My client went to work on what felt like a normal day. Then she was called into a meeting and told her role was being made redundant. She had been there eight years. The company had announced cost-cutting, but given how pivotal her role was, she believed she was safe.

In the meeting, everything felt surreal. She was partly in shock, partly flooded with rejection. Everyone else on her team had kept their jobs, so she took that to mean she was the weak one.

She went home and sat in the kitchen alone for four hours. No radio. No TV. She didn’t move a muscle, in shock and visibly shaking.

Her husband came home and asked if she was okay. She said she was fine. He didn’t notice how different she was, and she didn’t tell him. She cooked dinner, he helped, they chatted about the news and his day. They ate. They cleared up. She went for a shower and put on her pyjamas. Then she had a panic attack.

Her husband found her in the bedroom, struggling to breathe and crying. After an hour or so she eventually felt calmer. He asked her five times what was wrong, and each time she couldn’t muster a sentence.

He helped her into bed. She lay in his arms, he stroked her hair, she nestled into his neck and said, “They let go of me today. I don’t have a job anymore.”

He was silent. Still crying, she said, “What are we going to do?”

When the ground moves

A life transition can feel like being inside a whirlwind, with twists and turns you can’t time, predict or control.

Not every transition knocks us sideways. Win the lottery and, technically, you’re in a life transition, but it’s one most of us would welcome and adapt to without much friction. A good problem to have.

The transitions that throw us off kilter are usually the unexpected ones: the abrupt interruption to normal, everyday life.

There are the visible demands: the practical tasks, and a learning curve that can be steep, especially if it’s your first time. And there are the invisible strains: the thinking, understanding, rationalising and planning as you try to make sense of the best way through.

The writer William Bridges spent decades studying how people move through change. He put it simply: “It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions.” The change is the event. The transition is everything that happens inside you as you come to terms with it.

By its nature, a life transition means detaching from something that was a normal part of everyday life. For most of us, letting go is stressful. So is grappling with uncertainty, and so is adapting to something new. Every point in the transition affects us practically, emotionally and mentally, to varying degrees.

Expected or unexpected, there’s an optimal and a suboptimal way to navigate a life transition.

What counts as a life transition?

For my client, it was redundancy. For you, it might be something else entirely.

A career move or promotion, redundancy, dismissal. Starting or selling your business. Filing for bankruptcy. Retirement.

Planning to get married. Contemplating separation or divorce after a long-term relationship.

Moving home, relocating to a new city or a new country. Your children growing up and leaving home. Your parents becoming unwell or elderly and needing care, moving in with you, or you moving in with them.

Planning to have children, struggling with fertility, miscarriage or birth. Becoming a parent, and navigating the phases of child development alongside your key relationships, especially the one with yourself.

A new medical diagnosis, for you or for someone you care about. Perimenopause, which every woman meets eventually, in her own way.

The loss of a loved one. Becoming estranged from a family member.

What happens in your mind and body

Expect a mix of emotions. Shock, shame, confusion, powerlessness, emptiness, fear and overwhelm are just some of the ones clients mention as they move through a transition.

It’s normal to feel waves of emotion, sometimes intensely, sometimes more steadily, as you come to terms with the news.

Physiologically, your nervous system may move into fight, flight, freeze or fawn. You might feel a surge of adrenaline, then a crash afterwards. This happens before you’ve had a chance to think. Dr Stephen Porges, who developed polyvagal theory, calls it neuroception: the body scanning for safety and danger, a process he says takes place “in primitive parts of the brain, without our conscious awareness.”

So your reaction to the news isn’t entirely within your control, and that itself can unsettle you. Perhaps you became intensely upset. Perhaps you froze. Perhaps, like my client, you held it together for hours and then your body caught up with you.

