“Now what?” “What next?” These lifelong questions crop up with every transition and challenge all of us. We know that each person experiences many transitions, many crises. Let’s start our understanding of change with some definitions.
When we think about transitions in our lives, the ones most likely to come to mind are the noteworthy events that happen to us, expectedly or unexpectedly. But some equally important transitions stem from “non-events,” the things we expect and hope for that somehow fail to happen, such as not being able to have a baby, or not getting a promotion. Both kinds of transitions can bring considerable change. The significance of the event or non-event lies in how and to what extent it alters our lives.
We must be cautious about judging the severity of an event simply by labeling it. A transition that is severe for one person may be relatively minor for another, depending on the degree to which it alters the persons roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions.
The following clues will help you determine the significance of a particular transition:
Clue 1. How has the transition changed your roles? For example, you have a baby, and suddenly you’ve become a parent; you change jobs, and you take on a whole new set of responsibilities. All of us enact many roles in life. We are friends, parents, children, coworkers, employees, employers, neighbors, students, teachers, and much more, depending on the circumstances. And in each of these roles, we have particular relationships with our family and others around us.
Examples of transitions that can change our roles include divorce, having a child or a grandchild, seeing our children grow up and leave home, moving into a better job or losing a job, graduating from college, or undertaking a new career in middle age. A divorce means that we lose a partnership and the role of spouse, and it can also mean that we lose neighbors and sometimes friends. The same is true when we lose a job. When we change jobs and are required to make a move, we lose neighbors and friends and perhaps group membership, but we gain a new role in the workforce.
In analyzing a transition, it is useful to delineate the role changes. Which are gains and which are losses? Even if we gain new roles in the course of a change, the more roles that are altered, the more we have to adapt. We must remember that with role changes come changes in routines, in relationships, and in assumptions.
Clue 2. How has the transition changed your relationships? For example, being a parent puts you in touch with new people, as does a new job. Both experiences also transform your existing relationships. Having your colleague become your boss will change your relationship. You are no longer on equal footing. Many retirees report that their relationships with former colleagues change dramatically. The daily camaraderie no longer exists. This illustrates the interaction of changed roles leading to changed relationships.
Clue 3. How has the transition changed your routines? For example, a new baby alters living and sleeping habits; a new job may require a shift in schedule and in commuting patterns.
Some of us do not realize the importance of routines in our daily life until they are changed or eliminated. Even minor routines—taking a coffee break with a coworker who is a valued friend or watching the news every night at seven o’clock—provide us with an important measure of serenity, solace, and comfort.
In one case, a widow and mother of three children married a man with three children of his own. She expected role changes, especially when the whole family moved into her house. She acquired not only a husband and a larger family but the role of stepparent, which brought with it a changed relationship with her former in-laws and a new relationship with her new in-laws.
She had expected to undergo some difficulty with her role changes, but the additional difficulties of adjusting to new daily routines came as a surprise. All the logistical and mechanical issues of daily life—who makes the beds, who washes the dishes, who drives the carpool, who shops and cooks—suddenly had to be renegotiated. In another case, a woman and her children moved in with her new husband and his children. As the husband said, “The forks and knives were no longer in their ‘right place.’ ”
Some people regard changes in routine as positive. For example, one writer who moved from New York City to France basked in her change of routine. She said, “I found it easier to change almost everything at once—where I lived, what I ate, how I exercised, my work routine—when I went to France. Sometimes I have felt jarred when my routines change, but because I was seeking change, this time it was exhilarating.” It is not the amount of role or routine change that is the primary factor in how we weather a transition—it is how we evaluate it.
Clue 4. How has the transition affected your assumptions about yourself and the world? I often lead transition workshops during which I ask participants which changes are most difficult. The answer is often the same: events that change ones definition of oneself. One participant held an important job, but she was frightened by the responsibility. It took about a year for her to realize that she could not only do the job but do it well. She eventually defined herself as someone who is comfortable with being in control. In another, less happy case, a man who lost his job and could not find another began to see himself as worthless and therefore unemployable. Or a new father discovers hes more protective and responsible than he thought he would be, or a person in a new secretarial position may discover personal strengths and weaknesses that went unrecognized in the old clerk-typist job.
If a transition is major, it will change all four aspects of your life: your roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions. If it changes only one or two, it is still a transition, but clearly one of less magnitude.
The same type of transition, such as retirement, can affect people in very different ways. One person may view it as a very positive change—the gateway to a new career or a new life of leisure; another may view it as a very negative one—a one-way ticket to limbo.
