This chapter will guide you in assessing one of your four S’s—your Situation. When you think back on all the transitions that you have made in your lifetime, you can probably remember some that you handled rather well and others that you handled less smoothly and with less satisfactory results. Since you are the same person, it may be puzzling that you could have pulled through one change like a trooper and yet floundered in the face of other, apparently less severe changes.
In chapter 2, I described different types of transition events and non-events, showing that some are anticipated and planned for, while others are unexpected and catch us by surprise. Some alter our lives dramatically; others do not. To understand your own Situation, it helps to identify your transition and try to attach one of those labels to it. But in order to take some of the mystery out of your transition, go beyond the label and ask yourself a series of questions: What are the characteristics of your particular Situation in terms of your planning for it, its timing in your life, your control of it, your previous experience with similar transitions, its permanence, and the presence of other stresses in your life?
Your answers to these questions will differ with each of your transitions. You will evaluate some as negative, others as positive, and many as a mixture. Some transitions will change your life in every regard; others in more limited ways. Some you will be able to plan for and control, but others will seem overwhelming and out of your control. Some will occur at a bad time in your life and add a burden to the stresses you already have, while others will add zest and sparkle to your life.
This chapter lists the factors that you must assess, consciously or unconsciously, when you TAKE STOCK of your Situation.
You can evaluate your Situation by asking yourself these questions: Can you plan for it? Is it at a good time in your life? Can you control it? Is it fleeting or permanent? And how does it fit into the rest of your life? Psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman found that individuals constantly ask: Is my transition good, bad, or neutral and do I have the resources for coping with the transition?1
They point out that the same apparent transition will be evaluated differently depending on the individual. For example, two young women have just delivered babies. One is thrilled. She and her husband have been trying to have a baby for several years. She is overwhelmed. This is a major transition that is changing every aspect of her life. But she is thrilled about it. The other young woman is a teenager, with very few resources. She is overwhelmed and evaluates the baby as negative. How will she care for it? What will she do about her own life?
Of course, one’s evaluation can change. For example, one woman reported her anguish about a rift in her thirty-five-year-old friendship. By talking through the Situation with her therapist and reading books on women’s friendships, she began to see that she was in the midst of a shifting relationship, not a final rift. She reevaluated her Situation from negative to okay. This modification enabled her to cope with the changing relationship.
Our evaluations are also colored by the way we view the world. Some of us are optimists and see the glass as half full, while others are pessimists who describe the same glass of water as half empty. Though a particular kind of change may seem only negative, it is impossible to make assumptions about how people will react to it. In the study of men whose jobs were eliminated at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the late counseling psychologist Zandy Leibowitz and I found that most of the men felt “hit on the head” and “kicked in the back” when they first learned of the RIF (reduction in force).2 They were terrified of the change, yet six months later typical reports from these men were “I feel like a king” and “I now know I can handle anything.” They had been challenged by change. The week they learned about the job loss, all but two of the men we studied saw the change very negatively. A man who cut the grass reported, “I don’t care about losing my job because I feel sure me and my buddies will get a job cutting grass someplace else.” Similarly, a top executive saw opportunity rather than disaster. “This is great,” he said. “I am so bored with my job, my wife, my life. This gives me the excuse I needed. I’m leaving everything and moving across country.”
A famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is illuminating: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In other words, to one person a job loss can be the devastating last straw that destroys hope. But to another, it can present a challenge to take control and beat the illness down.
Your evaluation certainly affects your ability to cope. In a study of college students, for example, psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman found that students’ assessment of their own competence to handle exams was a better predictor of achievement than grade point average or SAT scores.3
You do not know anything about the nature of the transition for an individual until you know what it means to that person. The bottom line is this: You are more likely to embrace a change if you see it as one for the better or simply as neutral than if you see it as negative.
If you can anticipate a change, you can rehearse for it mentally, and often that makes the change easier. For three years, one woman rehearsed her departure from her husband. She knew exactly what she was going to do on the day that she left, so that when the time came, the inevitably painful transition was somewhat less anguishing.
Many middle-aged and older women begin rehearsing for widowhood. Since men die earlier than women and women traditionally marry older men, there is an expectation that women will live alone. This beginning preparation does not ease the pain but does act as a reality check about what to do next.
Marylu McEwen, Susan Komives, and I conducted a pilot study of men and women college presidents as they left their jobs. We learned that their ability to cope depended on whether or not leaving was voluntary and planned or involuntary and forced. Leave-taking is often difficult, but it is easier when you can plan and rehearse for it.4
There is some evidence that planning ahead for retirement can ease the pain of leaving your roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions. In fact, pre-retirement programs are cropping up as a way to push employees to think and plan about the future.
