Looking for a little advice about your relationship? Perhaps you have questions about parenting OUTCAN? Ask Andrea! Our social worker, Andrea Liss will pick one question a month and answer it in our mid-month bulletin. You can submit your questions anonymously to her at https://bit.ly/MFSEAndreaSFME.
Dear Andrea,
I’m really struggling with our new OUTCAN life. We just arrived this summer and lots has gone wrong. My husband and I ran into some financial difficulties with the sale of our house, my kids are missing their friends and remind me every day about this, it’s looking like work as a teacher is not going to be as easy to secure as I thought, and to top it all off, my mom is sick back home in Canada. This has been a rough start to a posting that I was looking forward to. Any tips for me?
- Struggling
Dear Struggling,
I’m sorry that all these events are happening at once. Here are my thoughts to help you reflect on and even reframe your situation.
The beginning of an OUTCAN is a pretty harried time for newcomers. Once you’ve lived in this particular CAF environment or take time to observe those in the community who are further into their posting you’ll see that most seem less wired, confused, and overwhelmed.
You, however, have been particularly walloped with life events in addition to your transition OUTCAN, dear Struggling. Life is coming at you from all angles. People generally do one of two things when this occurs- start digging themselves out of the hole shovel by shovel-full, sometimes with or without a plan, or, they go to bed and hide under the covers (and become depressed).
We run through life expecting it to be predictable and stable but actually, this is far from reality. Life doesn’t actually follow the stages we were taught in introductory psychology. Terms like “Life stages”, “stages of grief”, “the stages of adult development”, and “stages of change” tend to make us think that events happen in a true, right and straightforward manner. Many adults had the plan of go to school, get married, and have children, however our goals rarely account for illness, job loss, breaking up, and loss of a dear loved one. All of these events are just as likely to occur.
Bruce Feiler is an American social contributor and author of a wonderful new book entitled Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. For this book he gathered stories from people about key moments of significant upheaval in their lives. He posed questions of his research participants that he collected into what he ended up calling, The Life Story Project. He interviewed hundreds of people and documented thousands of stories. The primary conclusion he was able to come to is that life is not linear like we believe it to be. What are the implications of this?
Feiler states “the linear life is over”- one job, one marriage, one family, one spirituality, one sexuality- this does simply not exist. Based on his research, the predictable ‘straight’ life that we have been taught we should want or have never really existed to begin with. Feiler questions adult development theories and popular texts that have supported this notion. It’s actually more ‘normal’ for curve balls to be thrown and upheavals to occur he concludes.
I think Feiler would say that you are going through a number of simultaneous “Life Disruptors”. “Disruptors” is what he calls the curve balls, such as, getting a health diagnosis, having a baby, learning that your partner has had an affair, teaching grade ones online through the pandemic, or moving OUTCAN. These events disrupt our homeostasis and increase uncertainty. We don’t like this.
The average number of Disruptors that an adult goes through over a lifetime is three dozen! If you think about it, we humans must be pretty good at finding our way in life if we make it through life having experienced thirty-six disruptors!
Disruptors are voluntary (marriage) or involuntary (loss of spouse), and personal (victim of crime) or communal (pandemic). Feiler then further distinguishes the Disruptors into five broad categories- Love, Beliefs, Work, Body, and Identity. As far as I can see it dear Struggling, you are getting walloped on the categories of Identity, Love, Work, and Beliefs- all but one in Feiler’s “Deck of Disruptors”. Let me demonstrate with reprinting your Ask Andrea and noting each Disruptor category: “We just arrived this summer and lots has gone wrong. My husband and I ran into some financial difficulties with the sale of our house (Identity), my kids are missing their friends and remind me every day about this (Love), it’s looking like work as a teacher is not going to be as easy to secure as I thought (Work), and to top it all off, my mom is sick back home in Canada (Love). This has been a rough start to a posting that I was looking forward to (Beliefs).
The most important piece of advice I can give is that you are in transition and that most of this will sort itself out within the next six months- the kids will likely adjust, you will quite likely reconfigure your life to accept the employment realities you are facing, and depending on mom’s situation, her wellness may become stable, improve or worsen. When the time comes, you will act as the situation demands. When life comes at us all at once, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Moving OUTCAN is a series of stressful events due to so much change for all family members and all at the same time. Pro Tips: 1. Focus on what you can control and 2. Journal daily with the following question in mind: “What did I do today to help me and my family better transition to our OUTCAN adventure”? This is not toxic positivity- how you frame your posting and what you do about it will define it. If you notice you or a family member is stuck and unable to budge in the transition, seek family, community or professional support. Who knows, you may be experiencing a “Lifequake.”
“Lifequake” is a term developed by Feiler that captures the significance of simultaneous life events without painting the whole thing as necessarily negative. “A lifequake is a
forceful burst of change in one’s life that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal (p.79). A Lifequake will put you back on your heels, where in a life transition it is you who will be putting yourself in the ready position. For one in every ten life Disruptors, things get even heavier in a “Lifequake”. Feiler’s data show that over the course of our lives we experience three to five Lifequakes. At an average of four to six years in length for each Lifequake this means that in fact half of our adult lives are spent in significant transition!
Feiler describes three phases of transition through a Lifequake- the long goodbye, the messy middle, and the new beginning where a new self is unveiled. I think arriving OUTCAN, dear Struggling, is going to be a mix of the long goodbye with the messy middle and an eventual unique opportunity for a new beginning. How long do you want the long goodbye and the messy middle to last while giving it the attention it deserves? That’s something that is under your control dear Struggling.
Feiler’s research indicates that during the messy middle creativity is something that people are ultimately attracted to. Creativity helped them get out of the quagmire of being in the middle of a sense of stuckness. I think creativity forces us to use parts of the brain that are important in shifting our perspectives and increasing the meaning we make out of our transitions.
Struggling dearest, once the dust settles in the next few months you will need to take a look at yourself and what you yourself want out of the next three years. In order to best meet your goal of getting through this tough time, knowing the ABCs of meaning making in transition will help: Agency, Belonging, and Cause.
Psychologist Besser Van der Kolk defines agency as “the feeling of being in charge of your life; knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances”. This is a building block of identity.
Belonging is about our relationships. It’s about the friends, family, co-workers, community we give to and receive from.
A cause is a calling that is greater than ourselves.
According to Feiler, the result of navigating a life transition seems to be the re-weighting of the ABCs for people. This happens because a transition is cued by a pause- the Disruptor disrupts our highly clung-to life trajectories, dreams and goals. The great thing about a life transition is that it gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect. Personal projects are often begun at times of transition, as are increases in belongingness goals and contributing to a cause. The life of non-linearity is our reality. Softening our expectations about a clean and straight life is the prescription.
Check out Feiler’s ted talk on Transitions https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_the_secret_to_mastering_life_s_biggest_transitions?language=en
You may also want to read a past Ask Andrea on Identity at https://www.outcanhorscan.com/post/ask-andrea-stolen-identity
If you would like to pose a question for the Ask Andrea column, please send your anonymous question to https://bit.ly/MFSEAndreaSFME and Andrea will do her best to share some of her ideas.
Andrea has a master’s degree in Social Work and is a Registered Social Worker (Ontario) with over 20 years of experience. She maintains a faculty appointment at McMaster University where she teaches in the Masters of Science in Psychotherapy program.