Life Cycle Transitions or Life Transitions can be experienced as highly unsettling or as a smooth transition into a new life equilibrium.  

The difference lies in your attitude, willingness and ability to manage change.

Once you find yourself in the fray between unfamiliar waters these are the three things that will determine how you experience the transition and how well you determine the outcome for yourself - and others.

What can be the fray? 

• Retirement can be something to look forward to but it also changes your and your partner’s life in several significant ways. Retirement is likely to bring a degree of loss of control and influence stemming from work. At home the greeting “Honey, I’m home” can change its meaning significantly.

• The loss of a partner to death or the loss of any relationship is met by unimaginable pain. The resulting grief is intensified by loneliness. The very support system that helped us all along is gone.

• Change of health status - yours, your partner’s or your parents.

• Pre- or post-divorce struggles are emotionally exhausting.

• Re-Marriage and joining an existing family unit is a labor of love that is sometimes not met with love but resistance of the child/ren in the blended family.

• Unresolved struggles from ongoing or past midlife challenges. Whether the resulting and lingering pain is relational or financial, it hurts.

• Menopause and its psychological and biological challenges. Unless you experience menopause, it is difficult to describe all its causes, impacts and pain because it hits every woman differently and yet, the same.

The fray are circumstances in which you struggle. Individually or together. It always takes personal, emotional and psychological work to struggle through it. Hopefully, to grow through it as well.

Contentment, happiness or peace do not mean the absence of struggle. It means to be in the midst of all these things and still know that this will pass and you will be well. You will be different and you will be well because a well-processed Life Transition or Life Cycle Transition will result in an emotionally stronger, more stable, and calm you.