LETTING GO
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 122.
Hello, my friends. Let's talk today about the phrase letting go. We use it in so many different contexts, if you think about it.
Often we use it in the context of needing to let go of something. And the reason we say that is because we realize that whatever we're holding onto is creating some kind of pain for us. For example, we want to let go of our anger or our resentment.
Ultimately, we want to let go of that painful emotion we're feeling. We could want to let go of some belief or thought we're having about ourselves or someone else. And this actually relates to letting go of emotions because the way we think about anything in our life creates the emotions we feel about those things.
When it comes to being the mom of a teen or an adult child, this phrase letting go takes on a whole new meaning because we start thinking about having to let go of our children. Now, just saying that, that you have to let go of your kids, it's pretty painful when you think about it. Like when you say, I want to let go of my resentment or let go of my insecurity.
It's like, yes, of course, we're on board with getting rid of those things. No one actually wants to hold on to emotional pain, even though we can find that it's actually hard to let go of that pain, even when you don't want it. But when it comes to your kids, there's not one ounce of your being that wants to actually let go.
That's just inconceivable to most of us as moms. So the thought that we have to let go is inevitably painful. One of the places that I tend to spend a lot of time with my clients is investigating the way we're perceiving the world.
Because so often, we just think that the way we look at life is the truth. And we don't actually empower ourselves to separate out the actual factual truth of our lives from the way that we're thinking about it. Because our thoughts are actually never true.
Unless we're just thinking facts, like literal facts, our thoughts are simply an interpretation of the facts of our lives. When you don't spend time understanding that interpretation, the stories that your brain is crafting about your life, then you create a whole emotional experience that you think reflects the truth of the world. And this is why words really matter.
Because when you're thinking, I have to let go of my child, and you're also likely thinking that there's nothing you'd like to do less than letting go of your child, that creates pain. And consider this, when you think you have to let go of something that you love, and that letting that thing go will result in an experience where you're required to give that something up, presumably forever, that's the experience of grief when you think about it. You're being forced to mourn the loss of something that you actually don't want to let go.
It's this uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, thinking you have to let go, but not wanting to accept that reality. My friend, is it any wonder that so many of us are in pain as we transition to the empty nest? Whether that's something you're experiencing as your teen starts to grow up and pull away, or whether it's something you're grappling with as your child leaves the nest for college or the next stage of their life, there is so much that we don't want to let go. But I guess the question I want to invite you to consider is, do you actually have to let go of your child? Look, when women come to me and they're experiencing this deep sadness around this question of letting go, I get it.
Not only do we not want to let go, but we can feel stuck in this dread of our lives. Dread that it's never going to get any better. Of course you love your child.
You want them to be a part of your life. And by the way, they've been such a meaningful part of your life for so long. The thought of letting that go, letting go of the purpose and connection, letting go of this special role you've had, of course that's going to feel painful.
You know, when we grieve the death of someone we love, one of the stages of grief is denial. So even when we know someone is gone, we can fight that reality in our minds. So of course, when we consider having to let go of our kids, how much more room there is for denial.
Because we don't want it. And it actually seems like if we fight hard enough, we can avoid the pain of it. We don't want them to live far away.
We don't want to conceive of a world in which we don't hear from them every day. We want to know what's going on in their lives. We can also anticipate this pain in the future.
Fear that we're losing connection and that it's only going to get worse. Some of our kids are talkative and naturally include us in their lives. But other kids don't share a thing.
Either they just don't talk or they seem to shut us out almost willfully. Almost as if we're doing something wrong or just really annoying by trying to connect with them. So if that's your experience with your teen right now, it doesn't take much encouragement for your mind to project more disconnection in the future.
You might be thinking if they don't talk at home now, they'll definitely not text or call when they're in college. Notice how you can already start to develop perceptions of how much your kids will include you in their life in the future based on your observation today. You already start to fear that if my child's the kind of person who doesn't share much when they're home, what's going to happen when they leave? We don't want this future we're imagining.
And so it's normal for us to try to fix things now. To try to get our kids to open up or to see our point of view. To try to broach the topic of them having to call us or text us back at least once a week.
You try to come up with the right boundaries in terms of how you'll interact with them. We don't want to have to let go. That's the bottom line.
It doesn't feel fair that we should have to let go. So if this conversation is resonating, it is literally no wonder that you're feeling sad or frustrated or uncomfortable right now. So I want to reframe this conversation about letting go.