That night, her husband gave her a tight hug and calmly said, “Let’s go to sleep now. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

In the days that followed, she slowly came to terms with her news. Her husband staying calm and resolute anchored her. She spoke to a friend in recruitment, who had tips for updating her CV. She spoke to other family and friends; everyone shared advice, or their own version of events. Each piece was helpful. Together, it left her confused.

Then she came to see me. Actually, her husband found me and booked the call for her. When we first spoke, this is where she was:

• Calmer in the day, but panicked and anxious in the evenings.
• Spending eight hours a day on job sites, applying with her updated CV, while telling herself she probably wasn’t good enough to be selected for interview.
• Scrolling or watching box sets to avoid the feelings when they intensified, especially at night.
• Going over her finances and sharing her deepest fears with her husband every night before sleep.

The problem? She was doing everything in her power to improve her situation, and almost everything she was doing was deepening her suffering.

It was so confusing, because as each day passed she felt worse. Not clearer. Not calmer. And still no plan.

She was following good advice, but it was standard advice you can Google. It wasn’t specific to her situation or her nuances. She wasn’t clear what success looked like for her. And she didn’t realise she could reduce the intensity of the feelings, thoughts and sensations that were affecting her.

Becoming proactive, channelling your emotions into a solution, trying to anticipate the next step: this is often where we put our attention. It’s a way of gaining some control. It can also be a way to avoid the intensity of the emotions running through you.

Being proactive can help in the short term. But it’s just as important to slow life down and honour your situation, so your mind and body can come to terms with things more fully.

Nearly everyone you speak to will have advice on what to do and how to manage yourself, which makes it easy to fall into the trap of believing others know better than you. The risk is that they heighten your emotions by projecting how they felt, or would feel, in your shoes. That isn’t to say your news shouldn’t be shared. But being selective about whose opinion matters, and who is genuinely supportive, shapes how well you move through it.

Why life transitions feel so hard

The loss of control leaves you feeling disempowered. One minute you’re tootling along with a sense of certainty. The next, you’re wrapping your head around an uncertain season of life.

Your sense of identity is often wrapped inside the life you’ve been living. You know who you are and how to be. It’s your comfort zone, even if there were parts you didn’t enjoy or didn’t choose. A transition can make you question who you are, or who you’ll have to become. More than that, it makes you question whether you have what it takes to become the person who navigates it. That pressure is uncomfortable.

We are anchored by our relationships, environment, work, money, health and habits. Through our days, weeks and months we cycle through them, and that rhythm is deeply grounding; it’s where our sense of belonging lives. We attach to these anchors emotionally, and even the ones you didn’t choose on purpose find their way under your skin. So when a transition disrupts one area, it can knock you out of the whole cycle, and that is often what throws us so far off kilter. Letting go takes real energy. It asks you to step back, reimagine your life, and stay open to what might be possible next.

What makes it harder

It isn’t always within our gift to choose our reaction. But some things can seriously delay or worsen our progress.

Numbing your feelings, with alcohol, or by over-leaning on any crutch, tends to intensify them or worsen the situation rather than ease it.

Isolating yourself when you hear the news blocks the very things that help you feel anchored. If you don’t let anyone support you, expect to stay in uncertainty for longer.

Rushing into decisions before you’ve assessed the situation and your options can lead to more suffering. Let the news settle, and take extra time to weigh things up, ideally when you can be objective. At this early stage, it’s better to sit with uncertainty than to make a decision you later regret.

Comparing yourself to others causes more suffering than necessary. If someone else accepted things and moved on with more ease than you, it means nothing about you. This is a moment to step out of any mental race.

Judging your emotions or your reaction is unkind. Showing yourself grace and compassion in a time of uncertainty is the kindest thing you can do. Speak to yourself without judgement or criticism. It will soothe and calm you.

