Navigating Transitions

As the weather becomes cooler and the teachers and children return to school, you may find yourself struggling with the transition. Learning to manage transitions is essential to your emotional well-being.

Step 1: Be Patient.
Be patient as you adapt to changes in the schedule. Allow yourself some extra time so as not to feel rushed or harried, and therefore, irritable. Understand that transitions are necessary and not meant to defeat you. Go with the Flow.

Step 2: Accept Change
The truth is that those who struggle in times of transition are often those who resist change. They prefer to keep things the same and predictable. It is thought to feel safer, for it keeps everything in the comfort zone of familiarity. Of course, life does not stay the same. Accept that change is inevitable. Remind yourself that you are capable of handling change. Eventually the changes that you are experiencing in the now will become familiar.

Step 3: Get Grounded
Schedule a counseling session or better yet, attend a Weekend Workshop offered at Avenues Counseling Center. Let go of fears that hold you hostage to resistance and begin to embrace a life of joy and spontaneity.



 

Options for Personal Transformation

There are 3 options for Personal Transformation:

1.)                        Breakup (relational)

2.)                        Breakdown (physical, emotional, financial)

3.)                        Breakthrough (Transformation)

 

Breakups can turn into breakdowns. It is as if you need to push away a loved one in order to breakdown physically, emotionally or financially. After all, you don’t want to hurt them. Perhaps, subconsciously, you don’t want to take them down with you.

Breakdowns occur when you struggle physically, emotionally or financially. You may get sick or injured, feel depressed or anxious, or face financial difficulties.  Breakdowns can become breakthroughs. You can get to the other side. You can learn something about yourself that you wouldn’t have known, had it not been for the breakdown. You can learn that you are strong, capable, fiscally responsible, happy, or confident.

A Breakthrough is when you push through your feelings of insecurity and inadequacy to emerge more self-aware, more self-reliant, or more capable. You transform much like the caterpillar that becomes the butterfly. As the caterpillar, you can only recognize the pain of feeling trapped, stuck, and uncomfortable.  You wonder if you will survive the pain that sometimes accompanies transformation.  And then something magical happens. What you no longer need falls away, and you are left with what you do need, although it may appear quite different than what you had previously known. Transformation has occurred, and suddenly you have so much more than you previously thought possible.   

Regardless of the route you take, may you appreciate the transformation that comes.