On Self-Loss
"The Millennial Therapist" joins Rainn, plus an excerpt from her book “It’s On Me”
Greetings to All!
(With a special shout out to those in search of the courage to face some hard truths!)
This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn is joined by existential psychotherapist and author Dr. Sara Kuburic, aka The Millennial Therapist.
For many these days—especially for a lot of younger people–Sara is a compassionate and courageous guide for those trying to untangle the beautiful mess of being human. In their conversation, Rainn and Sara dive deep into the soul-swamp of selfhood: What does it mean to truly take responsibility for your life? Not with abusive self blame, but with the courage and creativity to reclaim your own becoming.
They discuss meaning, suffering, identity, and the spiritual work of being in relationship—not just with others, but with your own evolving self. There’s laughter, there’s hard truths, and there’s a moment of unexpected tenderness involving a psychological reading of Dwight Schrute that you are not likely to forget. (Trust.)
To accompany this week’s episode, we’re sharing an excerpt from Sara’s book, It’s On Me. In it, she writes:
Healing requires that we recognize who we became when we abandoned ourselves, and that we choose who we want to be instead.
It echoes that luminous line—frequently misattributed to Anaïs Nin but in fact authored by writer Elizabeth Appell:
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom…
So we invite you to ask yourself—and perhaps share in the comments (if you’re feeling brave):
Is there a place in your life where staying stuck has become more painful than the risk of change?
Is this the season to step into the discomfort—not as punishment, but as a portal?
Even if it starts messy—even if it comes with tremors and weird dreams and forced journal entries—maybe it’s a journey that will lead you back to the self you were always meant to become.
May the questions you ask never be answered—but always lead to better questions.
— The Soul Boom Team
What Is Self-Loss?
(Excerpted from It’s On Me)
By Dr. Sara Kuburic
What Is Self-Loss?
Here’s a visualization I often do with my clients to give them a sense of what self-loss feels like:
Imagine you’re alone, sitting in a worn leather armchair in the middle of a room. In front of you is a chipped coffee table straining to support the weight of the numerous dusty books that you intended to read but never found time for. You have a cup of coffee that has grown cold, the milk curdled on the surface. On the side table next to you is a vintage green lamp, merely ornamental ever since the room has been set ablaze.
The flames are creeping up the walls, peeling the wallpaper and sending parachutes of ash in midair. The flares slowly inch toward you; little sparks burning holes in the rug at your feet. You can barely see through the haze; your lungs fill with smoke, your eyes water. Yet you continue to sit there—paying bills, checking your email, making work deadlines, sending long, upset text messages, or posting inspirational quotes on Instagram—ignoring your impending death. You hear faint instinctual inner screams. A voice deep inside is urging you to MOVE.
But instead, you convince yourself that “this is fine”; that you are fine, in control, even. That the way you have chosen to live will not hurt you. Your life is threatened, but for some reason or another you don’t see it; you ignore it, or perhaps you’re waiting for someone else to save you. You are too “busy” to save yourself. Or, maybe you notice the flames, but you are preoccupied with debating who set the fire in the first place—you’d rather figure out who to blame than find a way to live. Regardless of the specifics, you don’t choose to extinguish the fire, which ultimately means you are choosing to get burned….
We successfully ignore signs of danger and the call to responsibility. We surrender our freedom and risk our lives to enjoy the warmth of the familiar—our so-called obligations and day-to-day mundanities. We may not know why we find ourselves in a burning room or who is to blame, but ultimately the only thing that matters is what we do about it.
It can be hard to wrap our heads around the idea of facing such a clear threat and continuing to live as if it’s of no consequence. It’s difficult to imagine that someone on the verge of losing something as significant as their Self can ignore the warning signs. This loss—this impending danger that I am talking about—is not physical, it is existential.
And it’s the danger that most of us face as a consequence of the way we choose to live our everyday lives.
Let’s spend a day in the life of a girl named Alex. When her alarm goes off in the morning, the first thing she does is grab her phone. It will only take a couple of seconds before her finger taps on the first app. As her eyes adjust to the brightness, she will squint away the blur of her screen and check her DMs, silently calculating when to respond or like a picture without looking too eager. She will mindlessly scroll for a couple of minutes, or ten, or twenty-five, consciously or subconsciously taking note of other people’s lives, body shapes, or success, adding new insecurities, comparisons, or expectations to the back of her mind. Eventually she will hurry around her apartment to get ready (for the gaze of others), and if there is enough time to do one thing for herself that morning—it’s going to be coffee. Always. Alex will chug it as she hops on her first online meeting or rushes out the door to catch the train, completely forgetting to eat breakfast, drink water . . . or take a deep breath.
