Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

Then, seeing that I was losing her, I said, “Why do you ask?” “Oh, we’re talking at school about what our daddies do, and I wondered what I should say.” This troubled me for weeks. I had thought that I was comfortable with my temporary state of disidentification, but I found that I was vulnerable through the kids—who didn’t really care what I did, so long as it had a name. As time went on, I grew more comfortable with what might be called a “participial” identity, that is, identifying with ing words (gardening, writing, running, lecturing) rather than with nouns. But I have to admit that it always bothered me that the kids preferred nouns. They corresponded to the part of me that still longed for the lost security of a recognizable label.

The lifetime contains a long chain of disenchantments, many small and a few large: lovers who prove unfaithful, leaders who are corrupt, idols who turn out to be petty and dull, organizations that betray your trust. Worst of all, there are the times when you turned out to be what you said (and even believed) that you were not. Disenchantment, you can quickly discover, is a recurrent experience throughout the lifetime of anyone who has the courage and trust to believe in the first place.

The mind is a vessel that must be emptied if new wine is to be put in.

In fact, the entire termination process violates our too-seldom examined idea that development means gain and has nothing to do with loss.

The lesson of disenchantment begins with the discovery that if you want to change—really to change, and not just to switch positions—you must realize that some significant part of your old reality was in your head, not out there. The flawless parent, the noble leader, the perfect wife, and the utterly trustworthy friend are an inner cast of characters looking for actors to play the parts.

The whole idea of disenchantment is that reality has many layers, none wrong but each appropriate to a particular phase of intellectual and spiritual development.

The disenchanted person recognizes the old view as sufficient in its time but insufficient now: “I needed to believe that husbands [or friends or mentors] were always trustworthy; it protected me against some of the contingencies of life.”

The disenchanted person moves on, but the disillusioned person stops and goes through the play again with new actors. Such a person is on a perpetual quest for a real friend, a true mate, and a trustworthy leader. The quest only goes around in circles, and real movement and real development are arrested.

The problem is that before we can find a new something, we must deal with a time of nothingness. And that prospect awakens old fears and all the old fantasies about death and abandonment.

Before you have time to reply, he reminds you how you came to be the ruler of this land. The city was at that time, too, in the grip of a curse, as the terrible sphinx crouched outside the city gate and refused to give back life to the city until someone answered the sphinx’s riddle about the animal that walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening. You were a young adult then, just beginning to make your own way in the world, and you stepped forth and risked an answer: the human being, you said. You solved the riddle, the spell was broken, and in gratitude the city made you its ruler. So now the spokesman says, “Do it for us again.” [In the play, he puts it more cunningly: “Never be it our memory of thy reign that we were first restored and afterward cast down by you.”] They are asking you to keep on being the one you have always been—to live up to your public image. They ask you not to change now.

Having so strenuously resisted the summons to change, Oedipus suffered terribly in the process of transformation. But we often overlook the sequel to Oedipus Rex. Sophocles meant us to see that after the death came a rebirth and a new way of being in the world. By the time we meet Oedipus again in Oedipus at Colonus, he has passed through the suffering of loss. Leaning on the cane that the sphinx’s riddle had referred to, he is not just old but spiritually enlightened and a blessing to whatever town harbors him.

When a person is overwhelmed by a change, the transition—and particularly the ending—is almost impossible to comprehend. That fact, in turn, reminds us that time not only reconciles us to loss but also helps us to understand the loss so that we can live through it.

In our age of stress, alienation, and burnout, this is surely a piece of wisdom that we need to recover. In keeping with our mechanistic bias, we have tried to make do with recharging and repair, imagining that renewal comes through fixing something defective or supplying something that is missing. But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. The neutral zone is the only source of the self-renewal that we all seek. We need it, just the way that an apple tree needs the cold of winter.

Some people seem to know instinctively what they want, and they usually get their signals from their mouths or their stomachs.

Remember, you don’t have to do anything about the wanting; you just need be aware of it. It’s overkill to control your behavior by denying that you’re attracted to or interested in something.8

Because endings are dyings in one sense, the obituary is an appropriate statement about your past. As you stand here in the emptiness of the neutral zone, what do you think and feel about the past? What was unlived in that past—what dreams, what convictions, what talents, what ideas, what qualities in you went unrealized? You are at a turning point now. The next phase of your life is taking shape. This is an opportunity to do something different with your life, something that expresses you in some significant way. This is a chance to begin a new chapter.

Do what you do attentively rather than distractedly while you wait for the real experience to come along. Making tea and putting on your shoes and watching a bird on the bush outside the window are the real experiences.

There are no secrets to taking a neutral-zone retreat, no great topics that you are supposed to meditate on. You are simply living for a little while in a setting that corresponds to your position in life. You’ve removed the old reality glasses so that you can see the world anew.

