Change is hard - including for therapists like me

So much of the work I do with clients is focused on change. 

Often something has changed that needs to be unpacked, processed, made sense of, and dealt with. Sometimes it’s a loss. Sometimes it’s a shift in circumstances. Sometimes it’s a change in how something feels. Sometimes it’s to deal with a change that was unwanted, or unexpected, or both. 

During much of our work together, the client often wants to change how they respond or feel about what has happened - and so often the change they are trying to affect is hard. 

Most of us would recognise that change is not easy, even change(s) that we have chosen and feel ok about, because familiarity mostly represents certainty, security and predictability. These are things that most of us prefer. They help us to stay anchored, and therefore unlikely to drift away from our chosen path and unlikely to face unwelcome movements. As humans, we mostly prefer to know things will be ok rather than experiencing the unknown: the feeling that anything could happen, which can lead us to feel stress and anxiety. 

In my own life, I prefer certainty. I am a routine and planning-focused person. I like order. I like familiarity. I like to feel in control. As I have written before, I don’t see this as a negative thing, but something that helps me to feel safe: https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/not-a-control-freak. 

My work brings me into contact every day with chaos and uncertainty, anxiety and upheaval. I try to help my clients to navigate what is being thrown at them, taking my lead from them in what they want to feel and achieve. I often will ask them to help me understand what “good looks like”, or where would they like to get to as they make their way through a difficult time in their life. 

It is of course a cliche to say that doctors make the worse patients, and perhaps therefore true that therapists (professional supporters of people through change), can make the worse navigators of change. I don’t know. What I do know, is that I am in the middle of a period of huge change in my life - positive change that I have happily sought out and embraced - but a period in my life that underlines what clients tell me every day: change is hard. 

Over the past four weeks I (and my wife and daughter) have left our home on Merseyside; we have moved to Belfast (although not into our new house - that is still a few weeks off) and stayed in four different places (and counting) thanks to family and Airbnb; my daughter has left her school and friends near Liverpool; my wife has left her job and started a new one; I have moved my business and worked with many clients to shift our work together from in-person to online (mostly successfully); I have established a new in-person base in Belfast and started to receive new in-person client enquiries, referrals and sessions; I am shifting my golf (a key wellbeing activity for me) from Birkdale to Northern Ireland and am establishing new routines and places to exercise, walk and work; all of which in the middle of the school holidays, which is always a period in which routines are thrown up in the air and certainty is harder to achieve in daily life. 

Into all this, I add the experience of being an introvert who needs space and quiet, something that is harder to achieve when staying with family in close quarters, or living out of bags and in spaces in which space is at a premium. There is a danger of course, of dismissing all of these experiences and unsettling feelings they bring up for me as “first world problems”, something I speak with clients about all the time. I am going to resist that dangerous temptation. 

As I say to clients, you feel how you feel, and just because we are not in Gaza or Ukraine, or facing the challenges we hear others face every day through the radio, TV or online, doesn’t lessen the impact that the changes we are facing in our lives have on us. There is no hierarchy or league table of suffering or pain or anxiety or sadness - there is only the feelings we experience. If I break my leg, it doesn’t hurt less because you broke both legs. My challenge in responding to changes in my life are not made greater or smaller because of the changes you are facing in yours. We feel how we feel. 

I currently feel extremely happy - I have achieved my long-standing dream of living on the island of Ireland, with my two favourite people in the world. My heart is overflowing with gratitude to feel at home: https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/we-are-going-home - but I am also unsettled.

I have not yet fully established the sorts of routines and patterns that will help me to feel anchored and at total peace. I have not yet got the order that I crave and need in my day-to-day life. I do not yet have a place to lay my hat or to hang my clothes. I am not yet through this period of great change. And yet, I am ok. I am more than ok. I am feeling very happy and very lucky.

But the fact that I remain unsettled despite all these positive is further evidence if we needed it, that change is hard. Change is really hard.

It is hard for everyone, therapists included.