Why Life Transitions Are Hard (And How to Handle It Well)
““Change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events but rather the inner reorientation or self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work.” ”
Almost a year ago, my family experienced a lot of transitions.
My wife and I both transitioned into new jobs. We moved to a new location. We changed churches. Our children started at new schools. We found out we were having another baby.
Yeah, a lot of transitions.
Here’s what I’ve learned about why transitions are so difficult:
1. Transitions Bring About Loss
Every time you say “yes” to a change, you’re opening the door to transition. And opening the door to transitions is to welcome losses into your living room. To say “yes” to change is to say “yes” to the others.
Get married? Lose autonomy. Have a kid? Lose sleep and free time (and some more). Move to your dream city? Lose your old rhythms and routines. Every transition brings about a series of losses. (And the aforementioned scenarios are really positive ones. Think about the extra layers of losses that come from a break-up, unemployment, etc.)
See, the issue isn’t figuring out whether the change is good or bad, but what the losses are, because losses are the common denominator. A transition could bring about the greatest changes in your life, and it would still come with some losses.
2. Transitions Make You Feel Lost
Imagine a guy who has just married the girl of his dreams. If you injected him with truth serum 10 days after his wedding and asked him how he was doing - you’d probably be surprised to hear him ramble about how disorienting everything feels.
This is because his old routines and rhythms have been shattered. Going from a single guy who did breakfast a certain way, took a certain route to work, and spent post-work time his way, to now learning to accommodate to his wife’s breakfast preferences, taking a new route to work from a new city, to now coming home to a wife, is a completely different life.
Transition is the in-between space between the life that “was” and the life that “will be.” And that space is filled with excitement but anxiety, newness but confusion.
3 Practices For Handling Your Transition Well
1. Grieve Your Losses
The issue is not will you grieve, but will you grieve well.
We can either pursue health and yield to the grieving process through journaling (for self-awareness) and sharing with community (for expression and acceptance), as a few examples, or we can fight against it and hurt ourselves and others in the process. Because when we don’t grieve well, our pain will leak. And it will be painfully obvious to others around us.
2. Cultivate New Norms
In my new ministry context, we have our midweek services on Thursday nights instead of my previous norm of Friday nights. This means our family has Friday nights open for the first time in a long time.
While this initially felt a little weird, we decided to leverage it by having date nights, family movie nights, and date nights with our kids. We’re trying to cultivate this new rhythm and this is much better than clinging to old norms that are now irrelevant.
3. Give Yourself More Adjustment Time
When people transition, they usually have a mental timetable for when things will “settle down.” Just know it usually takes more time in reality than less time. So save yourself the trouble and give yourself more time to transition than you think you need. Just add a few extra 3-6 months to your initial time-table.
After all of our transitions, I think things started feeling somewhat normal by month 6. Even then, we still had a ways to go.
Here’s the good news: The loss and feelings of lost-ness are temporary. It will pass. And before you know it, life can and will be sweeter than before.
There’s even better news - this whole thing is an opportunity for you to draw nearer to Jesus. Transition has a way of placing our hearts in the right posture for spiritual transformation.
Transition is temporary but your transformation will be forever. Rejoice in that!
