Transitions are times of shifting identity, stress, values, relationships, or life demands. Even when you’re managing responsibilities, transitions can feel destabilizing, confusing, or overwhelming, especially when your nervous system has adapted to chronic stress or overfunctioning.
Therapy can help you understand what’s happening beneath the surface, restore capacity, and build a way forward that feels grounded and sustainable.
Below are common types of transitions I support people through. Each one can connect with different therapy approaches depending on your needs.
Understanding Life Transitions Through a Therapeutic Lens
Transitions represent pivotal moments in our lives when familiar patterns, roles, or circumstances shift significantly. These changes can trigger a complex mix of emotions, from excitement and anticipation to anxiety, grief, and uncertainty. What makes transitions particularly challenging is that they often require us to let go of what was familiar while simultaneously adapting to something new and unknown.
From a neurobiological perspective, transitions activate our stress response systems. Your brain, designed to keep you safe, may interpret change as a potential threat, even when the transition is positive or chosen. This is why you might find yourself feeling anxious about a promotion you've worked hard for, or overwhelmed by a move you've been planning for months. Understanding this response through a trauma-informed and neurodivergent lens allows me to tailor my approach to how your specific nervous system processes and adapts to change.
Common Life Transitions I Support Clients Through
Transitions, even positive ones can bring stress, and this doesn't mean something is wrong with you. Transitions often ask your nervous system and identity to reorganize. Therapy can provide support, clarity, and steadiness during these in-between spaces.
Career and Professional Changes:
Changes at work often bring up more than logistics. Starting a new role, changing careers, stepping back, or questioning long-term professional identity can surface deeper questions about purpose, worth, and sustainability.
Many of the people I work with are capable, high-functioning adults who look successful on paper but feel depleted, disconnected, or unsure how to move forward without burning out again. Therapy can help you process these shifts, understand the nervous system impact of chronic pressure, and reconnect with a sense of direction that feels aligned- not just impressive.
Fertility and Family-Building Transitions:
Experiences like infertility, IVF, pregnancy loss, or non-linear paths to parenthood often involve grief, hope, uncertainty, and identity shifts- sometimes all at once. These experiences can be emotionally isolating, especially when others don’t fully understand the complexity of what you’re carrying.
I offer a compassionate, grounded space to process the emotional and nervous system impact of fertility and family-building journeys, and to explore how these experiences affect your sense of self, relationships, and future.
Relationship Transitions:
Changes in relationships often reach straight into our nervous system and sense of self. Whether you’re entering a new relationship, deepening commitment, navigating separation or divorce, or adjusting to shifts in family dynamics, these transitions can bring up grief, fear, anger, hope, and vulnerability all at once.
Drawing from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and family systems work, I help individuals and couples make sense of what’s happening beneath the surface, soften reactive patterns, and move toward more secure connection and clarity, whether that means rebuilding, redefining, or letting go with intention.
Transition to Parenthood:
The transition into parenthood, especially the first year, often brings profound changes in identity, relationships, and daily life. Even deeply wanted transitions can come with overwhelm, grief for your former self, emotional reactivity, or disconnection from your partner.
I help individuals and couples navigate this adjustment with support that honors both the joy and the strain of early parenthood, strengthening communication, regulation, and connection during a time of intense change.
Life Stage Transitions:
Certain periods of life naturally ask us to reorganize who we are: moving into adulthood, becoming a parent, redefining relationships, sending children into new stages, or approaching midlife or retirement.
These transitions can stir grief, anxiety, uncertainty, or a sense that old coping strategies no longer work. Therapy can help you make meaning of what you’re leaving behind while building capacity for what’s emerging next.
Geographic and Cultural Transitions:
Relocating, returning “home,” or adjusting to new cultural environments can quietly disrupt your sense of belonging and identity. Even positive moves can activate stress, loss, or nervous system dysregulation.
Together, we explore how to stay connected to yourself while adapting to new surroundings, relationships, and rhythms, without losing your grounding or sense of continuity.
Health and Body Transitions:
Changes in physical health, entering peri-menopause or menopause, injury, chronic illness, or shifts in bodily capacity require both emotional and nervous-system adjustment. These transitions can bring grief, frustration, fear, or a sense of disconnection from your body.
My somatic and nervous-system-informed approach supports you in reconnecting with your body safely and compassionately, helping you adapt to change without pushing past your limits or ignoring what your system needs.
Why Transitions Can Feel So Hard
Transitions are not just “events," they are nervous system challenges. They often:
-
Push you into chronic activation or collapse
-
Stir old patterns or defenses
-
Require emotional + systemic capacity, not just cognitive insight
That’s why therapy that includes nervous system awareness and somatic regulation is a powerful support for transitions.
How I Can Help
Knowing where you are in a transition is as important as what to do next. My process includes:
-
A comprehensive intake that maps your current patterns + nervous system state
-
Identification of emotional, cognitive, and somatic responses
-
A collaboratively designed plan tailored to your goals
-
Evidence-based, nervous-system-aware interventions
How I Support You Through Transitions
Major life transitions don’t always show up as clear symptoms. More often, they show up as feeling off, stuck, reactive, numb, or unsure of yourself. My work focuses less on labels and more on understanding what your system is responding to and helping you move through change with more clarity, stability, and self-trust.
Depending on what you’re navigating, our work may include:
Nervous System & Somatic Support
Transitions often activate stress responses or lead to depletion and shutdown. We pay attention to how your body is responding to change and use gentle, practical somatic and polyvagal-informed strategies to help you feel more grounded, regulated, and present.
Cognitive & Behavioral Tools (CBT )
When familiar structures fall away, unhelpful thought patterns, avoidance, or self-criticism often intensify. We work with these patterns in a way that builds flexibility, helps you tolerate uncertainty, and supports values-based decision making rather than fear-driven choices.
Emotion Processing & Meaning-Making
Transitions can bring layered emotions: grief for what’s ending, fear about what’s next, relief you weren’t expecting, or conflict between what you “should” want and what you actually feel. Therapy creates space to process these experiences without rushing to fix or minimize them.
Identity & Values Clarification (ACT)
Many transitions raise deeper questions about identity, purpose, and direction. We explore who you are becoming, what matters now, and how to make choices that feel aligned rather than reactive or externally driven.
Relational & Attachment-Aware Work
Changes often impact how we relate to others. We look at communication patterns, boundaries, and attachment dynamics so you can stay connected to yourself and the people around you during periods of change.
Practical Integration & Next Steps
Insight alone isn’t always enough during transitions. I help you translate understanding into small, sustainable shifts, whether that’s how you structure your days, communicate needs, or pace yourself through uncertainty.
How To Get Started
If this resonates, the next step is a free 20-minute consultation. This gives us a chance to talk briefly about what you’re navigating, answer any questions you have, and see whether working together feels like a good fit. You don’t need a clear diagnosis or plan to reach out- just a sense that something is shifting and you’d like support as you move forward.
