There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes with losing someone you love. It isn’t only sadness, though sadness is certainly part of it. It’s the strange, disquieting sense that the ground you’d been standing on has shifted — that the person who shaped so much of your daily life, your sense of who you were, your plans for what came next, is simply no longer there.

Sue Johnson, the psychologist who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, spent her career studying human attachment — why the people we love become woven into how we understand ourselves. That’s not just theory. It helps explain why losing someone doesn’t just leave an empty space in your schedule or your home. It can leave you without a sense of who you are, because so much of who you are was built in connection to them.

That’s often the part of grief no one prepares you for. Not just missing someone, but wondering who you are without them.