Life transitions
Counselling for life transitions
Migration, career change, becoming a parent, the end of a relationship — change that is much bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.
Transitions are strange because the hard part usually arrives after the event, not during it. The move happens. The job starts. The baby comes. Everyone congratulates you and moves on, and a few months later you find you’re tired in a way rest doesn’t fix, moving through the day on autopilot, present and somehow not.
That isn’t ingratitude and it isn’t a failure to adjust. A transition asks you to become someone slightly different, and the old version doesn’t leave quietly. Often there’s grief inside the change that nobody named, precisely because the change was a good one.
I work with adults in exactly this position — frequently people who look, on paper, like they’re doing well. The work is about locating yourself again, rather than performing having arrived.
Common questions
What counts as a life transition?
Migration or moving cities. Career change, redundancy, retraining, promotion. Becoming a parent, or not becoming one. Marriage, separation, divorce. A diagnosis. Children leaving. Anything that shifts who you are, not only what you do.
Why does a positive change still feel this hard?
Because gain and loss arrive together. A promotion can cost you the work you actually liked. A migration can deliver safety and remove your parents from the same continent. Both sides are real, and only one of them tends to get spoken about.
I keep waiting to feel normal again.
Transitions rarely resolve by returning to the previous normal. They resolve by arriving at a new one, and that takes longer and asks more than most people are warned about.
Is this connected to grief?
Often, yes. Most transitions contain a loss nobody registered. See unspoken grief.
What if my transition is also a cultural one?
Then two things are happening at once, and they compound. That’s the territory of cultural identity and belonging, and it’s a substantial part of my practice.
How long does this work usually take?
Often shorter than people expect — transitions have a shape, and naming it moves things. We review as we go rather than committing to a number in advance.
Continue reading
Writing on this
Why transitions feel heavy →
What causes the feeling of being lost, and what it looks like from the inside.
Snakes, ladders, and the square you’re on →
On progress that doesn’t run in a straight line.
Christmas, board games and finding harmony →
When a season that’s meant to be joyful does something else entirely.
Something has shifted, and you don’t want to keep carrying it alone
Fifteen minutes, free, no obligation. Sessions in English, Hindi or Gujarati,
weekday mornings and evenings, online across Australia.