At work, she puts on a faint smile while dealing with people who are unpleasant, unkind, or just bad at their jobs. She lives by her online calendar, which tells her who to talk to and when, and which tasks she needs to tackle. She often checks her emails during long calls, paying very little attention to either. If she is feeling annoyed, she’ll send a snarky text to a colleague on the same video call—waiting to see if they crack a smile. At lunch, she will get a caffeine refill and eat some food, while barely taking a moment to notice its taste. She will take a picture of her outfit or the view from her desk—commenting on the weather, her workload, or making a self-deprecating joke. Every two or three minutes, Alex will check to see who’s viewed her story and look at it herself—her pictures tend to paint her life better than she knows how to live it, and looking at them helps her feel like she’s living much more than she actually is.
After work, she might hop on her Peloton, not because she cares about her health but because she hates her body. Afterward, she will meet up with her friends or watch Netflix on the couch in an effort to distract herself from feeling drained, upset, bored, or unfulfilled, while spending the majority of the time glancing at her phone, wondering if that person she’s seeing is going to text her back. Eventually she crawls into bed and looks at her screen until her eyelids get heavy.
Alex has become accustomed to (some might even say comfortable with) living in the burning room.
And with every passing day, she sinks deeper into self-loss….
Self-loss is being estranged from and lacking congruence, resonance, and alliance with who we truly are. It’s the feeling of being inconsistent and inauthentic—of having our actions, feelings, and decisions cease to represent how we understand and experience ourselves as “truly” being.
The regrettable reality is that too many of us go on with life unfazed by the fact that we do not know who we are. As an existential therapist, I have come to understand that the human sense of Self is the staple of well-being...The crux of self-loss is that it doesn’t allow us to exist—not truly. Not in a way we find fulfilling or, perhaps, even worth all the effort….
Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, once said that self-loss “causes little stir in the world; for in the world a self is what one least asks after, and the thing it is most dangerous of all to show signs of having. The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be unnoticed.”
The paradox of this loss is that although it often goes unnoticed, it still involves our will. Meaning, it ultimately happens because we allow it to. We do not lose our Self without our permission or participation. We may not choose to be in a burning room, but our inaction, our neglect to extinguish the flames, becomes a decision. It may be our lack of awareness, a particularly unhealthy environment or relationship, or an old wound that drives the estrangement in the first place. But more often than not, the self-loss—the complete disconnect from who we are—is ultimately accomplished through the process of self-deception. The threat is so big that the only way we can cope with it—besides actually doing something about it—is to lie to ourselves and deny that we feel empty, unfulfilled, and confused. Life has become a patchwork consisting of our misguided efforts to fill the void with relationships, jobs, possessions, or even, sometimes, kids. Anything that can help us pretend for just a little longer that there is nothing wrong. We continually ignore our past, our shadows, our wounds, and then wonder why we find ourselves making decisions that don’t serve us.
Our propensity to self-deceive—to hide the truth from ourselves and see only what we want to see despite proof to the contrary—is not merely an individual quirk, but an approach to Self that is embedded within society as a whole. Our society has normalized being something other than our Self, and to be honest, most of us don’t know that there is an alternative path. We’ve been taught to invent, pretend, morph, and edit who we are in an effort to achieve “belonging” or “recognition,” as if such external gains will compensate for the emptiness within.
Some of us knew who we were and then we lost our way. Some of us never became our Self in the first place. We grew older, we aged, our roles and functions changed, but we never grasped our essence (the intrinsic quality that makes us who we are…). We became many things—a professional, a partner, a mentor, a parent, a friend—but we never truly became our Self. We never took real responsibility for the precious, limited time we were given. Before we knew it, a deep sense of disorientation made it difficult for us to even know where to begin.
Self-loss, in its most basic function, restricts our ability to be our Self.
It is one of the most painful human experiences—an invisible suffering that colors every aspect of our lives. As a result of not knowing who we are, we:
Self-sabotage and hurt ourselves unintentionally.
Struggle to identify and verbalize what we need, think, or how we feel.
Find ourselves living a life that we don’t want or don’t find fulfilling.
Prioritize others over ourselves.
Stay in relationships that we are not meant to be in.
Get caught in cycles of reenacting unhealthy patterns.
Are unable to identify our purpose or direction in life.
Fail at setting and maintaining boundaries.
Are faced with a deep sense of unhappiness.
Grapple with our self-esteem.