The timing of a change is often as critical to your reaction as the type of change. Does the event come at a particularly difficult time in your life? Two men recovering from open heart surgery may have very different reactions to the operation and different levels of optimism about recuperation. One, for example, may be in physical pain, but may believe he is facing a bright future with a loving partner and a secure job. The other may have been abandoned by his wife, or his child may have been diagnosed with a severe illness, or he could be jobless. He will find it harder to dream of a better day.
Other examples with built-in timing problems include events such as a family move during the summer before a child’s senior year of high school; a company layoff just before the employees pension rights are vested; and the diagnosis of a serious illness in one partner of a couple about to marry. These unfortunately timed changes can double their normal impact, making it far more difficult for an individual to go through a change. Of course, a change can also occur when it is expected, or at an unexpected but ideal moment, making it much easier to cope. One forty-five-year-old woman had wanted to move to New York to work for many years. But she feared that because of her age and her relatively provincial background, no one would hire her. But with perfect timing, she was offered a fantastic job in New York just as her youngest child was going to college. In spite of her nerve-wracking adjustments to combine a serious career change and a dramatic move, she was able to face these more easily with her nest empty.
In analyzing a transition, it is also important to consider another kind of timing: the timing within the transition process itself.
As discussed in chapter 1, each transition is like a journey, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the beginning you think constantly of the change. The middle period is one of disruption, when you find yourself vulnerable: old norms and relationships are no longer relevant, and new ones are not yet in place. In the final period, you begin to fit the transition into the pattern of your life.
In many ways, the story of adult lives is the story of timing. When were you born—that is, during which historical period? Where are you in your family time? Are you proceeding according to what Bernice Neugarten labeled your “social clock?” This refers to the fact that people are always evaluating themselves in terms of whether or not they are “on time” or “off-time.”5 That is, are they engaging in behavior that seems appropriate? Appropriate behavior reflects our social, person-made clocks.
There are two kinds of control—the ability to influence life circumstances and, when that is not possible, the ability to control how one handles life circumstances. I used to say to my teenage son, “I cannot change the single-minded coach who expects you to play even with a concussion, but I can help you learn how to cope more effectively by considering the following possibilities: 1) you change the situation by getting off the football team; 2) you change the meaning of the situation by beginning to see football as just one activity and the coach’s put-down of you as irrelevant; or 3) you cope by trying to relax, breathe deeply, and imagine yourself as you want to be on the field.”
The ability to influence events, things, persons, and themselves gives people a sense of control. Psychologist Judith Rodin compared residents who were given some elements of control over their environment with others who were not. Not surprisingly, those given control over aspects of their lives lived longer than those given no control.6
I conducted a focus group with wives of football players. One of the wives echoed what others were feeling: “It just doesn’t seem fair. For years I have been on hold while he has become a national hero. When will it be my turn? I feel as if my life is controlled by his schedule and needs, not mine.” Another wife felt that both adults in a marriage or partnership should have equal control over who cooks, cleans, mends, and takes children to doctors and dentists; over who moves for a better job; over whose life “counts.” She wondered, “Will that kind of equality ever exist for me?”
Divorce underscores the issue of control. If I were to interview the cast of characters involved in a particular divorce, I would find as many different stories about control as there are individuals. The couple’s children, for example, might wish to prevent the divorce but realize that they are powerless to do so. The parents of the divorcing couple might also feel that they lack control. The couple who made the decision to divorce may feel in control of the decision, or one member of the couple may feel that it has been imposed while the other member who initiated it feels in control.
In divorce as in any other transition, people may use different methods to cope with the problem of feeling out of control. They may try to change the situation by negotiating, receiving mediation, cajoling, or even by legal means such as promoting legislation to protect grandparents’ rights. Others might try to change the perceived meaning of divorce with comments like “This will really be better for the kids.” Still others try to relax in the face of a difficult situation by jogging, meditating, or relaxing.
Transitions that are forced on us are far more difficult to manage than those we make by choice. In the study of men whose jobs were eliminated, one theme emerged: they were as concerned about their lack of control over the job loss as over the actual loss itself. One man told me, “This experience has been the most difficult in my life.”
