A Time for Self-Discovery?
Current attitudes imply that our identity is related to the work we do and existing literature focuses on the outer level of our lives in retirement, paying scant attention to the working of our inner life. My heuristic research investigated the psychological effects of retirement and pre-retirement, brought about by age, illness and redundancy at different stages of the life cycle. The results could have social relevance for the counselling profession, at a time when the retired section of the community is expanding. Information came out of a ‘Conscious Retirement’ workshop and a Co-operative Enquiry Group, using creative ways such as masks, spontaneous writing, drawing, inner dialoguing, and clay modelling to access unconscious thoughts and feelings. It was concluded that retirement might be a transformative event involving losses (death of false selves) and opportunities for creativity (birth of authentic selves). It was discovered that adapting to retirement might parallel the grie