Are constantly overwhelmed or disappointed by life.
Find it hard, ultimately, to truly connect with, accept, and trust who we are.
HOW DOES SELF-LOSS MANIFEST?
I didn’t address my own self-loss for a long time, mostly because I didn’t know I was lost. One of the reasons it’s challenging to pinpoint self-loss—besides our willing or unwilling ignorance—is because, for so many of us, it’s deeply intertwined with the experience of being human.
I experienced the manifestation of self-loss in every aspect of my life:
I suppressed my emotions until they overwhelmed me.
I misused and ignored the signals my body was sending, until it forced me to listen.
I had a bad habit of forcing relationships to work because I didn’t know who I was without them.
I lived a large part of my life blindly accepting a belief system that guided my morality. The issue wasn’t the worldview per se, the issue was my lack of agency and attunement to my own needs and desires.
And finally, while I appeared to be one of those boring and always responsible human beings, I was recklessly irresponsible with my own existence. I lived as if I had time to waste and wouldn’t feel the consequences of my actions. I deceived myself into thinking that being unfulfilled, sad, and confused was the way I was meant to live my life.
I wish I could have recognized my loss sooner, but that would have required knowing what to look for—and I didn’t. So, let me help you get a better grasp of how self-loss generally manifests in our lives, holistically. Let’s look at five major categories:
1. Emotions
Individuals who experience self-loss often struggle to self-regulate, self-soothe, or emotionally connect—they lack inner grounding. As a consequence, they begin to cope through mechanisms of avoidance, suppression, or escapism…
The emotional impact of self-loss is often found in the extremes.
Some individuals will get irritated by others who display a lot of emotions (or, more accurately, they will get triggered by them)…On the other hand, others may experience self-loss as constantly feeling overwhelmed by their feelings (not knowing what to do with them)….
2. The Body
We cannot separate our body from who we are. In this light, it is not surprising that when we experience self-loss, it makes it harder to feel alignment and congruency—meaning, it becomes difficult to find agreement, harmony, and compatibility with sex, food, movement (exercise), and our Self. We often misunderstand our physical needs, wants, preferences, or experiences…Many of us expect too much from our bodies, while paying very little attention to them (a recipe for any unhealthy relationship)…This is all because most of us don’t understand our body as part of our core Self.
3. Relationships
The relationship we have with our Self will be reflected in the types of relationships we have with others. People who experience self-loss are more likely to enter into and remain in 1) unhealthy relationships, 2) one-sided relationships, 3) unfulfilling relationships, or 4) all of the above. Why? Because self-loss is often accompanied by our inability or unwillingness to discern which relationships align with how we feel, what we need, and who we are. When we lack self-understanding, we are more likely to choose a partner or relationship as a response to our wounds, insecurities, or modeled behavior.
Self-loss often robs us of our sense of worth and leaves us trying to regain our value through external validation. …
4. Inner Consent
Self-loss can lead to lack of inner consent. “Inner consent” is a term in existential analysis, a fancy way of saying agreement or permission for the way we are choosing to use our human freedom and live our life. When we experience self-loss, we often don’t participate with intention or discernment, and, as a result, we struggle to defend or accept not just our circumstances, consequences, or responsibilities, but who we are.
Inner consent is our willingness to say yes to life—saying yes to our thoughts, values, emotionality, who we are, what matters to us, our convictions, our personal uniqueness, our attitude, our purpose. It is the practice of tuning in and evaluating whether something aligns or is in harmony with who we understand our Self to be.…When we give our inner consent, life stops happening to us. Instead it becomes something for us, to shape as we’d like.
Inner consent is an empowered stance….
It is a feeling of complete agreement with our actions and who we perceive our Self to be. There is no inner consent without a clear idea of who we are. And, without inner consent, there is no authenticity or fulfillment.
5. Meaning and Morality
Meaning is the reason we choose to live, while morality dictates the way we choose to live. Meaning and morality are the direction—or orientation—toward which we point our existence. Self-loss is not merely a result of action or inaction; sometimes it’s a consequence of misdirection. The impact of self-loss manifests as ambiguous values, morals, or ethical conduct; even meaninglessness. We often find ourselves having a difficult time discerning what we believe in or why, or how to purposefully engage with the world around us.…
We have meaning within our Self—we have the power to create meaning from the way we engage with and understand the world, not just from how we contribute to it. It’s important to learn that we can find meaning in a conversation, in an art gallery, or simply in watching the waves crash against a rock.