Family members may be affected in very different ways by a change in the job status of one person in the family. Psychiatrist Robert Seidenberg wrote about the trauma experienced by women who are asked to follow their successful husbands around the country as the husbands changed jobs. Such moves for a promotion demand very different coping strengths in a family.7 The spouse who is being promoted has elected the change and is often excited and happy about the move. The spouse who follows feels forced into it by the need to keep the family together. This “follower” often feels depressed and unsettled, leaving friends, routine, and a familiar home. Children in such a family have different responses, depending on their Situation, Support, Self, and Strategies. Grandparents may feel very sad about “losing” an entire family. If invited to join the move, they might feel powerless. If not invited, they might feel deserted. We can, however, generalize that the more you feel you can control a Situation, the more likely you’ll be able to manage it and to reduce the toll it takes on you.
Your previous experience can help you get through the transition facing you. Applying what you have learned can help you avoid becoming overwhelmed. Consider two people facing surgery. On the basis of previous experience, one patient may be able to focus on the anticipated surgery, rehearse for it, and prepare for it by recalling the factors that offered comfort and control during past surgeries. Another patient may feel terrified because of previous negative experiences. For this patient, the key might be to identify what made the previous experience negative—a dislike for a particular hospital or doctor, for instance—and try to determine how those factors can be avoided or ameliorated the second time.
Similarly, some families in the armed services or the Foreign Service say that they get used to resettling and even thrive on the experience by viewing the move in terms of the challenge of meeting new friends and becoming part of a new culture and lifestyle. Yet, for other families the stress of such moves can add up until finally someone says, “I’ve had it. Never again.”
Previous experience is an important factor in coping, but only the individual involved can determine whether it is a plus or minus.
We regard a permanent change differently from one that we consider temporary. It is easier to endure—even a very painful transition—if we know that it wont last too long. For example, although no one looks forward to surgery, a brief stay in the hospital for a minor operation is easier to cope with than a diagnosis of a lifelong disability. A man may agree to move to another city so that his wife can enroll in a two-year training program, but only on condition that the move is temporary. He may need reassurance that they will return to their home community when her training is completed.
On the other hand, it feels good when something that is going well is seen as permanent. When interviewed by a television correspondent on 60 Minutes, the new head of a major company said she loved her life at that moment—her family, her job, her money—and she wished that it could last forever.
None of us leads a static life. Our lives are changing constantly, and the same transition may influence you differently under different circumstances. The other stresses in your life influence how you handle a particular transition. Consider the story of Julia, a clerical worker. She underwent a major transition in her life—her husbands job loss. When she described this event to me, it became clear that she and her family were overwhelmed. Her daughter Joan had been living with heart disease. Joan was president of her school class and an active skier and tennis player, and the family had to believe that the teenagers case was exceptional, that she would recover. Yet, at almost the same time that her father lost his job, Joan suffered a serious relapse and was hospitalized. This forced the family to face the prognosis that the youngsters life really was at stake. Earlier that year Julia’s father had undergone eye surgery, and her mother-in-law had died. “I feel like a multiple-problem family,” said Julia. The family felt stretched to its limits. Any one of these transitions—all undeniably negative—could reduce ones ability to cope. Bunched together, this set of changes all but incapacitated this family.
Some changes—even elected changes—can be disruptive. For many people, coping with multiple changes at once can cause stress. Whether you evaluate the changes as stressful or not, they do force you to use lots of strategies. To understand how an individual approaches and responds to a particular transition, it is necessary to look at the range of factors that add up to the context of the person’s entire life.
As you think about making a change or weathering an existing one, you can ask yourself a series of questions about your Situation, your Self or inner strengths, your Supports, and your coping Strategies. In this chapter I focused on your Situation.
Is this Situation good or bad from your point of view? Is it positive or negative? Is it expected or unexpected? Does the transition come at the worst possible time or the best? Is it a move up or a move down? Where are you in the transition process—at the beginning, the middle, or the end?
When confronted with a transition, especially an unexpected or undesired one, it is easy for you to view your Situation as irrevocable or permanent. Yet, as we have seen in this chapter, analyzing a transition systematically shows that each one is different, that some are more significant than others, and that any irrevocability may be more deeply rooted in our own psychological makeup than in reality.
You can improve your ability to cope with transitions by learning how to measure the impact of a particular change: by placing it on a continuum of time and seriousness; by examining the effects it has had on your roles, routines, and relationships; and by becoming more aware of the effect of your own personality on how you view the situation.
Before going on to look at two other crucial S’s—your Self and your Supports—you can analyze your Situation by filling out the chart titled “Your Situation Review.”
