Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

transition is a constant and unsettling process that offers, as all great hero’s journeys do, the chance of growth and redemption.

Change is your move to a new city or your shift to a new job. It is the birth of your new baby or the death of your father. It is the switch from the old health plan at work to the new one, or the replacement of your manager by a new one, or it is the acquisition that your company just made. In other words, change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events but rather the inner reorientation and 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, because it doesn’t take.

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. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.

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 those three phases are going to be so critical to what we are discussing, let me reiterate: all transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.

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. Throughout nature, growth involves periodic accelerations and transformations: things go slowly for a time and nothing seems to happen—until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird molts, or the hibernation begins. With us it is the same.

change will happen—that change is the norm now, and somehow or other we will need to develop ways of dealing productively with it.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.… “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” Alice replied rather shyly, “at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1

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

rule number two: every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.

No wonder those tribal rites of passage in which the group facilitates a person’s transition from one life phase to the next often contain rituals for clearing the mind of old memories and information.

Why is letting go so difficult? This is a puzzling question, especially if we have been looking forward to a change. It is frightening to discover that some part of us is still holding on to what we used to be, for it makes us wonder whether the change was a bad idea. Can it be that the old thing was somehow (and in spite of everything we thought we knew) right for us and the new thing wrong?

How can we feel a loss when we marry after years of loneliness or receive an inheritance after struggling to make ends meet or achieve fame after a career spent trying to make it?

We feel these unexpected losses because, to an extent that we seldom realize, we come to identify ourselves with the circumstances of our lives. Who we think we are is partly defined by our roles and relationships, those we like as well as those we don’t. But the bonds go deeper even than that. Our whole way of being—the personal style that makes you recognizably “you” and me “me”—is developed within and adjusted to fit a given life pattern. The very complaining that we do is part of that style.

There are ways of facilitating transitions, and they begin with recognizing that letting go is at best an ambiguous experience. They involve seeing transition in a new light, of understanding the various phases of the transition. They involve developing new skills for negotiating the perilous passage across the “nowhere” that separates the old life situation from the new. But before that can be done, you need to understand your own characteristic ways of coping with endings.

Leaving for a better job may, ironically enough, cause the same grief and confusion that occurred in the past when you reached the sad end of a core relationship. It is important to recognize this, for it means that some of the feelings you experience today have nothing to do with the present ending but are the product, instead, of the resonance set up between situations in your present and those in your past.

What you bring with you to a transitional situation is the style you have developed for dealing with endings.

Looking back over your ending experiences, what can you say about your own style of bringing situations to a close? Is it abrupt and designed to deny the impact of the change, or is it so slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening? Do you tend to be active or passive in these terminal situations?

Rule number three: although it is advantageous to understand your own style of endings, some part of you will resist that understanding as though your life depended on it.

Think about how you tend to act at the end of an evening at a friend’s house or a night on the town. Do you try to drag things out by starting new conversations and activities as others seem to be ready to leave, or do you say suddenly that it was a nice evening and dash out? Or what about some recent larger ending, like leaving a job or moving from a neighborhood? Did you say good-bye to everyone, or did you leave a day ahead of schedule just so that you could avoid the farewells?

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.

our most important beginnings take place in the darkness outside our awareness. It is, after all, the ending that makes the beginning possible. So we have rule number four: first there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature.

We expect to be distressed by illness, but it is a shock when recovery leads to difficulty.

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?

Events pile up outside us, and we respond inwardly in ways that leave us changed.

What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening, yet has only one voice? —The riddle of the sphinx The human being. —Oedipus’s solution to the riddle

we think of people as we think of cars: having times of production and function—and then, unfortunately, of falling apart.

In so doing, you can see that the force of life’s two great developmental shifts fan out over the lifetime: 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 point is that Joanna and I (and quite possibly you) 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 psychologist Erik Erikson has explained how that process of identity formation works during youth, when a person tries on a series of roles and experiments with different kinds of relationships.1 Daughter, good athlete, average student, girlfriend, actress, sister, babysitter, pal, shy person, closet moralist, dreamer—out of this potpourri of identities some coherent sense of self must be formed. This is the developmental business of youth, says Erikson. He called it the task of this phase of life.

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:

only suggest that even diverse life experiences reflect the same basic transitional task of shifting from the centrifugal force of leaving childhood to the centripetal one of finding a suitable place in the world.

The variety was immense. But beneath the surface, the various transitions began with the discovery that roles and relationships were starting to pinch and bind.

Second thoughts can turn one’s thirties into a difficult time. It is often the first time of transition after leaving home when a person feels real doubt about the future. It can also be a very lonely time, because the very people one would normally talk to about personal problems may be the people one is having second thoughts about. And the distress is deepened by that twisted old idea that if you’d only done things properly, you would have everything settled once and for all by twenty-five or so.