As for morality, individuals who grew up with a set of rules (morals) by which they abided often feel lost once they distance themselves from, change, or question their belief system. Many of my clients have learned the virtue of obedience, but most did not—or were not allowed to—think for themselves. Lack of questioning and reflection can translate into blind obedience, which does not take into account inner consent, attunement, or alignment. Preset morals dictated their actions, providing them a sort of cheat sheet, and shaping them into who they are—and for some, who they are is lost.
IT GETS BETTER
No one ever intends to lose their Self, but at some point, their intention becomes irrelevant. Not irrelevant in terms of responsibility, but irrelevant in terms of the consequences. If someone sets your house on fire—regardless of whether it’s by accident or on purpose—the reality remains that there is a fire to deal with….
It’s unrealistic for us to expect ourselves to be fully authentic and aligned at every moment in our lives, but we cannot stop trying. We have a responsibility to be our Self (and, let’s not forget, to offer ourself grace as we keep trying).
We must stop normalizing the painful experiences of self-loss. Although it’s common, this is not a condition worth settling for. If we lose our Self, we will be left with a life we are merely enduring, performing. We deserve more, and we can have more.
It’s easy to pathologize any human experience that involves suffering, but let’s not dismiss the role pain can play in our lives. I am not suggesting we should seek out pain, but rather that we can gain insight from it when it does happen (and it will). It’s helpful to understand our suffering as a signal and a messenger.
The pain that you experience when a flame touches your skin is the impetus that moves your hand, protecting you from being burned. The pain of self-loss is not any different. It signals to you that something is not right, and it’s this same signal that can motivate you to change your life.
I always tell my clients that during the process of healing, things often get worse before they get better. In the beginning, the more we become aware, the more it’s going to hurt. It can be difficult to face the fact that our parents failed or hurt us in some way, or that we were the reason our last relationship failed. But here is the good news: Self-loss is not just a submergence into the darkness; it can also serve as a reorientation. It is a space for atonement (offering reconciliation and forgiveness to ourselves) and transformation, and ultimately our chance to create wholeness. It can become our opportunity for agency and freedom. Much like fire, the experience holds within itself both destruction and generative power—unapologetically molding and carving the paths of our existence.
Lost is a beautiful place in which you can feel unrestricted and uninhibited in your journey of exploring new ideas, people, meaning, and things. Lost can mark the beginning of your Self.
I have come to realize that the transformation that results from choosing to see, understand, and be who we are is unmatched by anything else. Who we are is a unique, real-time, always-evolving experience, never to be shared with a single other person. The question “Who am I?” has to be answered in the present moment—and it will change with every choice and exercise of our human freedom.
It’s important for us to realize that our task is not to go back and try to “find” who we used to be.
The Self is like a painting. Every moment and interaction adds paint to our canvas. The previous layers contribute to the current picture, but with every stroke, the painting changes—becomes more of what it truly is. The painting can never go back to what it once was. Your journey only moves forward. Every aspect of your life—every failure, every change, every loss, every moment of despair or joy—speaks to who you are and the life that you’re living in the present moment.
Reckoning with our self-loss is a long and obscure journey—and I am here to help you with yours. The first step is to acknowledge your self-loss. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed as you try to look at your Self—I mean, truly look at your Self. It’s normal to feel exhausted or discouraged as you strive to live intentionally: Every. Single. Day. It’s normal to buckle under the burden of responsibility that comes with recognizing your freedom to shape and be who you are.
The reward far outweighs the effort, though, I promise.
The reward is you. The real you that lives an authentic, free, and meaningful life. Note that this does not mean an easy, pleasant, or perfect life. This means a life where you truly experience every aspect of being alive, a life in which you fully participate, a life where you feel all of it—the excruciating and elevating moments alike. A life in which you make mistakes and emerge with lessons. A life in which you fully embody who you are.
Hard Truth
Who you are in this moment—whether you are on a plane, sitting at your kitchen table, or on your bed—IS who you really are. If you don’t like who that is, it is up to you to do something about it.
Gentle Reminder
It’s never too late to be you.
From It’s On Me by Sara Kuburic. Copyright © 2023 by the author, and reprinted with permission of Penguin Random House.
Sara Kuburic is an existential psychotherapist, writer, and speaker known for her compassionate and courageous approach to self-discovery and personal transformation. In It’s On Me, she invites readers to confront the painful reality of self-loss and offers a path to healing through radical self-responsibility. Through her global platform as The Millennial Therapist, Kuburic explores themes of identity, freedom, and emotional integrity—empowering individuals to reclaim their lives and live with authenticity, intention, and courage.
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