Are You Fighting Change?
After a major transition, like divorce or even a relocation — be it a a trans-continental or trans-oceanic move, or just a move to a new part of town, you might experience isolation or homesickness that just doesn’t resolve on its own. You may feel misunderstood and alone. Your attempts at reaching out to others may not result in the kind of satisfying interactions that you long for, and you may wonder why. Perhaps you are feeling bad because it hurts to be so alone.
Other life transitions can also be surprisingly challenging.
You may be experiencing a lifestyle change
- living on your own for the first time away from parents,
- you are single again
- or perhaps you are a parent suffering from empty nest syndrome.
- you may be reaching a milestone age and thinking about “what might have been…”
I offer therapy to those facing the challenge and anxiety of adjusting to a new lifestyle.
Situations I’ve just described are hard enough, right? If you also experienced a loss or other traumatic experience early in your life, confronting these kinds of life transitions may pose an extra layer of difficulty. You may find that something about the situation itself evokes deeper feelings and memories from an earlier childhood wounding. If you suffered from sexual, physical or emotional abuse during your formative years, it may be very hard to trust, hard to believe you are lovable, and deserving of being treated with respect.
And maybe you’ve never had a warm, nurturing relationship with your parents that might have enabled you to open up, or to learn on them, so whenever you are in transition, you feel trapped in your aloneness.
By listening very closely, I will gently help you recognize how your past may be impacting your present day difficulties. Together we will look at the options for work on deeper healing or depending on your needs and desires, we may focus instead on strategies for moving through the difficulties you face now — without going into details of the past. If you are ready to work on healing on a deeper level, we can plan how to do so in a safe way. The decision on how best to proceed can only be made once safety and trust have established between us, as this will form the foundation of all our work together.