Transition: understanding and managing personal change

Abstract

Today, more than at any other time in our history, people have to cope with an often bewildering variety of transitions: from home to school; from school to work; from being single to being married and — increasingly — divorced; from job to job; from job to loss of employment; retraining and re-education; from place to place and friend to friend; to parenthood and then to children leaving home; and finally to bereavements and death. Alongside these and other major life events people are having to learn to cope with the passage from one stage of personal development to another: adolescence, early adulthood, stabilization, mid-life transition and restabil- ization.

In the ongoing flux of life, (the person) undergoes many changes. Arriving, departing, growing, declining, achieving, failing — every change involves a loss and a gain. The old environment must be given up, the new accepted. People come and go; one job is lost, another begun; territory and possessions are acquired or sold; new skills are learnt, old abandoned; expectations are fulfilled or hopes dashed — in all these situations the individual is faced with the need to give up one mode of life and accept another (Parkes, 1972).