Stress Therapy & Making Difficult Decisions
Stress therapy reveals that major life transitions are often fundamentally linked with the necessity of making difficult decisions — and with intense anxiety and stress. When one is confronted with major, potentially life-changing decisions, it can seem very fateful indeed.
Relationship Choices
Stress therapy shows it’s common for crises or major life transitions to be mixed right up with the process of making difficult decisions about key relationships in our lives. Decisions about whether to stay in marriages or relationships, or possibly difficult choices about who to love are frequent. Sometimes these feelings are occasioned by major life transitions; sometimes they force us into the crisis of a major life transition.
Career Transition
It may be that a career path that has been pursued ends or starts to feel like it simply can’t or won’t work anymore. An individual must face whether to stay in the old career, or else find some new way to move forward. Often there can be intense stress in deciding what to do — or how to do it.
Changes in Philosophy, Spirituality or World View
Changes in the fundamental way a person views the world can lead toward making difficult decisions. The reverse can also be true. A change in a fundamental aspect of belief, or a spiritual crisis can be a real earthquake in a person’s life, and it may require a very individual solution, and also the right kind of help to work it through in a way that is authentic for that individual.
Patterns of Behaviour that Don’t Work Anymore
We adapt to situations in life with patterns of behaviour. For instance, the person who grows up in an incredibly chaotic house may learn to be incredibly rigorous and methodical, as a way of “getting through”. Such attitudes may serve a person incredibly well — until one day life calls for change. Transitioning to a new attitude may require skilled help through stress therapy.
A Whole New Way of Making Decisions — and Living?
At crisis points, the challenge of making a particular major decision may lead to a transformed way of making decisions, and, in fact, to a whole different outlook on life as it is worked through. Often, /a-midlife-transition such as Jungian analysis can be of tremendous help in the decision process.
I wish each of you the gifts of insight and clarity in the decisions on your journey towards wholeness.
[cta]
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© 2011 Brian Collinson
2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, ON (near Mississauga)
jamenta
I imagine Jung would usually say to a client: don’t interfere – approach the events/transitions with a wait and see perspective, let the events play themselves out. He would of course, pay very close attention to the client’s dreams – the perspective of the unconscious. Sometimes – the conscious should act based on the unconscious attitude. But more often than not – the conscious attitude just gets in the way – thus Jung often admonished “Don’t Interfere”.
Not saying any of this is easy. Life is not easy. Being lost is not easy. Facing big transitions in life – even death – perhaps the biggest challenge of all – is a journey – and part of one’s individuation process.