Put an End to the Grind With a Fresh Start

Nine years ago, Leonard Felder was on his way home from a job he hated when the New York subway train he was riding stalled in a tunnel. That event, author and psychologist Felder says, was a major turning point in his life. He made the decision to break out of the meaningless rut his life had become, went back to school and ultimately used his experience as the impetus for his recently released book, “A Fresh Start: How to Let Go of Emotional Baggage and Enjoy Your Life Again.”

Felder, 33, recalls the night in the subway vividly: “At that moment I knew I had to go back to school and do what I’d always wanted to do: become a psychologist and writer.”

As an undergrad at Kenyon College in Ohio, Felder had majored in playwriting but “chickened out” after graduating and decided to get his MBA so he could have a “safer” career. Instead of listening to his own instincts, he accepted a job with a large corporation.

“I was pretending that the MBA career path was the right one for me even though I knew inside that it wasn’t--I was climbing the ladder of success, only it was leaning against the wrong wall.

“But I was afraid to break with what wasn’t satisfying in order to move ahead. It took years before I found the courage to break out of my rut.”

Even after he made the decision to make a fresh start, he still had doubts.

No ‘Overnight Clues’

“There weren’t overnight clues that I’d made the right decisions. Every time I’ve taken a step forward in my life, it’s always involved a period of uncertainty. I had difficulty paying the bills. I was used to working 9 to 5 and felt guilty having so much free time while I went to graduate school. I questioned my right to search for a new career.”

Felder went on to earn his doctorate in psychology, established a therapy practice and has co-authored four books including the best seller “Making Peace With Your Parents.” His most recent book, “A Fresh Start” refers to his own transitions and the insecurity and uncertainty he felt during those periods.

“I wanted to write a book that would help people nurture themselves and get the support that they need to break out of their ruts.

“Most people are raised to believe that you only get one career or relationship in your life. But people in their 30s, 40s and 50s are discovering that sometimes their best relationships or careers aren’t the first ones they choose. They feel guilty because they think there must be something wrong with them if they don’t get it right the first time, and instead of learning and growing from their past mistakes, they have the strange habit of re-enacting similar traumas over and over again.

“The best way to keep the past from disrupting the present and future, and thus make a new beginning,” Felder says, “is to uncover what unfinished business from long ago is keeping you stuck.”

Making a fresh start means different things to different people and yet there are common threads to every success story.

Francine Browner, Lucky Altman, Regina Jones, Lou Gross and Jacqueline Phillips are examples of fresh-starters.

Each of them felt it took courage to admit they weren’t satisfied with their lives and knew that it would take all their energy to make a change. They all stressed the importance of a strong support system and the ability to live with uncertainty, ambiguity and the likelihood that they would make mistakes. They also seemed to agree that Los Angeles is a great place to make a fresh start.

Historian David Clark corroborates this belief. In his UCLA extension course, titled “Improbable L.A.,” Clark describes Los Angeles as a place that has been built because people chose to come here to make a new start in life.

“Los Angeles has been considered the “city of second chances” since the turn of the century,” says Clark, whose grandfather came here in 1921. “Like many people who came to L.A., he had no specific reason other than he thought there would be better opportunities here, and he was willing to take a gamble on discovering one.

“The message that you could take from Los Angeles history is that the future is open and anything is possible,” Clark says, “that everything’s going to be terrific here!”

Francine Browner, 42, had dreamed of moving to California since she was a teen-ager growing up in the suburbs of New York. But the decision to finally do it didn’t happen until she was 30 and had been married 10 years.

“I wasn’t really conscious that I was unhappy,” Browner says, “because 20 years ago people didn’t sit around thinking about how unhappy they were.”

But then her neighbor invited her to join a consciousness-raising group, and she began to take a closer look at her life. She was taking art classes and realized that the positive feedback she was getting from her teachers was missing at home. The more time she spent at school, the more obvious it became that she and her husband had little in common.

Marriage Is Over

A friend had recently moved to California and Browner decided to visit her. When she returned to New York, she told her husband she wanted a divorce.

“If I’d given one minute of practical thought to what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I walked away from a 10-year marriage with only a car worth $1,500 and $4,000 in the bank. I had two small children and no practical skills, but I knew I had to make a change.”

She had taken some design courses at Parson’s School of Design in New York before her marriage and decided to start her own blouse-design business. Shortly after that, a design firm in California offered her a job, and she was finally able to move to California.

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I realized I had good business sense and understood what people wanted, and I gained more confidence in my skills.”

