As a holistic psychotherapist and life coach, I work with clients all week long who are going through major transitions of one kind or another; relationship endings and beginnings, career changes, geographic changes, death or loss of a loved one, health challenges, etc.
So often I hear my clients say they feel lost, have no idea what to do next, feel like they don’t know who they are anymore and often feel hopeless that things will get better and their life will once again feel back on track.
It strikes me in these conversations, that my clients often feel like they did something wrong, somehow were misled or took a wrong turn because these events are happening to them. They seem surprised that life got so messy and out of control.
As I get older, I am aware they we are socialized as young children to believe we have more control over the outcome of our lives than it seems we actually do.
In my recent blog entitled, Is Your Old Life Dying?, I wrote about the way in which life is speeding up these days and so many of us are seeing our old lives fall away while being called to birth something new. Many times we have no idea what this new life is supposed to be or how we are going to create it, but the old way of living simply feels outdated, suffocating, uninspired and boring. I especially see this in the clients I work with who are in their late 30’s to mid-fifties and beyond.
I listened to a call by one of my mentor coaches this week, Martha Beck, in which she talked about the rapidly accelerating pace of change that is taking place in the world, and in all of our lives, like never before. There is a quickening going on and we are finding situations in our lives collapsing in a way that we are being called to reinvent ourselves, over and over, often in profound and dramatic ways.