Further, what appears to be the same transition may be a major trauma for one person but a minor problem for someone else. Consider, for example, the lives of two clerical workers, Adrienne and Bette, each of whom took responsibility for caring for an aging parent.
For Adrienne, almost everything in her life was altered after her mother—already frail—broke her hip. She had always been dependent on her mother, but now her mother depended on her; Adrienne’s role had changed. Her relationships with her own family were changing as well. She had little time for her husband and children since so much of her time was spent caring for her mother. Her routines were clearly changed. Instead of going home after work, she went right to her mothers house, where she spent almost six hours each day until her brother came to relieve her. Only her assumptions about herself were unaltered. She had always considered herself a devoted daughter, and caring for her mother now was consistent with that image.
Bette, also a devoted daughter, was faced with an apparently similar situation, but in reality it was quite different. In Bette’s family her sister was the main caregiver. Her mother and sister both felt that Bette should do more, but she had small children and refused to disrupt her own family. So although her role and routines were not upset nearly as much as Adrienne’s were, her assumptions about herself were much more in flux; she felt guilty much of the time.
The outward transition may look the same, but only the person involved can define whether the transition is positive or negative and the degree to which ones life has been altered. Even a positive and not-very-disruptive transition requires a period of adjustment.
Although the onset of a transition may be linked to one identifiable event, transitions take time. Six months, a year, sometimes two years pass before one moves fully through a major transition. Realizing this makes it possible to be kinder to oneself and more understanding to friends who have difficulty coping with change.
Often our first reaction to a transition is extreme, possibly very emotional. Have you ever been jilted? I have. The day of the Big Jilt, I was devastated and thought I would never recover. Within a year, I was happily involved with someone new.
I have interviewed men who lost their jobs because of a plant closing. They, too, felt that they would never recover. Art said, “I feel as if I have been hit on the head and kicked in the back. I will never get over it.” But six months later he was in a new job and could joke about his earlier desperation. Not all transitions end so well. Another man in this group who failed to find a job was still depressed six months after the layoff.
At first you are consumed by the change, preoccupied with thinking and talking about it. This is followed by a middle period of disruption—a period of great vulnerability. You’re likely to experience confusion about what to do next, how to behave. Tiny details can become problematic. If, for example, you have just moved in with someone, it takes a while to know where the dishes and glasses are stored. But more important, it takes time to feel comfortable rearranging them. Finally, the change becomes integrated into your life, for better or worse. You’ve accommodated to your transition. Your former roles, routines, relationships, and assumptions have been replaced by new ones.
Time transforms some bad events, but it also alters good ones. One day you marry the person of your dreams or connect with the love of your life and decide to move in together. You think, “I will always feel like this. Nothing will ever come between us.” Yet, a few months or years later you may have a major blowup and wonder what you ever saw in this person.
In order to illustrate the different ways transitions can change lives, I will relate the stories of five people: Carolyn, a newlywed; Warren, who cared first for his mother and, after her death, for his sister; Cathy, one of the first women appointed to a highly responsible executive position; and Melissa and Frank, who moved from their family home into a condominium apartment. First, the story of Carolyn.
In fairy tales, princesses marry princes, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after. In real life, even if people do manage to live happily, it can take quite a bit of adjusting to get to “ever after.” Carolyn, for example, married her high school sweetheart and moved with him from Cleveland into a small town.
We interviewed Carolyn right after her move. She said, “If you had a ten-point scale and ten was miserable, I’d be off the scale.” Back home she had been part of a tightly knit religious group and had had the support of many close friends and relatives. In her new community she felt isolated. Her husband needed the car to go to work, and lacking convenient transportation, Carolyn stayed in their apartment, without friends or support. To add to her dismay during this lonely period, she had the discomfort and disappointment of a tubal pregnancy.
In an interview six months later, Carolyn sounded very different. She had worked to overcome her isolation and was making some headway. After negotiating the use of the car, she joined a religious group similar to the one in her hometown and even started a newcomers’ club. She had also arranged regular phone chats with family and friends in her old community. “I’d still rather be back home,” she said, but she no longer felt like a complete outsider and was beginning to build a new circle of friends.
Carolyn’s story shows that when you reflect on how you felt at the beginning of a transition and compare it with your feelings about it later, it’s evident that a transition does not happen only at one given point in time. Rather, it is a process—an episode with a beginning, a middle, and usually an end. And all through the transition, your reactions and emotions continue to change as you integrate the event or nonevent into your life.
