Starting Over Isn’t Failure: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Life Transitions

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in San Francisco

There are moments in adult life—leaving a career, ending a long relationship, relocating, stepping away from an identity you’ve outgrown—when people tell me in therapy, “I should be past this by now.” Beneath the sentence is often a quiet fear: If I’m starting over again, does it mean I’ve failed?

In a city like San Francisco, where narratives of linear success and innovation dominate public life, it can feel almost subversive to pause, turn in a different direction, or choose uncertainty over momentum. Yet clinically, these moments of rupture are rarely signs of regression. They are inflection points. Transitional spaces. Psychological thresholds in which the self reorganizes.

The Psychology Beneath the Transition

Life transitions destabilize us not simply because circumstances change, but because the psyche is asked to renegotiate old identifications. An ending in the present often stirs the sediments of earlier experiences—loss, rejection, unmet aspirations, internalized expectations of who we were supposed to become.

Psychoanalytic theorists have long noted that transitions evoke the “in-between” state described by Winnicott and later elaborated by contemporary relational analysts: a liminal psychological space where one’s familiar sense of self loosens before a new configuration emerges. This is why even chosen, healthy changes can feel disorganizing. Transitions pull forward layers of the self that were previously dormant, split off, or deprived of expression.

A career shift may awaken a childhood belief that security must be earned through perfection.
A breakup may reopen early attachment wounds or fears of abandonment.
A move to a new city may revive fantasies of reinvention alongside anxieties about being unmoored.

Transitions don’t just disrupt routines—they reactivate internal worlds.

Why We Misinterpret Transition as “Failure”

Culturally, there is a preference for the illusion of continuity. We are taught to admire the uninterrupted path: steady careers, continuous relationships, upward trajectories. Yet development is not linear. As Erikson's developmental theory and later life-span research have repeatedly shown, identity reshapes itself across adulthood through cycles of rupture and reorganization.

When clients in my San Francisco practice describe feeling “behind,” it is rarely the external transition they fear—it is the internal story about what the transition means. Beneath self-criticism lies the belief that adulthood should be coherent, stable, and fully formed.

But coherence is often a retrospective construction, not a psychological reality.

Reclaiming the Meaning of Starting Over

Beginning again is not an erasure of the past but a re-encounter with it. Each transition invites a different set of questions:

What part of myself was muted in the life I’m leaving?
What desire am I finally willing to acknowledge?
What version of me is beginning to surface now?
What unconscious loyalties or fears held me in place before this moment?

When understood psychodynamically, starting over becomes less of a collapse and more of a reorganization of the self—an integration of previously incompatible or unexpressed aspects of identity.

Transitions are not detours from the path. They are the path.

The Role of Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy offers more than coping skills for transition—it provides a relational space where the meaning of the transition unfolds. Therapy becomes a holding environment in which the mind can safely explore the losses, fantasies, ambivalence, and longings that arise when an old life structure loosens.

In this process, clients often discover that what they experienced as “starting over” was actually a movement toward greater internal coherence—a step toward living in a way that aligns with the self rather than the inherited expectations of family, culture, or earlier versions of identity.

Starting over is not a failure of mastery. It is a sign that your psyche is ready to reconfigure itself.

If You’re in a Transitional Moment

If you are standing at a threshold—uncertain, hopeful, disoriented, or quietly relieved—psychodynamic therapy can help you make sense of what is ending, what is beginning, and what part of you is finally ready to emerge. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty but to deepen your relationship with yourself during a period when the ground feels unsteady.

You are not starting from scratch. You are starting from experience.

Selected References

• Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality.

• Erikson, E. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis.

• Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant.

• Stolorow, R., Atwood, G. & Orange, D. (2002). Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis.