Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

In America the archaeology of fast-moving men on a nearly empty continent was spread plain and thin on the surface. Its peculiar product was the abandoned place (the “ghost town”) rather than the buried place. Its characteristic relics were things left by choice before they were used up. —DANIEL J. BOORSTIN The Americans: The National Experience1

AMERICANS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN TRANSITION. Whereas Old World families trace themselves back to a place, New World families originate in an act of migration.

As Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, “Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.”4 (That statement, being thirty-five years old, is presumably also out of date!)

To feel as though everything is “up in the air,” as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something—if it is part of a movement toward a desired end.

Moreover, the experience of being in transition is itself changing. Being in between marriages or careers takes on a particularly painful quality when those things are changing profoundly.

(And when we looked back at the other shore, we saw that the dock we had left from had broken loose and was heading downstream.)

published that at least justified the difficulties we experienced as “Catch-30” or the “Mid-Life Crisis.” But such books were based on idealized life schedules that hung off us like one-size-fits-all clothes,

The subject of this book is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, of suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and of launching forth again in a new situation. Because

All transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.

Transitions is not simply a manual on how to cope; rather, it is based on a theory of personal development that views transition as the natural process of disorientation and reorientation marking the turning points in the path of growth.

If we have learned one thing since Transitions was originally published, it is that change will happen—that change is the norm now, and somehow or other we will need to develop ways of dealing productively with it.

(Rule number one: When you’re in transition, you find yourself coming back in new ways to old activities.)

seemed to be that we had all experienced (1) an ending, followed by (2) a period of confusion and distress, leading to (3) a new beginning, for those who had come that far.

However you learned to deal with them, endings are the first phase of transition. The second phase is a time of lostness and emptiness before “life” resumes an intelligible pattern and direction. The third phase is that of beginning anew.

So we have rule number four: First there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between.

But endings make us fearful. They break our connection with the setting in which we have come to know ourselves, and they awaken old memories of hurt and shame.

The change that put him into transition was one that anyone would have called “good,” but it threatened to undermine his life as completely as death or disaster or any other “bad” change. The transition began at one place in his life, but its effects reached across every aspect of his world.

We expect to be distressed by illness, but it is a shock when recovery leads to difficulty. We know that overworking is hard, but how can a big vacation lay us low? And how shall we account for the puzzling chains of events, none of which are especially big or traumatic, that make our lives look like Rube Goldberg machines, one piece setting another into motion

What are the events that have brought change into your life in the past year? And what are the areas of your life in which the changes are evident? Here are some categories and guidelines to

Losses of relationships. What relationships have gone out of your life in the past year—list everything from a spouse’s death to a friend’s moving away. Include marital separations, children leaving home, or the alienation of a former friend. What about the death of a pet, or the loss of some admired hero, or anything that narrows your field of relationships?

Changes in home life. Getting married or having a child; having a spouse retire, becoming ill (or recovering), returning to school, changing jobs, or going into a depression; moving to a new house or remodeling the old one; experiencing increased (or decreased) domestic tension—anything that changed the content or quality of life in your home.

Personal Changes. Getting sick (or well again); experiencing notable success (or failure); changing your eating habits, sleep patterns, sexual activities; starting or stopping school; ma...

Work and financial changes. Getting fired, retiring, or changing jobs; changes within your organization; an increase or decrease in income; taking on new loans or mortgages; discovering that career advancement is blocked. Inner changes. Spiritual awakening, deepening social and political awareness, or psychological insights; changes in self-image or values; the discovery of a new dream or the ...

It makes you wonder about the frequency of colds during honeymoons and realize that transition takes its toll physically as well as mentally and socially. It also makes you realize that there are times in everyone’s life that are transitional in more than a quantitative sense.

My work with individuals in transition makes me believe that in a culture as diverse as ours no one model of adulthood fits everyone—or even anyone—exactly.

This theory, with its assertion of lifelong development and its claim that problems are often signals of life transitions, runs counter to modern mechanistic ideas about adulthood.

roll. The idea that de-velop-ment (which means “unfolding”) continues uninterruptedly throughout a lifetime is entirely foreign to the world of products. Think how strange it would be to have an automobile mechanic lift the hood of your car and say, “Hey, see that swelling on the side of the cylinder block? That’s your second carburetor beginning to bud.” Machines don’t do that.

We are beginning to understand that this production analogy has led to a serious misunderstanding of our real nature and that we need new ways of thinking about the life cycle. As

The first involves an end to old dependencies and the establishment of the person as a separate social entity; the second involves movement beyond that separateness to something more complex, to a deeper sense of interrelatedness. The middle third of life is characterized by a mixture of these two influences. Although the particulars cannot be pinned down into a generally applicable chronology, you will be able to find the signs of them in your own life history.

had a memorable transition experience around the end of childhood, and that experience was established in our awareness as a model for subsequent life transitions.

