Life transitions can come at us fast or creep up on us slowly. They can be an unexpected illness in the family or a longggg 9 month wait for a baby to arrive. They can be perfectly planned, like college graduation, or spur of the moment, like a surprise work opportunity. The one thing predictable about life is that it is highly unpredictable. Whether you like it or not, change is inevitable.
There are many ways to define a life transition. When the word life transition comes to mind, usually the big events pop up. Events like marriage, leaving a long-term relationship, having a baby, or moving. Of course, these are certainly huge life transitions, but I want to throw out another way of thinking about transitions.
Difficult transitions are anything you define as a change in your life that is causing you emotional distress or disruption. What affects one, may not affect another. Personally, there have been times where smaller changes have affected me more deeply. For example, switching a job at the same company or moving apartments just a neighborhood over.
Our lives take different paths that we don’t expect or plan. A life transition disrupts our normal and causes us to feel emotions that we haven’t felt in a long time. It causes us to feel things like uncertainty, loss, fear, and sadness. Our brains try to make sense of what’s going on, grasping for anything that will tell us what the future holds.
Below are ways of dealing with difficult transitions
1. Focus on Accepting the Way Things Are
Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation. It means becoming aware of the current reality and understanding what needs to be adjusted. If you’re going through a life transition, as hard as it is, try and reflect on the present reality. What might you need to adjust? Perhaps you need to take a different route to work that doesn’t remind you of the past or delete the old photos on your phone of your ex. Letting go is hard. However, moving forward is difficult when you’re stuck in the past.
A helpful trick around acceptance is evaluating the present how it is and examining the current situation. For example, if you moved across the country, your mind may be constantly thinking about the past and the fun times you used to have with your best friend. However, evaluate the current situation as it would be today. Perhaps your best friend moved from your old city or is completely swamped with work. This means that even if you were living in your old city, things wouldn’t be the same. You most likely wouldn’t be having those nights out with your best friend anyway.
2. Don’t Push Way Your Emotions
The more we push our emotions away, the stronger they come back around. You may want to stuff your emotions deep down inside, especially if you are feeling extreme anxiety, fear, or sadness about the change. However, our feelings are like a boomerang; they always come back to the starting point. No matter how hard you try to bury those feelings, they will show up one way or another. Try not to hide your feelings or push them in! What you’re feeling is normal and completely understandable.
By acknowledging how hard the situation is, you’re simply allowing yourself to be human. This can be especially difficult if the change was supposed to be positive, but you find yourself experiencing different emotions outside of pure joy or happiness. Humans and emotions are complex. You may not just feel happiness or joy about a situation, and that’s OK. It doesn’t mean you made a mistake or did something wrong. Your emotions are there for a reason and are telling you important information. Try listening to what they have to say.
3. Find Things You Love to Do While Being in the Present Moment
Did you love working out at the gym next door at your old place or going out to dinner with your ex? Find similar things that you enjoyed doing and go do them! The place or the person may be different, but the action is similar. Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it any less. Try giving it a chance and remind yourself that not everything has changed. While doing something you love, try being in the present moment while doing it. Allow yourself to create new memories. The past will still be there waiting for you if you want to remember it.
4. Ask yourself, what have you learned along the way?
Not every change works out or is meant to be long-term. You may start to think you made the wrong decision or made a mistake. However, try reframing those thoughts and instead think about what you learned along the way and how you will carry it to the next challenge. Take it as a lesson learned rather than an error of judgment on your part. The great thing about life being in a state of change is well, it’s always changing! Meaning, whatever transition you’re going through right now, whether difficult or not, will change. Changes present new challenges, new ways of looking at things, and new ways to open the door to opportunity. Very rarely in life is there a road map of what’s right or wrong or that we have 100% certainty around decisions we make. View each transition as an opportunity rather than a defeat, knowing you made the best decision with all the information you had at the time.
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