Once the dust settles

It might take hours, days or weeks. Once you start to feel steadier within yourself, it’s time to make moves. The next steps differ by transition, but a few are close to universal:

• Who can I speak to confidentially for objective advice? Someone you know, or a support organisation.
• What are the most immediate, time-sensitive tasks? Make a list of priorities and share it with your inner circle.
• Which of those can I ask others to handle? Assign them.
• What is within my control? Make a micro and a macro list across four areas: relationships, health, finances and career.

For my client, the micro list for finances was a three-month contingency plan. In relationships, she couldn’t control how worried her husband felt, but she could control when, and for how long, they talked about it.

• Keep a list of priorities so you’re taking care of yourself and holding on to the things you can control.
• Consider what is outside your control. These are usually the things that unsettle you most.
• Find a trusted person to help you work out what information, help or skill you need for the things outside your control.
• Take a moment each day to journal, reflecting on your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Honour yourself without criticism.

What changed for her

I showed her how to slow down, to honour the moment she was in, and to ease the discomfort she was carrying.

We designed and tested a morning and evening routine, combining mindset tools to calm her nervous system.

We refined her job search so she was only applying for roles she was good at and would enjoy. She went from eight hours a day to two hours every other day.

We worked out a way to share updates with her husband that didn’t dominate every conversation, every evening.

Within five sessions she was grounded and steady, even though she still hadn’t secured a job.

She learned techniques to manage her emotions, tools to keep for life. She felt empowered and in control of herself. She knew what to do with intrusive thoughts: no more suppressing or distracting, but knowing exactly how to honour, process and release each feeling.

She became confident in her ability to secure a new role. She learned the power of working smarter, not harder, and realised this was a chance to be more selective about where and how she worked.

She started filling her time with home projects she’d put off, and took up hobbies that made her heart sing. She felt a new lease of life.

She set a boundary for conversations with her husband about work: twice a week, no more than 45 minutes, then on to other things. She journalled three or four times a week as an outlet.

Through our work, she came to see that those first feelings were rooted in shame, something she had carried since childhood and knew needed attention. She chose to park that deeper work until she’d secured a role, but she recognised the shame was shaping many of her decisions, and she wanted to come back to it.

Two months later she was offered a role she loved. She accepted.

Don’t walk through a transition alone

Life transitions are inevitable.

The author Bruce Feiler interviewed more than 200 people about the biggest changes of their lives. He found that around one in ten of life’s disruptions becomes what he calls a “lifequake”, and the transition that follows lasts about five years on average. By his reckoning, we spend a large part of our adult lives in transition. So if you’re in one now, you’re not behind. You’re in the middle of something nearly all of us go through.

Learning to navigate a transition is the actual work. It can feel like an unravelling. When the path is unknown, or every option carries risk, ask yourself, “What’s the next right thing to do?”

It’s still a confusing time. But there’s a way through that doesn’t leave you stuck or sidetracked by the noise. You can use the guidance in this blog, and you don’t have to do it alone.

This is what Groundwork is for. Five one-to-one sessions, online, wherever you are. It’s the same kind of work I did with my client, shaped around where you are right now.

You’ll see clearly what is inside and outside your control. The longer you stay unclear, the longer it feels like you’re suffering your way through. Clarity changes the shape of your days.

You’ll build a step-by-step plan for the practicalities, with regular check-ins between sessions, for when time matters.

And you’ll be supported with tools to regulate your emotions, consciously and subconsciously, so the volatile feelings lose their grip and your sense of control comes back.

I’ve walked many women through redundancy, relocation, diagnosis, loss and new beginnings. The time you spend in worry and panic can shrink. The ground can feel solid again, even before you know exactly where you’re going.

And if, like my client, you notice something older surfacing underneath, perhaps shame, perhaps a familiar voice, that’s worth listening to. I’ll write about where that comes from soon.

If you’re in the middle of a transition right now, you can read about Groundwork here, and we’ll see whether it’s your right next step.

References

Bridges, W. Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2011, p.14.

Porges, S. W. “Neuroception: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety.” 2004.

Feiler, B. Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. Penguin Press, 2020.