“Change is Good” reads the “Life is Good*” tee shirt, adorably adorned with three pretty dragonflies. Love the shirt. Also agree that change is good. Eventually.

What would your “Change is” tee shirt read, if you designed your own? How would you complete the sentence that begins with “Change is________________ ”   The concept of change can elicit excitement for what is to come, what one can become or an unknown but positive future. So why then, does change also have the ability to scare the daylights out of us?

Not everyone, mind you, may agree that change is scary, but for many, it is terrifying or at the very least, anxiety-inducing. A wise woman recently shared a metaphor for the kind of change that turns one’s world upside down. She shared the visceral sensations of waking up to an earthquake while traveling out of the country. She described the aftereffects of the shaking and the shifting of her immediate environment as altering her ability to trust her footing and her grounding.

This post-earthquake shake-up seems to be such an apt description of the way major life changes can distort one’s reality.   Major life changes such as high school or college graduation, youngest child-off-to-college or getting married, one’s own marriage, divorce, death of a loved one, receiving a serious health diagnosis, witnessing violence or an accident, discovering a spouse’s indiscretion, losing a job, receiving a job transfer, changing jobs, breaking up and/or catastrophic weather events can make us feel as if we can’t trust our footing or our grounding, literally and figuratively. One may feel as if one’s life has been placed in a plastic freezer bag, shaken up and spilled out in a new formation. What was once up is now down. Or is it sideways? How do I move in this new space where the familiar is now unfamiliar? Is it safe? What will happen to me if I take a step? Am I alone in this new space? Why do I feel disoriented, dizzy, lost?

These feelings are absolutely normal. We take in information about our environment via many avenues: we see, we hear, we smell, we touch. We think about it, we compare it to previous experiences. We learn our way around our environment and soon our bodies just know what to do. They go into auto-pilot. They reach for the alarm in the dark in the morning. They walk us sleepily to bed at night. They change the radio station in the car while we drive. 

Then change happens. What we once knew, we no longer know. We might understand parts of this change, but we need to relearn the new environment created by the change. It’s like walking around in the dark of night in an unfamiliar space like a hotel room or a family member’s home or trying to pin the tail on the donkey after spinning around several times. We may feel, metaphorically, like we keep walking into furniture that wasn’t there before or reaching for things (people?) that used to be there and aren’t. New obstacles to hurdle. New paths to take. New people to reach our hands to. Some new paths will be more painful and more confusing than others.   

It’s tough to follow our old routines when big change happens. It’s tough to make big decisions when things feel so foreign to us. It’s tough to feel like our old selves. What did we do before? How did we act? How did everything seem so easy? We may want to avoid our old environment that now feels so different. Yet, we also want to be there, seeking signs that everything is in place, just where it should be. These experiences can create feelings of tension, depression and anxiety as well as excitement and curiosity. Even positive changes can leave us reeling from confusion at times. We may even feel exhausted as we have to adapt to our new world.

As you test out your new footing on your new foundation and as you cautiously tread the new path, you may wish for guidance, a map to follow, a hand to hold onto, a rope to grasp until you trust your grounding again. Do it, take the hand. Counseling can help you learn your way around your new space. Give us a call. We are happy to guide you until you are ready to take the lead.  Best regards, Renee Kolecki, LPCC-S, 4-9-19.

Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash