Hannah explores the characters’ desire for community through The Search for Identity and Belonging. Although Alice’s journey toward self-discovery fuels the narrative, Ellie, Julia, and Max discover the importance of belonging through their shared vulnerability about their personal struggles. As Alice shifts away from her fear and trauma, the other characters learn from her resilience and create a new community. In isolation, each character is stuck in their trauma and toxic behaviors, but with each other, they grow into better people and maintain loving, supportive relationships with each other.

Although Alice’s search for identity drives the plot, each character has lost a piece of themselves in some way. Just like Alice begins the story nameless, Julia feels lost and unlike herself after her public failure with the Silverwood case. As she struggles to reconcile how her life and career have turned out, she loses her confidence as a practitioner, even though she has helped more patients than she hasn’t. Her problems fall into perspective once she sees the trauma that Alice has survived. She refocuses her priorities because she realizes that her issues with her career pale in comparison to the abuse that Alice has experienced at such a young age.