It’s important to recognize the reason for these feelings and to realize that they are natural. Just because things are up in the air now and you sometimes feel as if you were right back where you started, this is not a sign that you have made a mistake or have been wasting your time for the past ten years. It is only a sign that you are in one of life’s natural and periodic times of readjustment and renewed commitment. You are at the end of the novice period of adulthood, a time when long-term commitments are often made. You know the rules now, and you’re beginning to sense what you can and cannot do well. They no longer ask to see your driver’s license when you order a glass of wine. You are, for better or for worse, an undisputed grown-up. The question is, now what are you going to do?

In human life as in the rest of nature, change accumulates slowly and almost invisibly until it is made manifest in the sudden form of fledging out or thawing or leaf fall.

“It’s the mirror that does it to you first, I think,” said Carol on one of the final nights of the seminar. “I still thought of myself as I had been ten years earlier, but one day I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Where’d you come from, old gal? What ever happened to Carol—the girl who used to live here?’” Within organizations, you may begin to notice a widening gap between you at forty and the younger employees. It is as though some unmarked boundary had been crossed unawares, and you are now in another country. The young and the old seem to have their own places in the structure, but the middle-aged have lost a sense of belonging.

Oscar Wilde hits home: “The gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.”

These discoveries are thought provoking, to say the least, but they sometimes open the door to new activities and new achievements that were impossible when you were under the spell of the old dreams. Carried free of the old conflicts and confusions of trying to make it, and carried out into the clear water of self-knowledge and service, many people find at last what they were meant to do and to be. Gandhi discovered at fifty his real mission in nonviolent resistance. Cervantes was older than that when he began his career as a novelist. Lou Andreas-Salomé was in her sixties when she became a psychoanalyst. And then there is Grandma Moses, not to mention Colonel Sanders.

The transitions during this period depend less often on personal initiative and more often on someone else’s actions, such as your child’s decision to leave home or to marry. As you grow older, the illnesses and deaths among contemporaries carry with them the potential for unforeseen and unwanted transition. Yet every transition is an ending that prepares the ground for new growth and new activities.

Social usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not question its desirability. Fully aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development.

In the world of Greek heroes, Odysseus has just done a unique thing: he has given up his identity. Identities meant fame, and fame meant power. Great heroes sometimes won combats simply by scaring off their opponents. “I am Heracles… Achilles… the great Theseus.” To say, “I am Nobody,” and to find in that new nonidentity a source of power is significant, and it marks a stage of development going beyond the reliance on roles and the “standing-on-my-own-two-feet” stance that is natural to life’s midday. (It is also no accident that the giant who opposes Odysseus in this initiatory struggle carries the name Polyphemus, meaning “famous” in Greek.) For Odysseus has reached the point in his development where he must begin to turn back on himself those forces he has been directing outward at the world. It is the point at which the hero must stop slaying dragons and begin slaying the dragon slayer.

So in the end, the homeward journey of life’s second half demands three things: first, that we unlearn the style of mastering the world that we used to take us through the first half of life; second, that we resist our own longings to abandon the developmental journey and refuse the invitations to stay forever at some attractive stopping place; and third, that we recognize that it will take real effort to regain the inner “home.”

The transitions in life’s second half offer a special kind of opportunity to break with the social conditioning that has carried us successfully this far and to do something really new and different. It is a season more in tune than the earlier ones with the deeper promptings of the spirit.

Importante

Expand this recollection a little. Which of your own life transition points have been the most important so far? We have been discussing a series of typical times of transition and the developmental issues that are critical at each stage. But forget that. What is the chronology of your own experience with transition? Begin with the end of childhood and move up to the present. In some of these transitions, nothing very important changed. But in others, a chapter of your life ended. Make a list of these significant transitions.

but because his father had been miserable from the moment he retired. It is important to identify those transition points that simply correspond to transitions your parents made, since these points represent programming that may have nothing to do with the realities in your own life.

Much of this later growth may look at first like loss, just as much of the earlier growth appears to be gain. But that is no more true than the sense that spring is a season of gain and fall a season of loss. Each is essential to the full cycle, and the cycle is the only context in which the specific changes along the way have real meaning.

It takes a long time to be really married. One marries many times at many levels within a marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces within the marriage, you’re lucky and you stick it out. —Ruby Dee1

People change and forget to tell each other. —Lillian Hellman2

As they grew older, they needed their mother less and less, and Betty’s original desire for a career was renewed.

they say they support a change that someone else in the system is trying to make, but under the table they try to sabotage the change.