How do you learn to change? An insight from sorrow

This is a bit of an abstract story, of how grief and identity has touched my life through the years. I do not tell details, but do let me know if you want me to extend this.

There's a pattern I noticed in myself relatively late. Late enough that it had already caused damage.

I don't want to be dramatic, but growing up in Colombia, loss was structural. People died. Families displaced. Relatives who disappeared from one chapter to the next without clean endings (not my relatives thankfully). You don't process that as a child. You absorb it as grammar. A set of rules about how closeness works, what it costs, and what it tends to become. Without realizing it, I carried that grammar into every relationship that mattered. I didn't only reproduce the specific losses but the shape of them.

Colombia was specific. The collective was the unit. Family, neighborhood, extended belonging. For me that also meant the scouting movement, years of it, a structured community with explicit values, roles, service as identity. You knew who you were partly because you knew where you stood in relation to others. Identity held in common before it's held individually. I didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time. But that's what was happening: a developmental stage where the collective does the holding, before the harder work of individuation begins.[1]

When I moved to Europe, the container broke. That's not a complaint. It needed to. First in Germany, then in Sweden. Swedish culture operates on a strong assumption of individual autonomy. You are responsible for yourself. Others are responsible for themselves. There's dignity in that, and also a kind of loneliness that doesn't announce itself. The first real separation. Belonging felt different because it was elective. We even had a Slack channel called 'holdmyhair,' a reference to holding someone's hair back while they're sick. When you need a hand and you can't help back. That's what showing up looked like. No scaffolding of institution or family obligation. Just the decision to be there. This was my new collective identity. K9 Coliving in Stockholm made that possible.

What I didn't see clearly enough then was that the loss template was still running underneath. The grammar from Colombia, from early experiences of people and places that ended without resolution. Attachment that already anticipated its own failure. I recreated those dynamics in relationships. Not consciously, not dramatically (maybe a bit), but structurally. The pattern was there. Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan calls this being subject to your meaning-making system, embedded in it, unable to see it as one perspective among others.[1][2]

When I finally saw it, it didn't arrive as revelation. More like recognizing a shape you've been moving around for years and suddenly having a name for it. What made the recognition real, not just intellectual, was causing pain to someone I lovedthrough exactly these mechanisms. The loss template wasn't something I carried privately but something that played out on people. That's when it became impossible to theorize around. Kegan describes this shift as making the template **object** (something you can reflect on, hold at a distance, choose differently about).[3]

There's something in the language worth pausing on. "I am sorry" comes from sorrow. In Swedish, "jag är ledsen" literally means "I am sad." Both languages embed grief into the act of apologizing. I didn't encounter this as a linguistic curiosity but lived it first and then the etymology made sense. Heartbreak, in this case, was not mine received. It was mine caused. That's a different kind of sorrow. Heavier, more clarifying.

What that sorrow asked of me was to stay inside it. Not perform it for others. Not rush toward resolution to relieve the discomfort. Not narrate or analyze my way out of it. Just hold it. Most emotional movement is defensive. We replace one feeling with another before the first one has done its work. Holding is the refusal to do that. Kegan's framework suggests this holding creates space for transformation, not just learning new behaviors, but changing the very form of how you make meaning.[5]

I'm not past the pattern. I still recognize it when it activates. What's different is that I can see it now, name it, and sometimes choose differently. Sometimes not. Understanding your own patterns is not freedom from them. It's more like learning the terrain. You still have to walk it. Most adults remain at what Kegan calls the socialized mind (Stage 3), where identity is shaped by relationships. Moving toward the self-authoring mind (Stage 4) is rarer, and ongoing.[1]

The question has shifted over the years. Less "what does this place offer?" and more "what does this place ask of me?" A small difference in grammar. Maybe the most durable thing sorrow taught.