Transitions are disorienting even when they are wanted — and being unhappy inside a change you fought for carries its own particular shame.
The reason is that transitions are made of three things at once: an ending, an uncomfortable middle where the old rules have stopped applying and the new ones have not arrived, and a beginning. Most of the distress lives in the middle, and most people mistake the middle for failure.
Therapy during a transition is less about fixing something and more about having a steady place to stand while everything else moves.
How the work tends to go
Values work to find what stays constant while the circumstances change, grief work for what genuinely has been lost, and — where the transition has reopened older material — trauma-focused work as needed.
