Last week’s post, From An Ending to a New Beginning: The Role of Transition, explored the three stages of transition (endings, roaming the wilderness/neutral zone, and vision/new beginnings) and how understanding these stages might help us better handle the transitions in our lives. Just to review, change is the physical event that happens to us; it is situational. And when it is sudden or unexpected, we may hit a brick wall on our life journey. We deal with the brick wall by going through transitions. Transitions are what we experience as we internalize and come to terms with the change; they are the psychological aspects of the process.
Dealing with both the change and the transition can be challenging. And for most, dealing with the transition is the most challenging because it is the inner process through which we come to terms with the change. The transition is when we let go of how things used to be and reorient and adjust ourselves to how things are now. This inner process, the transition, takes time and we often face several emotional challenges. This week, I’d like to explore 12 emotional challenges (which are based on the work of Kathleen High, an adjunct professor at Mt. San Antonio College).
For me, the emotional response tops my list of the 12 emotional challenges. Some basic emotions (with related negative feelings in italics and positive feelings underlined include fear (afraid, frightened, scared, hope, excitement), anger (angry, frustrated, gratitude, thankfulness), sadness (sad, sorrow, grief), joy (happy, happiness), disgust (nasty, repulsive, respect, love, appeal), surprise (alarm, panic, amazement), and trust (doubtful, faith, hope, acceptance). Emotions and feelings account for many of our behaviors, for our reactions to or our responses to our daily life experiences. And the challenge for us to avoid dwelling on the emotions and move beyond them.
Next on my list comes grief. Since all change and transition involve some type of loss, it is natural to experience grief as a part of the transitional journey. When we grieve, we go through several stages such as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance (based on the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross). What makes grieving hard is we don’t go through these stages in a linear fashion. Grieving is truly like a roller coaster with lots of ups and down. No one goes through it the same and in the same amount of time.
Another emotional challenge is reminiscing. This is where we have a difficult time accepting what has happened and we fixate on thinking about the time before the change. This is different than thinking about the good memories before the change. It is fine to wrap ourselves in the memory of something from the past but we cannot get stuck there and refuse to move on. It is fine to use our memories of time before the change to help motivate us to look forward at the new possibilities. But, we get ourselves into a bind when we just want to stay in the past and not move forward.
Our sense of identity is another challenge we face when in transition and merits a spot in my top five emotional challenges. Identity is how we see ourselves and often our roles in life give us aspects of our identity. When the change takes away one of our roles or how we see ourselves, we may experience a loss in our sense of self or purpose. This can all lead to an identity crisis. Often with this challenge come strong feelings of sadness or worthlessness.
Rounding out my top five is resistance. When we resist something we flat out refuse to accept it. Resisting the change and resisting making a transition denies us the opportunity to move forward on our life journey.
Mental challenges come with transition. These make us think and act differently and with this challenge, we often rethink our goals and our direction. Mental challenges have the ability to help us move forward and move on if we are open to that.
Transitions often affect how we express our personality. An outgoing person may become withdrawn. Someone who already tended to be introverted may become more reclusive. Positive people may lose their smiles. This becomes a challenge to not let what we may become be a permanent part of our personality. If we tend to be adaptable by nature, we can use this challenge to help us look forward to new opportunities within the transition.
Regret is another emotional challenge. Regret stems from feeling sad or disappointed over what has happened or from choices we have made. Regret often acts as concrete, keeping us stuck in one place. To help us move beyond regret, we need to adopt the mantra: no regrets; just lessons.
Values rank ninth on the 12 emotional challenges list. Values are the principles that we use to guide our behavior (like caring, compassion, hope, kindness, peace, truth, wonder…) These becomes an emotional challenge because some changes rock us to our core and we begin to question our basic values: Why trust when trust can be violated? Why love if it ends too quickly? Why be a hard worker when it is isn’t appreciated or valued?
Transitions can create a paradigm shift changing our perception of reality. How we see things gets skewed and then this skewed view colors how we view most other things in our life.
Aligned with our perception of reality is our spiritual perspective. The more seismic the change, the more we may question the meaning of or the value of life. Many may begin to question their faith or what they’ve always believed. Some turn away from their faith as a result of their transition.
Rounding out the list of emotional challenges is our political perspective. We may find ourselves becoming more conservative or more liberal as a result of our change and our transitions.
Transitions, by nature, have us questioning a lot about ourselves. It is scary to think that the questioning process might raise other issues, but that is exactly what happens and why it is important to know and understand some of the emotional challenges we all face with change and transition. And, perhaps by understanding them more, we won’t succumb to the pitfalls of the challenges, but rather, work through them and use them to find the possibilities and opportunities along our path of transition.
Author Becky Johnen 