Therapy for life transitions in Saddle River, NJ

The last one has moved out and the house has a sound it didn’t have before. Or the marriage ended, and you are forty-nine and living somewhere with a lease. Or you retired on the Friday to a great deal of applause and woke up on the Monday with no idea who you are. Or nothing dramatic happened at all — you just looked up and did not recognise the life you’d been running on autopilot.

The strange part is that everyone congratulates you, or sympathises for a fortnight, and then assumes it’s handled. Meanwhile you are standing in the middle of something much larger than the event itself, and there’s no vocabulary for it.

Every transition is a bereavement, including the good ones

This is the bit people get stuck on, and it’s the reason they think something is wrong with them.

You wanted the divorce and you are grieving. You could not wait for the kids to be independent and the silence is unbearable. You chose the retirement, the move, the career change — and you feel unmoored. So you conclude you’re ungrateful, and you say nothing, because who complains about getting what they asked for.

But you didn’t only lose the thing. You lost the version of yourself that the thing required. Someone’s wife. The person the whole household ran on. The one who knew exactly what Tuesday looked like. That identity was real, and it went, and it went without a funeral. Of course there is grief. There would be something odd about the absence of it.

The script nobody remembers writing

Transitions have a way of surfacing rules you never agreed to. That it’s too late. That this is the part where you wind down. That wanting more at your age is embarrassing. That the interesting chapter has already been and gone and the sensible thing is to be grateful for it.

Most people don’t argue with that. They experience it as realism rather than as an inherited script — and then they live inside it for twenty years.

This is the territory Dr. Birnbaum knows from both chairs. She had twins at 60 and conducted a large part of the argument about what a woman that age is permitted to want in public, on national television, with strangers offering opinions. She wrote a book about it. She is not neutral on the question of whether the script is negotiable, and she’ll tell you where she stands rather than hiding behind a professional face. (There’s more of that story on the about page.)

What the work looks like

Not advice about what to do next. If the answer were a decision, you’d have made it — you are, by all accounts, a capable person.

We start with what actually happened and what your days look like now. Then we get interested in the harder question underneath: who were you being, in the life that just ended, and how much of that was ever chosen? That’s the psychoanalytic part, and it’s what makes a transition into an opening rather than just a loss to absorb.

It’s slower than a plan and I won’t pretend otherwise. You’ll get an honest read from her, including on the things you’ve been telling yourself, which is a different service from being agreed with.

Where

Saddle River, in person — or telehealth anywhere in New Jersey, which a lot of people prefer while a household is mid-rearrangement.