If you’re in a life transition...
Maybe you’re reeling from the death of a loved one, or another loss, such as a cherished career. The ground just shifted massively beneath your feet, and you’ve lost confidence as you struggle to get your feet back underneath you and decide how to adjust.
Maybe you know you need a change, or that a change is inevitable. Maybe you’re held back by the knowledge that you’ll need to leave someone, or a group of people, behind, and that makes change scary.
Maybe you’ve been holding back from fully being yourself, such as if you’re LGBTQ+ or neurodivergent, and it feels increasingly necessary, for your own well-being, to live your life more fully and transparently. The question is, how?
Do these examples sound familiar? If so, please consider clicking the “Get Started” button at the top or bottom of this page to book a free 20-minute conversation, during which I can provide more detail on how my counsellor training and experience can help you navigate the current juncture in your life.
How I can help
When helping clients navigate life transitions, I often take a more existential approach, guiding them to better understand their subjective experience and the external factors influencing it. Using all of my therapeutic modalities, I key in on the themes of principles and values, strengths, and opportunities.
Principles and values
Whereas life situations are fluid and often unpredictable, solid principles and values are constants that can guide and support you in unexpected, fluid circumstances. I define principles as guidelines for action: what you will do and what you will not do in a situation. I define values as the morals that guide your principles.
Strengths
Your skills and personal strengths are other constants amid life’s flux. With curiosity, I strive to listen for them in what the client says, and find ways to use them. How do they help maintain or increase stability in your life, protect you when life has temporarily removed stability, or when uncertainty about the future threatens it?
Opportunities
Even in bleak circumstances, such as grief over a loss, or some unexpected challenges, there are benefits you can gain at the end of the tunnel. Change, although uncomfortable, is a chance to reinvent yourself, to reimagine your future, and discover resourcefulness and adaptiveness you didn’t know you had.
What does Life Transitions Counselling look like?
“Where are you going?”
It’s the question at the heart of a life transition. And when life is set to pivot, there’s often uncertainty. The future isn’t born yet, and it could change on the whim of a sudden realization, an opportunity taken- or one missed. This is why present-moment awareness is so crucial in transitions. Fortunately, because aliveness and uncertainty often coexist, presence is frequently easier to find!
A poem by Russel Thornton captures the spirit of a life transition and how each moment is alive with energy and possibility:
And you may have gone,
You may have departed into the pure promise of the unknown,
But what could you say of where you had been when you came back?
Or what could you say of your life,
Your loving, not loving,
Being loved, not being loved?
And the miracle of the panic
Was that you were standing, staring,
That you were hearing a bird cry,
That you were seeing the bright blade of a wing,
That a seagull was flying close and low through falling snow.