After several years of working her way up in the design business, she stopped working for about a year to write a screenplay.

“It was a good thing because I wasn’t that fulfilled in my design work until after I went out and tried something else. Then I realized that even when it’s something you really want to do and you think you might have talent, when you don’t get back what you need from the outside world, it’s difficult to keep going. I tried screenwriting until my money ran out and then returned to design. That’s when I reached a new level, and the work became more satisfying to me. I decided to open my own business.”

After three years of saving, she started her own line of clothes with partner Neil Afromsky. Today their business is worth $35 million.

Browner says: “You have to feel that there’s more to life than what you’re doing--that you’re not fulfilled. But don’t think too much about the consequences. You have to have confidence in yourself. I feel lucky every single day, and no one is more surprised by my success than I am!”

Fresh start is such a simple two-word definition for starting all over again, Regina Jones says, “and yet the reality is that making a fresh start is a long-term process that takes years to go through.”

Jones, 44, understands, because it took her many years to recover from the breakup of her marriage and begin a new life and career for herself. She grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and at 15 married her high school sweetheart. Over the next seven years they had five children. She worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for three years while raising her family and then retired to help her husband start a local entertainment publication.

Over the years as the business thrived and her husband advanced in his career, they became “quite the little success story.”

“Then things started to go sour in the late ‘70s,” Jones says. “The realization came that our marriage had completely fallen apart through neglect and lack of knowledge of how to hold a relationship together. My mother was dying of cancer, and the business was in big trouble. I couldn’t deal with everything, so I walked away from the business and came home.

“For the next three years I went through a healing process, licking my wounds and going back into the womb as much as I could.”

In 1982, Jones felt ready to work again and after a few temporary jobs accepted a position as vice president of public relations for a record company.

She worked there for three years and also did some fund-raising for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, coming up with the idea to have him host a “Saturday Night Live” show.

That year she decided to open her own public relations firm.

“Opening my own business with my own name was a frightening decision. I had always enjoyed being behind the scenes, and now it meant I would have to put my reputation on the line.”

For Jones, making a fresh start meant being willing to risk failure.

“You have to believe in yourself and be willing to go through whatever the process is that’s necessary to start all over. The hardest part is grieving and letting go of the past. I enjoyed being (married) and letting go of that (status) was a long and painful process. I delved into the very pits of self-pity and learned how to accept help from other people.

“I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve learned how to take care of myself and to make my own choices instead of trying to please others. Too many of us sell out to stay in positions--be it a marriage or job--where we’re unhappy. Life is just too short to be miserable. If something makes you unhappy, you need to make a change--you need to make a fresh start!”

Lou Gross, 43, describes himself as a “nice Jewish boy from New Jersey who did what was expected of me back in the ‘60s.” He went to college and chose a practical career in electrical engineering. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. It was during discussions with some of the other officers about the meaning of life that the first stirrings of what Gross calls an “evolutionary change” began.

After returning to New Jersey, he spent a few years doing graduate work in engineering and then moved to Northern California to work for an engineering firm.

“A friend I car-pooled with recommended that I read ‘Three Pillars of Zen’ and I was blown away by it. I started reading more on the subject and began going to L.A. for Zen retreats.”

In 1974, Gross quit his job, moved to Los Angeles and was ordained a lay Buddhist monk. For the next six years he alternately lived off his savings and returned to work as an engineer whenever his savings ran out. As he became more involved in meditation, he started to learn massage to relieve some of the tension he experienced from sitting for long periods. By 1981, his savings had run out and he knew he no longer wanted to work as an engineer. He was ordained as a seminarian monk and asked to develop his own livelihood.

He had been massaging friends for $5 an hour and decided to study body work. During the next two years he completed more than 1,000 hours of training in body-mind therapy and currently has a private practice doing massage and acupressure.

“I couldn’t find satisfaction in my engineering work anymore and wanted to integrate my life and my career. I felt that there were a lot of other people who could do engineering but couldn’t make the contribution to body work that I felt I could. I wanted to work with people, but I wasn’t sure it was the right decision. I asked everyone I knew if this was a path I should take, and everyone was very encouraging and told me to have courage. Even though I was going against my entire cultural upbringing, my transitions have been very fulfilling. There were painful times when I had to break away and create new structures, but whenever I moved ahead, I felt fulfilled.”

Jacqueline Phillips, 40, has worked hard to achieve the fresh starts she has made in her life. In 1977, she and her husband were producing a documentary for a television series. When funding ran out, they decided to finance the film themselves for the educational market. The film became an award-winner.

