The Book
Survival Identity: The Hidden Patterns Running Your Work, Leadership, and Life
A language for the adaptive patterns people build under pressure - and a structured path through them.
Publishing April 2026
Survival Identity
The Hidden Patterns Running Your Work, Leadership, and Life
You didn't lose your ambition. You didn't lose your values. But somewhere along the way, you lost yourself - and you're not sure how it happened.
Maybe it was the layoff that stripped away the title you'd built your identity around. The divorce that ended the version of you that existed inside that relationship. The diagnosis that rewrote your future. The leadership role that required you to become someone you no longer recognize. The career that succeeded - and somehow still left you feeling hollow.
Key idea
“This is not a mindset problem. It is a survival identity problem.”
A survival identity is the version of yourself you constructed to navigate pressure, uncertainty, and institutional demands. It kept you safe. It earned you success. It made you indispensable. But it was built for a world that no longer exists - and now it's running your life on autopilot.
Click the cover to explore survivalidentity.com for more information about the book and its larger ecosystem.
Endorsement 01
“Dr. Chiang brilliantly integrates neuroscience, somatic awareness, and social science theories into a readable and thought-provoking manifesto. Survival identity starts early in life and permeates all systems levels we live in, and her FORMA approach illuminates how to thrive beyond survival! Anyone who has been in a leadership position will identify, in one or more case scenarios/archetypes, the self that was once tied to an identity that can be liberated.”
Connie Corley, MSW, MA, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, California State University Los Angeles and Fielding Graduate University