Reflecting On A Year Of Transitions

Life is full of transitions, though we often underestimate how deeply they affect us. A transition isn’t just a change in circumstance—it’s a shift in identity, rhythm, and capacity. Beneath the practical details, change can quietly unsettle our sense of self, stir familiar patterns, and require a slower, more attentive kind of inward listening.

Over the past year, I’ve moved through several significant transitions, which has prompted a deeper curiosity about how change shapes us—in life, in relationships, and in the work we do, including the work I do with clients as a psychotherapist.

Since the start of 2025, I have moved countries, returned to my childhood home, gotten married, become pregnant with my first child, and renegotiated aspects of my relationship with my mother. None of these transitions happened in isolation. Each touched something deeper, rippling into the next and bringing earlier layers of my life into conversation with who I am becoming.

For many of us, major life transitions reawaken early relational patterns, particularly in our relationships with our mothers, and offer an opportunity to meet them differently.

Moving back into my childhood home while stepping more fully into adulthood—and towards motherhood—carried its own quiet synchronies. As I navigated shifts in family dynamics externally, I was also reworking them internally. Becoming a mother brought me into contact with my own maternal imprints, sometimes with tenderness, sometimes with friction, always with growing awareness.

What I noticed most clearly was how my energy moved through these transitions. Some moments brought a sense of expansion—momentum, vision, effort. But periods of intensity were often followed by a marked collapse in capacity. Motivation flattened; the drive to plan or move forward disappeared. In its place came deep exhaustion and strong emotions that needed a steady container. Less striving, less movement—more holding, more listening to what my body needed. This ebb and flow is a natural part of navigating major life changes, and learning to honour it can be as important as any forward momentum.

During this time, I also discovered I was pregnant. My body felt unfamiliar, and for months I lived with constant nausea and fatigue—a physical depletion that made it difficult to engage with life as I once had. At times, I carried a hushed fear that this was permanent—that something essential in me had broken or would not return. This marked loss in vitality asked something quieter of me: to slow down and trust a process I couldn’t yet see. It also deepened my understanding of how transitions live in the body—and how easily capacity can be misread as failure, both personally and clinically.

As my clinical practice naturally began to slow, new enquiries diminished, and I chose to bring some strands of work to a close. Part of this pause was a reflection of my own capacity, but I also noticed how often our capacity is mirrored by what the world offers us. With so many transitions unfolding simultaneously, the universe seemed to provide a quieter year in terms of clinical demands, allowing space for rest, reflection, and recalibration. This was not an easy experience; it stirred familiar beliefs about not being capable enough. What I came to see was that this period required more support, not more self-judgment. I leaned into supervision and returned to my own therapy to process what was being stirred.

There was a stretch of feeling disconnected and isolated, and then slowly, connection returned—through my body, through the growing presence of my baby, and through the steady support of my partner, family, friends at a distance, and the care I received from midwives here in France. This period reinforced something I return to often in my work: during major life transitions, healing and regulation are rarely solitary processes. They unfold most sustainably within relationships that offer consistency, witnessing, and care.

As plans for our new home took shape, something in me settled. Moving away from my childhood home marked a chapter of work completed, preparing me for life as a mother and partner. I felt more resourced, more grounded, more myself—in an adult way. Home, safety, and having a space of my own has always mattered deeply. This new environment, arriving alongside the nesting phase of pregnancy, brought a renewed sense of stability and possibility—a reminder that transitions, when met with care and reflection, can create the container we need to step fully into the next chapter of our lives.

My capacity for work and for others has not fully returned—and I don’t expect it to. For now, I find myself hunkering down in a smaller, more protected world, which I understand as a natural and adaptive part of becoming a mother. In both my personal experience and my clinical work, it’s easy to slip into narratives of giving up or not being good enough when practice changes or pauses. Yet when I step back and look at what is being built instead, I feel a sense of acceptance, even alongside difficulty. From a psychotherapy perspective, it’s never all one thing; it’s the capacity to recognise and hold both.

As I transition out of my practice and into motherhood, it feels important to remember why I began working as a psychotherapist in the first place—and to acknowledge what I am placing down, rather than losing. This matters so that when I am ready to return, I can do so with recognition and continuity, allowing experience to unfold rather than forcing resolution.

Living through these transitions has quietly shaped how I work with others. I find myself listening more closely for questions of capacity, timing, and identity—not just what is changing in someone’s life, but what that change is asking of their nervous system, their relationships, and their sense of self. In my work, I am less interested in helping people push through transition, and more interested in supporting them to move at a pace that allows something new to take root.