The Picture in Your Head Looked Different...

This is not how you pictured it. You had a vision for this new season. You imagined early morning yoga classes, weekly dinners with new friends in a new city, day trips on the weekends to exciting destinations, family surrounding you as you held your freshly birthed baby, that hard-earned job feeling just-right. You would balance it all, inspired and activated, your best self on display each day.

And yet, here you are. Now it's all so different. Several months into a life transition you anticipated with enthusiasm, you are no longer the hero of your fantasies. You have experienced the proverbial bump(s) in the road and you are struggling, to say the least. This is often the reality of a life transition. Especially those we've enacted with agency. There is a brilliant build-up in our brains of optimistic imaginings, though we may not expect perfection, we hope for abundance. And then, abundance becomes hard won. It shape-shifts into building plain old perseverance. You're simply trying to get through days, the anticipated life change is far less enchanting and you're feeling disillusioned.

In William Bridges' classic book entitled, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, he acknowledges that all life transitions are multifaceted, and often different from what we anticipate. This dissonance can cause turmoil. The realities of the circumstances we fantasized about are now prodding us to reconsider our identities and assess afresh what we want from life. Bridges identifies that one chosen change often "radiates" through peoples' lives causing residual changes that they were not expecting nor prepared for (1980, p. 22). As a result, stress grows and morale declines. Change requires us to recall our varying degrees of powerlessness as human beings. We cannot control every feature of a change. We may have wanted the new job and chosen the challenges it entails, but we did not anticipate the severity of the commute and the way it shifts our schedule, requiring earlier wake-up times, and later evenings spent in the car raging at the performance of other drivers. Though perhaps a relatively minor shift, the impact on sleep and general well-being is major. One is now forced to adapt in ways that make those idealized sunrise yoga classes unfathomable.

There's good news. As human beings we have the capacity to adapt. Flexibility is possible and it can grow over time. We can adjust to the reality of our life transition and find new routines that ground us. Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) offers a wonderful way to readjust, reset and even relinquish the flawless scenarios we've envisioned. I often have the honor of meeting people after a major life transition has occurred, typically at the moment when stress is high and disappointment is palpable. I often find myself turning to one of the core facets of CFT, self-compassion.

The ingredients of self-compassion are equal part awareness, understanding, and problem-solving. When we have landed in life transitions that are different than we hoped, we have the opportunity to bring our awareness to our honest reactions and to what we're experiencing. What is it that you are feeling? Where does that feeling manifest in your body? We can then bring understanding to that emotional and somatic experience. Why do I feel this way? What's the story behind this reaction? Self-compassion is not submitting to defeat, it's with grace, with hope, with creativity, choosing to problem-solve. It's asking, What can I do about this now? What's less than ideal about this season may be something you have to accept, but it is not the end of the story. You can devise a plan to find contentment. The hope that self-compassion brings in the framework of CFT is invigorating. Perhaps what we initially pictured about our life transition isn't attainable, maybe we were being a little too idealistic, but what that fantasy tells us is that we can access hope. As Emily Dickinson so eloquently wrote, hope perches in the soul and it sings, it never stops (Dickinson, 1861).

If the life transition you're in has grown lackluster, may you adjust your gaze a bit to experience self-compassion and identify a perfectly imperfect path forward.

With Warmth,

Erin

Bridges, W. (1980). Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. Perseus Books.

Dickinson, E., & Franklin, R. W. 1. (1861, 1999). The poems of Emily Dickinson. Reading ed. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.