Lifestyle Changes

A Clinician's Guide to Common Events, Challenges, and Options

Vera Sonja Maass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135902100
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Change is inevitable, and each person handles each event differently, some with more difficulty than others. In Lifestyle Changes, psychologist Vera Maass draws on 25 years of practice experience - and a lifetime filled with changes, growth, and challenges - to present a clinician's guide to working with clients who are facing a fundamental change in their lifestyle. Each chapter explores a different event and its potential impacts on the client's current lifestyle, focusing on positive ways to respond and adapt to the situation. Through a mix of case examples, personal vignettes, sample clinician/client dialog, and engaging language, Lifestyle Changes provides an accessible and practical resource for practitioners that maximizes the potential for positive growth out of each experience.

CHAPTER 1

Yesterday’s Guarantees—Today’s Uncertainties

There is nothing more certain than change. No matter what aspect of life we are looking at, not much remains the same. A hundred years ago people could imagine their lives to be similar to that of their parents. Where once lifestyles were passed on from one generation to another, today many individuals’ lifestyles change drastically and more than once within their lifetime.

Whether it is one’s family lifestyle, professional and occupational lifestyle, the adjustments that individuals in recovery from an addictive lifestyle face, or retirement lifestyle, change is the common thread through all of them. The security of marriage—once only threatened by widowhood—has given way to the insecurities of divorce, repeated singleness, single parenthood, and cohabitation. Careers that were once chosen for a lifetime of employment today encounter confrontation with early retirement or even obsoleteness of skills for many employees. The loyalty of generations of workers, who were employed by the same companies throughout their working lives, is disintegrating as their sons and daughters are confronted with reduced health care benefits and smaller retirement packages than their parents and grandparents had earned. In some cases, the employers have closed their doors and ceased to exist.

Pessimists might point to the end of a way of life, seeing nothing but chaos and decay; optimists might enthusiastically greet changes, waiting for a new utopia to unfold; and realists would view such dramatic changes as presenting challenges that call for adaptation to those changes as well as offering options for exploration of new paths and new adventures.

Reasons for Change

There are those who for various reasons emigrate from one country to another or just move from one region of the country to another. In some cases, people are confronted with the necessity to learn a different language; in many cases they are faced with the requirement to adapt to different cultures and customs. Overall, they often trade some parts of their previous daily life for new ways of existing.

People’s decisions in significant areas of their lives are often lifestyle decisions—decisions that are dictated or at least influenced by the lifestyle they found themselves in at the moment. For instance, a young, independent person would be able to choose a career for his or her interest in the particular field and also look for future opportunities to engage more deeply in those interests. On the other hand, a young man who has already made commitments to a wife and children may consider other variables in his career choices, such as the amount of the beginning salary and whether it is sufficient to consider buying a house for his developing family.

A divorced or widowed mother, living in the suburbs for the sake of her children’s safety, may have to trade her career-oriented job in the city for a less exciting employment opportunity closer to home because, as a single mother, she cannot afford the commuting time or the money it would cost to hire a nanny for the time she is away from her children. She may have to put her career plans on hold for the next several years or find other ways to make her new job meaningful.

Job and relationship choices made earlier in life make an impact on the financial and psychological well-being of individuals later in life, as Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a psychology professor tracking three generations of college students, observed. As reported in the APA Monitor on Psychology (Clay, 2003), people who changed jobs early in adulthood scored higher on measures of having a sense of productivity in work and a desire to generate a legacy for future generations than did individuals who settled down and stayed within an occupation for 20 or more years. The job changes that people made in their 20s and 30s seemed to have beneficial influences in midlife; they saved them from feeling stuck. On the other hand, Whitbourne found that changes in personal relationships (such as divorce) early in life tended to have a detrimental effect on people’s psychological well-being in midlife.

Thinking about retirement, individuals may volunteer their services in an area of high personal interest, something they always wanted to be active in but could not afford to gamble at when faced with family responsibilities. Following retirement from their jobs and with their children grown, they may consider a whole new career—one that includes increased personal satisfaction. They may even want to start a whole new business. In the end, it is the individual’s decision on how to approach the significant changes in his or her style of life.

The situation is somewhat different in the case of forced early retirement, especially when no big severance packet is in the offing; instead of the “golden parachute,” the person may receive nothing more than a “pink slip.” This person’s decision on the basis of his or her lifestyle change may amount to taking any available job, regardless of chances for future advancement, hopes for significant increases in salary, or even promises for meaningful or exciting activities.

Reactions to Change

Confronted with the circumstances of forced lifestyle changes, people initially tend to focus on the losses they experience with the change. “I was looking forward in my retirement to have a house and a boat along the coast of Florida, just fishing and taking it easy in the warm weather,” the hard-working man who is now forced into early retirement may complain. Similarly, health problems can wreck the best-laid plans and force individuals to cope with significant changes in their lifestyles. It is natural that the thought of losses becomes the first consideration in many of these situations.

Other changes may present themselves in the form of opportunities that are too tempting to resist. The young woman who has waited for years for a certain career opportunity exclaims:

I just found this exciting job that entails a lot of travel and meeting interesting people, but my husband resents having to be responsible for our children while I am gone. Now I have to decide between my career and my family; it’s not fair!”

