Life Transitions Counseling
I especially enjoy working with life transitions. Given that I am elderly I have gone through the stages of human development and I am in the last stage per Eric Erickson’s paradigm (see attached). I have experienced transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to middle age to old age. I have also studied life transitions in graduate school with great interest. I am comfortable in discussing divorce, death, teen and adult existential angst, loneliness, social isolation and trauma in addition to helping clients with the stages of human development that we all experience.
Life transitions involve change
Change will happen whether we accept it or not. With reference to Eric Erickson’s stages of psychosocial development, we go through 8 stages of change during a lifetime ranging from trust to mistrust as babies and ego integrity versus despair in old change.
Nothing stays the same. The only constant is change. Yet, change is what we perhaps struggle with the most. We are literally never the same from day to day. For one thing, none of us have ever been as old as we are in this moment. Each day, there is more sand in the bottom half of the hourglass than in the top half. Adapting to change and accepting mortality is essential to good mental health. Accepting change is in my mind one of the keys to achieving peace.
Fighting change is an exercise in futility
Time moves on, even if we do not. Accepting the fact that change is an integral part of living makes us more resilient. Knowing some of what to expect in major live stages makes us more adaptable to change. It decreases our instinct to fight age.
However, we do not know what changes are coming our way. The more we try to control the future and make our individual plans, the more we realize that John Lennon was correct when he said, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Often, our best laid plans are laid asunder by forces of the universe far beyond our control. It is the difference between expectations and realities.
Of course, we are all familiar with major life transitions both in terms of human development and unforeseen circumstances. Imagine if you wrote a life script at the age of 18 of you what you hope will happen in your life and you are now 80 years old and see what happened. It is likely that there would be little resemblance between the two scripts. Even more likely is that you would be amazed how much of what transpired in your life was unpredictable and involved the need to change. The only question is how difficult we made the change because change is inevitable and part of the lifeblood of the universe.
Adversity builds character
My life experience has taught me that adversity truly does build character and our mental health is not so much dependent on what happens to us, but how we respond to life’s vicissitudes. Do we decide that life is a journey, with many sorrows and disappointments yet are able to enjoy life because we are resilient to change, or do we succumb to perceived injustices done to us and live lives of quiet desperation, harboring anger and resentment?
In my many years of counseling, it continues to amaze me as to the link between a client’s attitude toward change and his or her own mental health status. Those who can accept things as they are, and not as they wish they were, tend to be healthiest people I have ever met. They are inspirational to me. Life transitions are a part of nature. We transition from birth to death. It is largely up to us how we choose to make the journey. Death is the great equalizer; we all share the same destiny.
Those who cannot move past hurts, injustices, slights, hurts and disappointments tend to live in a world of bitterness and resentment. In my experience the Buddhist First Noble Truth is true: “All life involves suffering.” No one gets a free pass. We all carry burdens unique to us. Many of those burdens we carry are due to the inability to make peace with change. My hair is white (what is left of it). I could bemoan the fact that I have grown old and have lost much of my physical strength, or do I celebrate that I have been given the opportunity to live a full life? It is my choice. Happiness can be a choice.
I often tell my clients that the difference between counseling and therapy is that the former may make you feel better in the short term, but that the latter will have more lasting impact and will cause pain because it necessarily demands change. And change is difficult and often painful. When I use EMDR, or Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavior Therapy, change is required for healing. There is no easy way to heal trauma. Change and pain are necessary elements to the healing process. I refer to myself as a therapist, not a counselor, because I insist on change in therapy. There is not other path to genuine healing.
I understand change. I am old and am now in the eighth and last stage of life. I am thankful that I am here. I appreciate the fact that I am a therapist who can help others through life transitions. It is a blessing.
Please Contact Me If I May be of Help
If you are struggling to make a transition or change in your life, I can help. Please call 614-307-6698 or contact me. I would be happy to address any concerns or questions you may have about my practice or approach to life transitions therapy.
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