Mostly it is a time to do whatever you do as though it were an element in an elaborate and ancient ritual and to do it with your total attention. For once in your life, you don’t have to produce results or accomplish anything. If you are happy, be happy. If you are bored, be bored. If you are lonely or sad, be lonely or sad. There is not some better reaction you could be having to the experience. Whatever you are feeling is you, and you’re there to be alone with that very person.

You see the former when someone “goes dead” at work or around the home. There has been no ending, no disengagement. The old job or the old relationship is intact. But the person is not there. He or she has become emotionally unplugged. Sometimes this happens because a decision has been made inwardly to end the situation. Emotionally, an ending has already taken place, although the outer circumstances remain unchanged. Or it may happen when you let go of an old dream because you finally admit to yourself that it is not going to work. Again, a subtle inner ending takes place, although everything goes on as before on the outside. The neutral zone overlaps with the old life, and you move like a sleepwalker through a role that you once identified with.

By treating ourselves like appliances that can be unplugged and plugged in again at will or cars that stop and start with the twist of a key, we have forgotten the importance of fallow time and winter and rests in music. We have abandoned a system of dealing with the neutral zone through ritual, and we have tried to deal with personal change as though it were a matter of simple readjustment.

Therefore, much as we long for external signs that point the way to the future, we must settle for inner signals that alert us to the proximity of new beginnings.

Genuine beginnings depend on this kind of inner realignment rather than on external shifts, for it is when we are aligned with deep longings (the real wantings discussed in Chapter 6) that we become powerfully motivated.

Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so, as though we were making the first step toward disaster. Everyone has a slightly different version of these anxieties and confusions, but in one way or another they all arise from the fear that real change destroys the old ways that we have learned to equate to who we are and what we need. To act on what we really want is the same as saying that “I, a unique person, exist.” It is to assert that we are on our own in a much deeper sense than we ever imagined when we were originally setting up shop as adults.

To make a successful new beginning, it is important to do more than simply persevere. It is important to understand what it is within us that undermines our resolve and casts doubt on our plans.

Then came his transition. It was marital difficulty—his wife began to feel like a fly in the web—but it might just as well have been related to work or health or finances. Being reasonable, this man could see the changes he had to make. He could even feel the excitement of a new and less restrictive relationship with his wife. “In holding her less tightly, I’d free myself, too,” he said. “The guard is a prisoner too, you know.”

As they squint down the long table at me, I feel as though I am nobody talking to somebody. Who am I to tell them what to do? I am afraid that I sound like someone saying, “I know that you have your plans all set, and I know that you think that you are the real pros here, but let me ask you (please) to take a minute to consider…” Then I get a grip on myself and recall what it feels like when an executive team does study its plans with transition in mind and how wonderful it is when a well-made transition plan helps them to foresee and avoid the resistance that fouls up so many organizational changes. I remember what it is like to be sharing a feeling of accomplishment with them and hearing that my warnings helped them avoid costly delays and disruptions. I’m really offering them (I tell myself) the best way to achieve the results that they really want. What I am urging is a wonderful opportunity for them, not only to succeed but to learn something new in the process. I take a deep breath. “I want to suggest something that I think will help you get the results you are after,” I say, and my voice sounds different now, even to me.

In an important new beginning, a preoccupation with results can be damaging.

Psychologically, the process of return brings us back to ourselves and involves a reintegration of our new identity with elements of our old one. This connection is necessary if we are going to be grounded and not up in the clouds. This aspect of the beginning is as natural as the disintegration was back in the termination phase. Inwardly and outwardly, one comes home. As a wonderful Zen saying expresses it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.”

Endings and beginnings, with emptiness and germination in between. That basic shape is so essential to growth that we must learn to recognize it in our lives.

Transition is at the heart of revitalization and transformation. Renewal occurs whenever we relinquish something we were attached to and follow life’s invitation toward new energy and a fresh purpose.

The transition model gives us a conceptual picture of transition. There is an ending, then a neutral zone, and only then a new beginning. However, those phases are not linear stages with clear boundaries. The three phases of transition curve, slant, and overlap.

Disengagement. The separation from what you have lost. Letting go of an identity, a way of being, a relationship, a role. Feeling less attachment.

Dismantling. Taking apart the structure. This could be moving after being in a location for a long time and realizing you can’t take your doctors, dentist, schools, gym, neighbors, friends, favorite restaurants, and other support with you. It might be dismantling your beliefs about an aspect of your life, perhaps a relationship.

Disidentification. The way that loss destroys the old identity you had. You are no longer a spouse or partner, a parent of young children, a project manager or teacher. You no longer relate to the image of who you have been.

Disenchantment. Disappointment, feeling let down or disillusioned by something that once held meaning and significance. You see how this loss separates you from the old reality you knew and accepted.

Disorientation. Feeling bewildered and lost as parts of you slip away. You find yourself alternating between reaching for something to hold on to and letting go.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. —Martha Graham in a letter to Agnes DeMille