Warren, a sixty-three-year-old divorced man, who has had open heart surgery, was principal caregiver for his eighty-three-year-old mother until she died, and is now totally in charge of his fifty-year-old disabled sister. He was forced out of a job because he was constantly leaving work to take his mother to the emergency room or do something for his sister. He rarely sleeps through the night and his life consists of constant crises. Despite the stress, Warren said, “I am proud to being doing this. This was the right thing with no regrets. My mom did so much for me when I was growing up. . . . I’m doing what I hope my daughter would do for me.”
Warren feels as if his life is on hold—that he cannot make any personal plans. All he can do is go to work, come home, and take care of his sister. He is trying to figure out a better solution.
Consider the example of Cathy, who was recently promoted to a top executive position—one of the first women to fill this role. At first, the newspaper articles about her thrilled Cathy and her family; she could think of nothing else. But now that she has been in the job for three weeks, she is beginning to feel very confused. The excitement is over, and she is not sure how to behave, how to feel. Cathy is particularly bothered by her new role supervising her former colleagues; she feels isolated from them. The very people she’s normally leaned on for support are now the ones she’s supposed to lead, evaluate, and even fire if need be. This is her vulnerable period, one that can last from a week to several years. If she adjusts well, she will become used to her new role and its power and even come to enjoy it. If she does not, she will suffer, lose confidence, become depressed, and perhaps seek another, less stressful job.
Whether the transition turns out for better or worse, it is still a slow process during which roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions keep changing.
Melissa and Frank realized that their house needed extensive repairs, and their son was a senior in high school preparing to attend college. With a minimal amount of soul-searching, they decided to sell their home. Thrilled when they were quickly offered the asking price, they moved to an apartment building that allowed dogs, and proceeded to invest in major redesign.
Before moving in, they were concerned about three issues: Would they fit into the space? Would the renovations be finished in time? Would their son adjust? They felt they could handle anything. After all, they had elected this transition, and they saw themselves as creative copers.
The complaints started the day they moved into the apartment. Their dog, the construction, and their teenage son all became subjects of a neighbors gripes to the manager. Even though the “best” dog trainer in the city pronounced their dog normal and the neighbors in need of training, Melissa still felt guilty and anxious every time the dog was left alone in the apartment. Petty accusations increased—their son walked through the lobby without a shirt. Melissa and Frank felt as if they had been suddenly transformed from desirable neighbors into pariahs. They did not want to move back to a big house, but they wondered if they could ever learn to tolerate “condominium mentality.”
As time went on, they began to enjoy the condo and all its resources, but even then it seemed that every time they relaxed, something else went wrong. They were amazed by the amount of adjustment this elected transition required. One day Melissa was in tears about the move. She realized that this was a process and though she might be overwhelmed at the beginning, they would eventually incorporate it into their lives.
As they looked back they realized that their move was a process that started with excitement about the move, then went through shock about the complaints, soul-searching about whether they had made the right decision, and—finally—contentment with the move. Eventually, they were delighted to live where they do. Their son moved to his own apartment nearby, and they no longer care about complaints from neighbors.
Many who write about the transition process suggest that people go through sequentially specific stages from beginning to end. In fact, they give labels to each stage. My research and experience lead me to conclude that life is not that orderly. The labels don’t work. What I have found is the following: If the transition is major (having altered your roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions), you will be consumed with it at the beginning. Then you will experience a middle period, during which you will learn the ropes but still feel vulnerable. Eventually you will incorporate the transition into your life, as Melissa and Frank did. They rarely think about the move now, although on occasion they miss the informal atmosphere of a house. On balance they have concluded that the benefits outweigh the losses. Reactions to good and bad transitions change over time, and an important factor in APPROACHING CHANGE is recognizing that we need time to adjust.
There are a number of assumptions embedded in this approach. One is that transitions can be either positive or negative, but if they have altered your life in significant ways, you will need to cope. The more your life is altered, the more you will have to bring your coping resources to bear on the change. Even if members of a group appear to be in the same boat—as we saw with the job loss group—each has unique problems that require unique solutions.
APPROACHING CHANGE requires knowing what change is, how you appraise it, and how much it has altered your life. The next chapter describes the multiple types of change you will encounter—an important aspect of APPROACHING CHANGE.
Name the Transition that is currently uppermost in your life.
Rate the degree to which your Transition changed your life on a 3-point scale: 1 is very little and 3 is very much.
Has it changed your roles?
Has it changed your relationships?
Has it changed your routines?