Life Stages and Life Change

The lives of successful people, or indeed successful relationships, reflect an ability to adapt successfully to the inevitable changes that life and relationships bring. Change often brings with it considerable challenges for individuals and relationships. When any individual changes, or there is a change in an individual or family situation, individuals and relationships have to adapt to be ‘successfully in step’ with those changes.

Some changes are large, sudden and dramatic. These changes can be thought of as ‘Life Transitions’. Some changes are slow, subtle and develop over a long period of time. Typical life transitions include the birth of a baby, the loss of a loved one, retuning to paid work or being made redundant, retirement, children leaving home, moving state or country, or a significant upward or downward change in finances. These require an immediate and significant response by the individuals and the relationships.

The slower and less obvious changes are occurring all the time, and while over time they can be just as significant as life transitions, the consequences and effects tend to ‘creep-up’ on people. These changes can cause ‘nasty’ shocks for people when they realise that large parts of their world have changed and important elements of their life don’t fit any more.
Both sorts of change can cause mal-adaptation that may not present as a problem until some considerable time later.

A large part of Fergus’s work is helping people manage such change. This is particularly the case when they may not realise that the origin of the problem that they are trying to sort out may go back to changes that needed to be made some time ago. Fergus’s systemic approach to therapy always looks for such issues around points of change, in major events, and in the lifecycle. Sometimes, simply by assisting couples or individuals to identify such issues or events people can get a helpful understanding of their situation and begin to develop solutions to their problems.