During this whole process her marriage broke up and she had to figure out how she was going to support herself and her 5-year-old daughter. She decided to start her own literary agency, because she had handled contracts and negotiations as a producer.

“I don’t know if it was a false start, but I discovered fairly quickly that this wasn’t the business for me. I couldn’t sell what I didn’t believe in, and more and more I was pulled toward the legal end of the business.

On to Law School

“I realized that I had to do something else, but I kept saying I was too old to go to law school. Then I realized, ‘You’re not getting any younger,’ so I applied and was accepted to USC law school.”

During her first summer in law school, she clerked for a national law firm and after passing her bar exam, accepted a job in litigation from them. But after two years in litigation she realized something was still missing.

“As an agent and film maker, I was creating something positive that would enrich people’s lives. In litigation, we were always tearing the other guys to shreds. I was working six and sometimes seven days a week, pulling all-nighters and rapidly approaching 40. I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute. Life is too short to be working this hard.’ ”

An aunt, who was dying of cancer, helped persuade her to make a change again.

“My aunt had worked all her life and shortly after she turned 65 and retired, she learned she had cancer. She sat me down and said if she’d known it was going to end this way, she never would have worked so hard. She told me not to work another weekend in my life, because it wasn’t worth sacrificing my health and happiness.”

Last May, Phillips accepted a position as in-house counsel for 20th Century Fox Studio’s television department, and she’s enthusiastic about her work again.

“My life is finally together for the first time. I’ve grown a lot even though I had to go through some very painful periods. I’m grateful for every part of that experience and I finally appreciate life. It really is a gift,” she said.

Lucky Altman, 46, believes her fresh start could probably be the story of a million other people who went through a divorce after being married for almost 20 years. She attributes her success to the support of friends in her church.

Altman observed similarities between the fresh start she made as a youngster and the one she made as an adult in 1980. When she was 13, she, her mother and brother fled under armed guard from a violent, alcoholic stepfather.

“We packed up and left in a day and on the plane my mother said, ‘You have to make a new life and never contact anyone in Florida again.’ We changed our name and completely forgot our past.

“When I made the decision to divorce my husband, I knew it couldn’t be the way it had been when I was 13. We had ties in the community--my son was still in school--and yet that old feeling--that all I had to do was just move away and become another person--wouldn’t work this time.

“No matter how right I felt my decision was (about divorce), I still felt the stigma of being divorced in the Catholic Church. I continued to be an active member in my church feeling very defiant but that defiance didn’t last very long because no one else thought I was defiant at all--they just expected me to be there.”

Working Several Jobs

The transition after her divorce to supporting herself and her son took several years. She had worked as a volunteer in the religious community for more than a decade and decided to use the skills she had learned. She found a job at USC in the Institute of Change in Ministry and started her own consulting business working with leaders of congregations to help them with long-range planning. The most difficult part of changing was trying to earn a living with three jobs and still be an effective and loving parent to her 15-year-old son.

“I refused to give in to despair, even though it was always there, and just tried to go straight ahead, a day at a time. I know I made mistakes, but I tried to trust my instincts and turn whatever adversity there was into a learning experience.

“Even though I think of myself as a very self-sufficient person, the most important thing that helped me make a fresh start was the support of the people in my parish--not necessarily the ones who were always going to say ‘you’re wonderful and right’--but the ones who helped me see things in a different way, who listened to my ramblings and helped me chart a course. It also took a lot of professional help--therapy and financial counseling. And a strong sense of self even though I had doubts when I was going through the process.”

In his book, Leonard Felder explains that the important factor in any fresh start is to realize what lessons and new inner strengths you can take from the previous experience. The progress you make in your relationship or career is not that everything becomes a breeze. Rather, it is that you learn to be more skillful at resolving conflicts and that you take better care of yourself in difficult situations.

He also cautions that making a fresh start doesn’t mean living in a fantasy world without conflicts--it means doing a much better job trusting your instincts and negotiating for your needs the next time similar conflicts arise. It also means having the courage not to settle for less than what your life might be.

Felder says it helps to find someone else who is also going through a difficult challenge and get together with that person weekly to discuss progress, setbacks and goals. Don’t be afraid to use your fears to remind yourself that you need to ask for help. Remember the times in your life when you succeeded, and reward yourself for every small step forward.

“Take things one step at a time,” he says, “because it’s easy to get discouraged if you’re not seeing progress. Remember the passion that got you going in the first place. And be patient--the people who fail are the ones who set too short a timetable or don’t give themselves a cash flow to make the transition. Change doesn’t happen overnight.”