Her husband may respond:

My father never had to do the dishes, cook, and take care of us children when he came home from work. Now I am supposed to do all that while my wife travels around the country. I have a career to think about, too; it’s not fair!

As people are contemplating the losses they are incurring as consequences of these changes, they often engage in a one-directional way of thinking and may blind themselves to the existence of possible options inherent in the new situation. In fact, often they are not even aware of this type of thinking; they may see themselves as faced with a decision where they have to choose one scenario to the exclusion of the other—much like the young woman who saw her choices as between her family and her career. Both choices were extremely important to her, yet she had to give up one of them. As she was weighing the desirability of either one, she could not help but feel a loss in whichever choice she made. If accused of one-directional thinking, she would defend herself, insisting that she was considering both sides, not just one.

But there is more than just deciding between two choices. Much of our thinking is dichotomous, occurring along the lines of good and bad, bright and dark, right and wrong, and so on. When we apply this type of thinking, what we perceive as losses in those lifestyle changes automatically take on the meaning of bad, dark, and wrong. And developments that grow out of these changes seem superimposed on the losses and automatically become experienced with the negative flavor associated with losses. Yet as the actual scenario of most lifestyle changes unfolds, there is another dichotomy at work: Those situations present both challenges and options. Confronting the challenges of change may be extremely painful, but in most situations it is unlikely that there is only one way to approach the challenge.

The Case of Bad Being Stronger Than Good

The case has been made for the greater power of bad events over good ones in everyday situations, major life events, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes (Baumeister, Bratlavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). The reasoning is that bad impressions form faster in people’s minds and are more resistant to modification or extinction than are good ones. Bad pieces of information and bad feedback appear to have greater impact than good ones. We spend more attention on processing bad information than on considering good information and we are more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to follow up on good ones. “To say that bad is stronger than good is thus to say that bad things will produce larger, more consistent, more multifaceted, or more lasting effects than good things” (Baumeister et al., 2001, p. 325).

This reasoning could be applied in some cases of individuals suffering from a particular phobia. For instance, a small child having difficulty getting out of a swimming pool may develop a strong fear that will last to adulthood and keep him from ever entering a swimming pool or any other body of water again. The boy’s fear will overshadow the fun he had at times when he played in the water prior to the frightening incident.

From an evolutionary point of view it might appear adaptive to focus more intently on bad than on good things. Organisms that were better in tune with bad events would have been more likely to survive threats and therefore would have had an increased probability of passing on their genes to future generations. Thus, when considering changes and options, focusing on the possible negative outcomes might appear to be an adaptive movement because ignoring the possibility of a positive outcome may induce regret later for having missed an opportunity for pleasure or advancement, but it does not become a matter of life or death.

Applying these findings to the relationship domain, Gottman (1994) developed a diagnostic index for the evaluation of relationships. For a successful relationship, positive interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one, he proposed. This would indicate that bad events or interactions are about five times as powerful as good ones in close relationships.

Although people may reject the notion of keeping track of their own positive and negative actions in a marriage, most likely their spouses—as the receiving agents—are acutely aware and provide a storage place in their memories for all the negative comments and behaviors endured. Perhaps it would be wise to start establishing a reservoir of good deeds right from the beginning of a relationship. One could compare it with the establishment of a nest egg that would come in handy at some time of need and would also accrue interest in the form of the partner’s goodwill in the meantime.

The Time Factor and Memory

Several decades ago, the then widely accepted notion of Helson’s (1964) adaptation level theory was that although the impact of significant changes in life circumstances is temporary, organisms react more strongly to changes than to stable conditions. The fact that they are most sensitive to new conditions indicates that changes command the organism’s attention to a higher level than would be required for existence in stable conditions. It is not surprising that change elicits strong reactions, but over time it gradually ceases to produce a reaction and eventually will be taken for granted. In other words, habituating to the change, the organism eventually returns to a calmer state of being.

Walker, Skowronski, and Thompson (2003) have taken exception to the notion that bad is stronger than good. Evaluating experimental data, particularly autobiographical memory information, they have suggested that when looking at the frequency of the events in question and the durability of the affect associated with them, negative affect is outlasted by positive affect. They argue that, in general, people perceive life events as pleasant and the pleasant emotions associated with them fade more slowly from memory than unpleasant emotions, and they conclude that people’s memory systems do not treat positive and negative affect equally. Thus, the differential fading of emotional memories with time can be seen to provide individuals with a heightened sense of positivity or psychological well-being, sometimes referred to as “the psychological immune system” that assists in dampening the effects of negativity (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998).

The hypothesis that human development proceeds as an interactive process of person, context, and time was the basis for the theory of life span development proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1995). According to theory, the impact and general perception of an event not only are influenced by personal variables and the context in which it occurred but also are modified by the passing of time.

