Difference between change and transition

Literature has always been preoccupied with transformation, with departures and arrivals, with thresholds and in-between spaces. Psychology also explores change and transformation, though through a different lens. Both disciplines ask the same question what happens to us when life moves on, and we haven’t yet caught up? Because while change happens quickly, transition takes time.

Divorce, becoming a parent, loss, leaving or starting a new career all demand more than new circumstances, they ask for new identities. The external event may be over in a moment, but the inner work of adjusting to it can take months or years.

Psychologist and organisational consultant William Bridges (1991, 2019) described this process as the difference between change and transition. Change is situational, a move, a loss, a new beginning. Transition is psychological, the gradual letting go of one way of being and the uncertain shaping of another.

Bridges identified three phases that characterise every transition: Ending, Neutral Zone, and New Beginning. These stages are not linear; we move back and forth as we navigate endings, uncertainty, and renewal.

1. Endings: The Work of Letting Go

Every transition begins with an ending. Even positive change carries loss, the loss of familiarity, status, or belonging. A new job can mean losing colleagues and confidence; divorce can remove friendship groups and dissolve routines that once felt secure.

Poet T.S. Eliot wrote,

“What we call the beginning is often the end,
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
(Four Quartets, 1943)

Eliot captures the paradox Bridges observed: all change begins with loss. To move forward, we must acknowledge what’s ending, sometimes a role, sometimes an identity.

Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking offers a poignant study of this first stage. She describes the mind’s refusal to accept loss, its desperate clinging to old realities. Her account mirrors the psychological resistance that so often marks transitions, we cannot build the new until we have honoured what is gone.

Letting go requires space for grief, even when the change is chosen. Without that recognition, people can become stuck in what Bridges called a frozen transition outwardly moving on while inwardly suspended in the past.

2. The Neutral Zone: Living in the In-Between

After an ending comes the disquieting middle, a time when the old way no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t yet solidified. This is the neutral zone, and it often feels like standing in fog.

Neuroscience explains part of the discomfort: uncertainty activates the brain’s threat system. Without clear predictability, the amygdala triggers anxiety and vigilance. Yet this phase, though exhausting, is profoundly creative. It’s the space where new possibilities begin to take form.

Writer Rainer Maria Rilke captured this experience of incubation:

“You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born… the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
(Letters to a Young Poet, 1903)

Rilke’s invitation to “live the questions” mirrors Bridges’ call to stay with uncertainty rather than flee from it.

Similarly, Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, reframes disorientation as essential: “Getting lost is not a matter of maps, but of becoming fully present in the unknown.” The neutral zone demands precisely that tolerating ambiguity long enough for reorganisation to occur.

It’s tempting to rush through this stage by seizing premature solutions. But genuine growth requires time in the in-between, where identity quietly reshapes itself.

3. New Beginnings: Rebuilding Identity

Eventually, a sense of direction returns. This is the phase of new beginnings, when energy gathers and new patterns emerge. The process is rarely dramatic — more a slow accretion of clarity and confidence.

Poet Mary Oliver described this turning point:

“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting their bad advice…”
(The Journey, 1986)

Her words capture the quiet courage of stepping into an untested self.

Derek Walcott’s poem Love After Love offers another image of renewal, the act of “giving back your heart to itself.” It’s a reminder that beginnings are less about invention than about return and integrating what has been learned through loss and uncertainty into a new, more congruent self.

Research in identity reconstruction (Ibarra, 2003; Schlossberg, 2011) supports this view, new selves emerge not through decision alone, but through experimentation. Small, provisional actions, enrolling in study, exploring creative work, forming new connections, gradually consolidate into coherence.

Why Transitions Feel So Difficult

The emotional weight of transition stems from several overlapping forces:

• Loss of identity: Roles provide stability and belonging; their loss can feel like losing oneself.

• Ambiguity intolerance: The brain equates uncertainty with threat.

• Cognitive strain: Constant adaptation taxes concentration and regulation.

• Social disruption: Old networks may not fit the new version of self.

• Control and predictability: Transitions highlight how much lies outside our influence.

Bridges’ insight that it is not change but transition that challenges us remains as relevant in therapy rooms as in boardrooms.

Supporting Ourselves and Others

• Acknowledge endings and name what is lost.

• Normalise confusion as part of the process.

• Keep small routines for stability, but hold them lightly.

• Seek relationships that can tolerate uncertainty.

• Experiment gently with what feels new.

• Allow time - psychological change cannot be rushed!

• Be kind to yourself.

Closing Reflection

Life transitions are universal but uniquely personal. They expose the gap between who we were and who we are becoming. Literature reminds us that this liminal space has always existed from Eliot’s paradox of endings and beginnings to Rilke’s faith in the unseen future.

Bridges gave language to what writers and poets had long known: transformation is rarely neat. It unfolds in grief, uncertainty, and renewal. And in that unfolding, we discover that the work of transition is, ultimately, the work of being human.

References

• Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press.

• Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes. Da Capo Press.

• Didion, J. (2005). The Year of Magical Thinking. Alfred A. Knopf.

• Eliot, T. S. (1943). Four Quartets. Faber & Faber.

• Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity. Harvard Business Press.

• Oliver, M. (1986). Dream Work. Atlantic Monthly Press.

• Rilke, R. M. (1903). Letters to a Young Poet.

• Schlossberg, N. K. (2011). The Counseling Psychologist, 39(1), 2–25.

• Solnit, R. (2005). A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin.

• Walcott, D. (1976). Sea Grapes. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.