The ending of childhood is one part of the shift from life’s morning (or dependence) to life’s noon (or independence). A second part of that shift involves establishing a separate identity, distinct from that of being so-and-so’s child.

Every phase of life has such a task, and failing to complete it satisfactorily means that you make the transition into the next phase accompanied by unfinished business. And most of us didn’t entirely finish the job of resolving identity issues back then. Consequently, whenever we enter a new transition, some of those old identity issues are going to reemerge.

we are finally on our own. That is the next important transition point for most people: the time when they leave home and set up shop for themselves.

On Your Own: What memories and feelings do you associate with that phrase? You may think of moving into an apartment with several friends and getting your first real job, or you may think of a series of gradual shifts—going away to school (but remaining financially dependent); taking a part time job (but having to borrow money from your parents for graduate school); and, finally, finishing school and earning enough to settle your debts with your parents. Some people react sadly to thinking about being on their own: “I don’t think I really made that transition,” said a woman in that first transition seminar. “Here I am at fifty, with my children flying the coop, and I’m only now beginning to taste what it’s like to be on your own.

At the other extreme, I knew a man of seventy who lived with his parents and worked for his ninety-five-year-old father in the family business. No insecurities for him—that is, so long as he kept his life within the tiny circle of his familiar childhood world and excluded alien experiences, such as mature relationships and a real career. Those are extreme examples, of course, but most of us can find in our lives some vestige of the transition to living on our own.

Communication is terribly important, but improving how they talk to one another will achieve much less than will finding out what they really want to say to each other when they do talk. And, yes, roles need to be renegotiated, too, but not until these people go through their transitions and see what their “new” lives consist of can they arrive at an enduring arrangement.

Having been a stranger to his own real needs and interests for so long, he no longer knew what he wanted, or even who he was.

Bob exhausted new careers daily. First he wanted to be a test pilot, then an atomic physicist, then a computer engineer, and on and on. Meanwhile, he was slow to mature socially and didn’t date at all. Don found his son easy to understand yet strangely frustrating.

These reactions are not limited to parents whose children are leaving the nest or taking steps that will ultimately create a life structure of their own. Whenever a member of a system changes, the other members will feel a twinge. Children are bothered when divorced or widowed parents begin to date again. Siblings conspire to keep one another in line long after they have stopped living under the same roof. And, of course, partners in an intimate relationship react with alarm to unexpected changes in the other person.

Whoever in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a [person’s] life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. —WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

TO GIVE PEOPLE’S LIFE STORIES ONE OVERARCHING shape, authors often trace their ultimate achievements back to a childhood dream. But that pattern is usually either the result of hindsight or a suggestion that their development was arrested by something early in their life journeys. As Goethe pointed out, the natural developmental pattern is not for people to keep the same dreams but to relinquish old dreams and generate new ones throughout their lifetimes.

It is no wonder that a job, once a perfect fit with your talents and interests, ultimately becomes boring, or a career loses its power to take you where you want to go. Nor is it a surprise that in even the most rewarding and successful work life many people come to points where—often unexpectedly—they find themselves in transition.

We place a high value on monetary success and professional prestige, and that encourages people to set (and then keep trying to reach) distant and elevated goals. This emphasis on success often stands in the way of people’s doing what really interests them and makes them happy. The

And the emphasis on financial success not only dissuades people from careers and lives that they might have found very satisfying but also teaches them that their own imaginings and longings—those haunting feelings that they weren’t meant to spend their lives doing what they’re doing at the moment—are inherently untrustworthy guides.

This common impression—that your own changing ideas and dreams are not a reliable basis for planning your work life—leads many people to seek career assistance at life’s natural transition points. People who have discounted or blocked out the inner callings from the future have cut themselves off from the very signals that really vital people use to stay on the paths of their own development.

characterizes most vital and satisfying careers, but first we need to note that the extremely high level of change in today’s organizations is likely to keep your career in a semipermanent state of transition.

but our society rewards change in the name of “innovation.” Our economy depends upon it, and if the innovation ceased, our economy as a whole—and, of course, most people’s individual careers—would fall apart.

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and an old identity to a new one.

If that temporary displacement of energy happens to only a few individuals, it is their problem; but when it occurs on a large scale, as it does during big reorganizations and mergers, the individual problem of career transition1 becomes the organization’s problem, in the form of “reduced productivity,” “absenteeism,” “increased defects,” or “turnover.”

How disruptive these times of reorientation will be during your career is determined by two things: first, the inherent importance of the change that triggers them; and, second, whether they coincide with a time when a developmental shift is occurring within you. Losing your job, for example, will always create a big change, but if it occurs when relatively little “developmental business” is going on inside you, it will simply be a practical problem that you have to solve. A much smaller change—not getting a promotion you had hoped for, for example—can have a larger impact on you if it occurs during a natural time of reappraisal and transition, like that at mid-life.