War and emigration are triggering a hidden identity crisis among Ukrainian adults
Ukrainian refugees carry the psychological and emotional weight of displacement and war (Photo: Ty ONeil / SOPA Images via Reuters)
For decades, developmental psychology treated adulthood as a finished state, as if identity crises belonged only to adolescence while adults had already “figured themselves out.”
That view changed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. Danish psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, along with psychologists Daniel Levinson and Erik Erikson in his later work, argued that adulthood is not a stable plateau. It contains its own major transitions and crises, each as psychologically significant as adolescent identity formation, only less visible and far less acknowledged.
Forced migration, especially during war, does not simply interrupt the external circumstances of adult life. It disrupts the psychological structures that make adulthood feel stable and coherent in the first place.
The crises of adulthood
Erikson described several key crises of adulthood and maturity. Each represents a checkpoint: Can identity withstand changing conditions, losses, and new demands?
One of the most important is the crisis of generativity versus stagnation, which typically unfolds between the ages of 35 and 65. At this stage, people confront a fundamental question: Am I leaving something behind?
This is not only about children. It is about contribution — to work, culture, community, relationships, or the next generation. Successfully resolving this stage creates a sense that one’s life matters beyond personal survival. Failure often produces stagnation, emotional narrowing, and withdrawal into self-protection and routine.
Later comes the crisis Erikson called integrity versus despair. A person looks back and asks: Was my life authentic? Did I live according to what I truly valued? If the answer is yes, the result is a sense of wholeness and meaning. If not, despair emerges from the realization that time has passed while essential parts of the self remained unrealized.
Alongside these stages are other adult transitions.
The so-called midlife crisis, despite becoming a cultural cliché, reflects a real psychological process. Between roughly 38 and 52, many people experience a growing mismatch between the life they have built and the person they feel themselves to be internally. The question becomes unavoidable: “If not now, then when?”
There are also recurring role crises. These can happen many times throughout adulthood — when someone becomes a parent, loses a partner, watches children leave home, reaches a professional ceiling, or experiences career collapse. Each transition challenges identities built too rigidly around specific roles.
How emigration disrupts adult identity
Forced emigration does not simply complicate these crises. In many cases, it triggers several at once while simultaneously removing the psychological tools people previously used to cope.
The crisis of generativity becomes particularly painful in migration.
The feeling that one is building something meaningful requires an environment where contribution is possible. For many Ukrainian adults who left during the most professionally active period of their lives, that environment disappeared almost overnight.
A doctor who spent years treating patients cannot practice abroad without re-certification. A teacher who shaped children’s worldviews suddenly works as an assistant or cleaner. An entrepreneur who built a business loses not only income, but networks, status, reputation, and social identity. Someone deeply involved in cultural or civic life becomes invisible in a new country.
This is not simply professional decline. It is the collapse of the channel through which a person answered the question: Why am I here?
The loss of generativity in mid-adulthood may be one of the least discussed and most widespread forms of migration grief.
The midlife crisis also changes under emigration.
In normal conditions, this crisis can become an opportunity to reconsider priorities, change direction, or reconnect with neglected parts of the self. But that process requires a minimum level of stability: housing, financial security, and emotional support.
Forced migration removes precisely those foundations.
Instead of asking internal questions such as “Who am I really?” people are consumed by immediate survival: documents, language barriers, housing, work, schools for children, legal status. The crisis is postponed, buried under practical necessity.
But postponed psychological crises rarely disappear. More often, they return later with greater force.
This burden falls especially heavily on women over 40 who emigrated with children and without partners. Many simultaneously carry the emotional and practical survival of the family while privately experiencing their own identity collapse — often without time, space, or permission to acknowledge it.
Role crises also become sharper in migration.
Adult identity is often built around stable social roles: parent, professional, spouse, provider. Emigration frequently removes those roles or transforms them beyond recognition.
Parents often describe a strange reversal of authority inside the family. Children adapt faster, learn the language more quickly, absorb cultural codes more naturally, and begin navigating the outside world more confidently than their parents. Adults who once felt competent suddenly experience themselves as dependent or inadequate within their own households.
The family hierarchy quietly shifts, and identity shifts with it.
For older adults, the final crisis — integrity versus despair — can become especially brutal under conditions of war and displacement.
People over 60 often lose not only physical homes, but the entire material structure of autobiographical memory: neighborhoods, familiar streets, family graves, routines, neighbors, local landmarks. The external “archive” of life disappears or becomes inaccessible.
This is not simply nostalgia. Psychologically, it creates a situation in which a person struggles to complete the narrative of their own life because the physical evidence of that life has been erased.
Adult crisis versus adolescent crisis
An adolescent builds identity for the first time. An adult enters crisis having already possessed an identity and then loses it.
This is a fundamentally different psychological experience.
Adolescents search for themselves. Adults often grieve themselves.
Psychologists sometimes describe forced migration as a form of “double grief”: the loss of home combined with the loss of self.
There is another important distinction. Adolescents are socially permitted to experiment, hesitate, and remain uncertain. Adults are expected to continue functioning regardless of internal collapse. Society demands competence, productivity, and emotional control.
As a result, adult identity crises often become invisible. Instead of open searching, they appear as symptoms.
How adult identity crisis appears
Unlike adolescence, adult identity crises rarely announce themselves directly. They often disguise themselves as depression, chronic anxiety, exhaustion, psychosomatic illness, emotional numbness, or a vague but persistent sense that life has lost coherence.
Some common signs include:
- chronic feelings of meaninglessness;
- rigid attachment to outdated roles or inability to take on new ones;
- constant comparison between “before” and “now”;
- collapse of social connections;
- and physical symptoms with no clear medical explanation.
Many migrants initially interpret these experiences as personal weakness or failure. In reality, they are often normal psychological responses to extreme instability and dislocation.
What helps
Perhaps the most important step is simply naming what is happening.
An identity crisis in adulthood is not immaturity or weakness. Under conditions of forced migration and war, it may be an entirely normal reaction to profoundly abnormal circumstances.
Research increasingly suggests that recovery depends less on external success than on the presence of at least one relationship in which a person can exist without performing a role — without needing to appear strong, useful, successful, or adapted.
And identity crisis itself is not necessarily destructive.
People who move through it consciously often emerge with a deeper, more flexible, and more resilient sense of self than they possessed before.
Today, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian adults are experiencing something psychology is only beginning to fully describe: identity crisis under conditions of forced migration and ongoing war.
These processes are not theoretical. They are unfolding in real time, across Europe and far beyond it.
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