Retirement

Retirement is a significant stressful life event, even though its onset may occur with feelings of relief and joy. The alteration of one’s daily routine, changes in the amount of time spent with partners and family members, new financial circumstances, and evolving priorities in health, friendship, and potentially new professional and philanthropic activities impact an individual emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually.

Each person’s experience of retirement is, of course, unique.

Retirement may ensue in a well-planned fashion or may occur in the context of unexpected circumstances, i.e., in the midst of a layoff or company merger, via an inheritance or legal settlement, following a significant medical event, or in the context of some other scenario in which the needs of friends or family members necessitated a transition.

Patients usually begin psychotherapy to address the challenges of retirement after this new phase of life is underway. Others seek assistance years in advance of retirement, while a portion of retirees have engaged with me after having been retired for a decade or more.

The commonality among all of these patients is the challenge of identifying and establishing new activities that continue to be perceived as meaningful, filling the psychic hole left by the departure from one’s previous professional life.

Yet, as it turns out, retirement is a complex and difficult life transition because it encompasses so much more than deciding on what one will do next.

Through the course of psychotherapy, many patients who are encountering retirement uncover previously unrecognized aspects of their personalities and coping styles that had been more or less concealed when they were employed.

How work buoyed their self-esteem both in healthy and dysfunctional ways, the avoidance of marital and familial issues that work afforded, patterns of physical and emotional self-destruction professional obligations condoned, and conflicts regarding one’s own mortality and legacy that were denied or suppressed are all potential realizations with which the retired individual must contend.

The other component of retirement that often emerges in psychotherapy as especially significant is the bi-directional quality of the experience, i.e., while retirement demands a “looking forward” orientation (i.e., what is next on the horizon?), it also conjures up a necessary confrontation with the past, i.e., the trajectory of one’s life, the decisions, mistakes, and regrets that determined the journey.

It seems that moving forward and looking back are mutually-informing processes that stimulate a reckoning of disparate emotional dimensions of a person’s mental life: navigating regret, remorse and gratitude while simultaneously igniting the creative energy required to forge ahead in new directions. Psychotherapy supports the patient’s capacity to explore the many issues and dilemmas associated with retirement in a comprehensive fashion, hopefully resulting in positive emotional and pragmatic outcomes.

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15615 Alton Parkway
Suite 450
Irvine, CA 92618

Hours
Monday: 8am - 8pm
Tuesday: 8am - 8pm
Wednesday: 8am - 8pm
Thursday: 8am - 8pm
Friday: 8am - 8pm
Saturday: Closed
Sunday: Closed