You may feel a swirl of emotions around life transitions, no matter how big or small. Developing an understanding of your feelings and responses to transitions is a key component of harnessing your resilience and acknowledging what relationship exists between your feelings and actions during times of change.
Communities have been challenged to modify the ways we show love, accept love, and live with meaning in the wake of adjustments ranging from family planning, to global pandemics, to daily routines. While some life transitions come when we decide it’s time for change, there is a sense of collective powerlessness in the fact that sometimes major life events happen outside of our control, and we are forced to ebb and flow with changing tides or stormy seas.
Mapping our feelings around change may support us in being gentle with ourselves during transitions, and acknowledging how our feelings, or internal world, translate to our external world, actions and beliefs about transition.
Transitions may induce conflicting or paired feelings that are polarizing, but show up to the “transition party” together. This unique duo may look like fear and surprise, anger and sadness, happiness and surprise, or disgusted and bad. These core feelings are intertwined with our “motivation to act” or decision making states. These primal instincts generally drive us to make decisions out of fear or love. Similar to our feelings around change, whether they be light and airy or dark and scary.
Regardless of the outcome, a key piece to this puzzle is acknowledging how our emotional responses (internal world) and external world (change of events, sudden shifts, transitions), our ability to tolerate the type of change, and acknowledgement of our experiences collide to determine how we perceive transitions are scary or tolerable based on our emotional experience. Review the tips below to check-in with yourself around change.
How often do you take a moment to reflect on your relationship to change?
Although it’s happening all the time, in and out of our control, think of a time in the last year you encountered a change that felt major for you. Ask yourself what your immediate reactions and feelings to the change were. Did any of your feelings show up together or conflict?
Based on that emotion and experience, what was it that you needed to feel, hear, or receive at that time?
Caring for yourself as your move through the phases of change is critical. Taking a moment to pause during a period of stress, fear, or love, is imperative to regulate and center clarity in your experiences with transition. Taking a moment to drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, and take a big deep breath. Taking a moment to remove yourself from the process of change and remind yourself that change is everywhere, and it’s a process. Give yourself permission to move through change with any feelings that you have and accept yourself in this moment.
You are the expert on you. During periods of uncertainty or unpredictability, chime into the things that make you feel safe and comfortable. Allow your old routines, or developing new ones, to carry you through. Offering yourself some structure during periods of change may support you bobbing over the waves of change. For us creatures of habit, hearing a long-time favorite song, or eating a familiar and favorite meal may offer you the comfort you need to access a moment of stillness.
In sitting with your feelings, take a moment to think about why this feeling may be showing up. Sometimes fear can show up to the party to protect us from things that have challenged us or made us uncomfortable before. The fear may drive us to disengage with an activity, or activate our flee or fight response to guide our process of engaging, or not, with transition. In acknowledging the ways we feel about change, try to imagine what the need behind the feeling.
Sharing your processes of change with those in your circle may provide commonality, and collective experience in navigating new or uncharted territory. The common thread of human experience is change. Developmentally, emotionally, spirituality, and physically humans are created to change, adapt, and grow. As much as change can be isolating, you must ask yourself, “what if this experience is shared among many people, and can provide a point of connection with others”.