Developmental researchers have proposed that the process of maturation occurs in stages, phases, or periods of time when certain age-related changes in behavior, thinking, emotion, and personality take place (Erikson, 1963; Levinson, 1990). During childhood, one can think of sensitive periods—a span of months or years during which children may be sensitive or particularly responsive to specific experiences or to their absence. An example of a sensitive period could be considered a child’s age from 6 to 12 months, a period that is significant for the development of parent–infant attachment. In adulthood, a concept related to timing is the notion of on-time and off-time events (Neugarten, 1979). The underlying hypothesis suggests that those experiences that occur at the expected times for an individual’s culture or cohort will be less difficult to adjust to than experiences that occur unexpectedly (at off-time). An example here would be that a person widowed at age 70 would experience less serious life disruption than an individual confronted with widowhood at age 30.

Focusing on adulthood, Levinson (1990) proposed the concept of life structures. These include all the roles individuals normally play and all their relationships, as well as the conflicts and balance that are operating among them. Upon entering a period in adulthood that requires a new life structure, there is a period of adjustment—the novice phase—followed by the mid-era phase, during which adults become more competent at handling new challenges through reassessment and reorganization of the life structure constructed during the novice phase. Eventually, the culmination phase brings about a return to stability when individuals have succeeded in building a life structure that facilitates the management of the new challenges with increased confidence and reduced stress.

Many lifestyle changes require a new life structure. Those that are expected, such as marriage, allow for various degrees of preparation, which will facilitate the transition. For those that come unexpectedly, the challenge of creating new life structures will be experienced as significantly more complicated. Many lifestyle changes also involve changes in people’s roles. Retirement reduces or eliminates the role of worker or employee. Reorganization within one’s employee role could bring on a change from a supervisory position to a line position and vice versa. Divorce and widowhood permanently, or sometimes temporarily, eliminate the role of spouse while perhaps emphasizing that of parent because now there is only one parent to be responsible for the couple’s offspring.

Larry, the suddenly widowed father of two children, was faced with the need to create a new life structure at the time of an unpredicted forced lifestyle change. With his wife and children, Larry had moved to the city about 2 years earlier to follow his professional development plan. His new work situation was very promising, confirming to him that he had made the right decision. But the death of his wife confronted him with the options of moving with his children back to their hometown, where they would have the help of his mother and his parents-in-law; letting the children move back and live with their grandparents while he remained in the city; or trying to develop a life as a single father while having to work fulltime to provide for their needs.

Whichever option Larry would adopt, he would have to build a new life structure and his role configuration would be different in each option. If he sent the children back to live with their grandparents, he would essentially be a single man again. If he moved with his children, he would be a single parent but, most likely, members of the extended family would be significantly involved in his life. On the other hand, if he decided to keep the children with him in the city, again, he would be in the role of the single parent but without frequent and direct assistance from and interaction with other family members. Each of the choices would be very challenging and each would have its own opportunities built in. Larry’s struggle and final choice will be described in detail in a later chapter.

“Meaning Making” and Constructive Alternativism

To accept the notion that the psychological effects of bad events outweigh those of good happenings might seem pessimistic, but it might provide an explanation for why so many people feel threatened by, or at least uncomfortable with, major changes in their lives. If indeed the impact of bad events on the human mind is so much more powerful than that of good events, not much mental and emotional energy might be available to ponder any possible advantageous outcomes. Precious opportunities might be lost needlessly; after all, not every major change contains life-or-death situations.

George Kelly’s formulations of a psychology of personal constructs based on the concept of constructive alternativism (1963) can be seen as offering a more positive outlook. Humans possess the creative ability of “meaning making”—giving meaning to the world rather than just responding to it. The idea of constructive alternativism presents us with the notion that

there are always alternative constructions available to choose among in dealing with the world. No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography. (Kelly, 1955/1991, p. 11)

According to Kelly, constructs provide the channels for mental processes. At the same time, constructs function as controls that individuals place upon lives. Intellect is the essential controlling feature of the human mind and the intellect is involved in formulating communicable constructs. It was Kelly’s suggestion to think of constructs as pathways to movement; each pathway included a series of dichotomous choices. In reconstructing, individuals can either rattle around in their old slots or they can construct new pathways for themselves that previously had not been accessible or perceptible.

The perception of an event and the meaning given it by individuals are shaped by previous experience and as such influence individuals’ reactions to an event or a crisis situation (Collins & Collins, 2005; James & Gilliland, 2005). What meaning individuals assign to an event can be learned by assessing their affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in the situation (Myer, 2001). Four different life dimensions seem to be impacted in a crisis event: physical, psychological, social, and moral/spiritual. For instance, there may be a difference in the way a repea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Yesterday’s Guarantees—Today’s Uncertainties
• 2. Marriage: A Multitransitional Process
• 3. Cohabitation: Prelude to Marriage or an End in Itself?
• 4. Until Divorce Do Us Part
• 5. Lifestyle Changes due to Widowhood
• 6. The Challenges of Single Parenthood
• 7. Caregiving: Putting One’s Life on Hold
• 8. Health-Related Issues Requiring Changes
• 9. Geographical and Cultural Relocations
• 10. Career Changes
• 11. Retirement: A Diverse Menu of Options
• 12. Conclusions
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index