You need to understand your own characteristic ways of coping with endings. One way to do this is to think back over the endings in your own life. Go back to your early childhood and recall the first experiences involving endings that you can remember.. deaths in the family, your parents’ departure on a trip, the death of a pet, or a friend’s moving away. Continue forward on this our of your life history and note all the endings you can recall along the way. Some involved places, social groups, hobbies, or sports; others involved responsibilities, training, or jobs. Some endings make be hard to describe. They have few outward signs, but they may leave long-lasting scars: the ending of innocence or trust, for example, or the ending of responsibility or of a religious faith.
What you bring with you to a transitional situation is the style you have developed for dealing with endings. The product of early experience and late influence, this style is your own way of dealing with external circumstances and with the inner distress they stir up. Your style is likely to reflect your childhood family situation, for transitions tend to send family members to different tasks: One person feels all the grief and anxiety for the entire group, another comforts the mourner, another takes over the routine responsibilities, and yet another goes into a sort of parody of “being in control of the situation.”
What can you say about your own style of bringing situations to a close? It is abrupt and designed to deny the impact of the change, or is it so slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening? Do you tend to be active or passive in these terminal situations? That is, is it your initiative that brings things to term or do events just happen to you?
Think about how you tend to act at the end of an evening at a friend’s house or a night on the town. Do you try to drag things out by starting new conversations and activities as others seem to be ready to leave, or do you say suddenly that it was a nice evening and dash out? Or what about some recent larger ending: leaving a job or moving from a neighborhood? Did you say goodbye to everyone, or did you leave a day ahead of schedule just so that you could avoid the goodbyes?
Everyone finds endings difficult, so your own style is not a sign that you have some “problem” that others don’t have. The person who leaves early and the one who stays late are both avoiding endings and the discomfort of facing a break in the continuity of things. Whether you are a dasher or a lingerer is largely the result of how you learned to avoid the “party’s-over” experience as a child.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