And I actually want to credit one of my brave and beautiful clients who framed this conversation perfectly. In between the sessions I have with my clients, I write up notes from our sessions. And then I offer personalized questions to help my clients continue exploring and practicing the concepts of self-coaching that I'm teaching them in between our sessions.
My goal is to pass on this knowledge to empower my clients to understand their minds and how that's impacting their emotional experience and the results they're creating in their lives. And with these tools, they're then empowered to decide for themselves how to move in a more productive or empowering direction. So after each of my sessions, I share these notes and homework with my clients in Slack, which is an online chat platform.
And then my clients can Slack me back throughout the week. And so we continue this beautiful dialogue back and forth between sessions. And I actually want to give a shout out to all of the women whom I've had the opportunity to coach, because these women are so courageous.
They often come to me because they're in pain or feeling stuck, but they know deep down that they're not broken. They don't need to be healed. In fact, they already believe in the possibility that they can bring themselves out of their pain.
They've just reached a point in their lives where they don't quite know how. I approach every single one of my clients from the standpoint that there is nothing wrong with them. They are human beings with powerful minds that just want to keep them safe.
They want to be comfortable and happy. In past episodes, I've covered the many mindset traps our brains fall into. Not because we're broken, but because our brains on a primitive level are incredibly efficient, adaptive, powerful organisms that will stop at nothing to keep us safe and comfortable and preserving our energy.
Our brains were designed to help us survive when we had to protect ourselves from predators. So of course our brains are still working hard to keep us safe. And so today this means our brains are looking for danger in our lives.
And what greater danger could our brains imagine than having to let go of our children? When you start to understand that sometimes the thoughts we have are just our brains on autopilot, but also that your mind has this capacity to step back and observe these unintentional thoughts, understand the impact of your mindset on your emotions and the way you show up. Through the process I teach, you start to find compassion for yourself on a whole new level. And when you learn how to harness the skill set, this is where you find your power, my friends.
So I applaud the women who come to me willing to dive into this work and believing the possibility that they have untapped power within them. This power to observe your mind. It is in all of us.
We just haven't learned how to harness it. So I can't tell you how rewarding it is for me to not only work with these courageous women, but to see them stepping into their power, taking responsibility for creating their own emotional well-being. This isn't about getting past the hump of the transition of the empty nest.
This is about what's possible for you for the rest of your life. So the inspiration for this podcast comes from one particular client who messaged me in Slack and laid out so beautifully her understanding of what she needed to let go. And I want to share this with you because I feel like her awareness is so powerful.
This is what she shared. I realize I don't need to let go of my kids or change my love for them. I don't think I could, which is why this thought of letting go is so painful.
But there are things I do need to let go of if I want my relationship with my children to flourish. I'm beginning to see how much of growth requires letting go of what no longer serves me. Now I see a small glimmer of the power of this.
This is so beautiful because I am with her 100% in agreement. I will also never let go of my boys. Right now they're 17 and 19 years old, and I have no plans to let them go.
But I am also very intentional about what I'm holding on to and when I'm letting go. So let me share this client's beautiful reflection on what she realizes she needs to work on letting go. The first thing she suggested was that she needs to let go of control.
Now control is another one of those triggering words. Has your teen ever said something to you like, Mom, you're trying to control my life. And you feel pissed because you're thinking I'm not trying to control your life.
I'm actually trying to help you. The question of control can be the source of so many disagreements with our kids, because they're pulling so hard to find freedom and independence. But we're over here just trying to help them.
But then they accuse us of being controlling. We can feel angry and resentful. Here we are busting our butts to try to help and support them.
And this is the thanks we get. But let's also reframe this conversation about control. Because when my client's talking about control, I think I know exactly what she means.
But I want to make sure you understand as well. Control isn't about being authoritarian or trying to manipulate or force our kids into anything. I don't think any of us moms have any interest in that type of control.
But the truth is, as moms, we also want things the way we want them. That's kind of a simple way of looking at it. We want things the way we want them.
And look, of course we do. We have preferences. We have thoughts about the way we want to be treated.
We definitely have thoughts about what we want for our kids and their lives. And there isn't anything wrong with any of that. The challenge is that with our kids, for a long time as they've been growing up, we've been able to get our way.
Remember those days when you just put clothes on them and they didn't have any opinion about it? I almost couldn't imagine that. Those days are long gone, my friend. Because our kids, starting in their preteens, maybe even younger, also want their lives the way they want them.
And it's often inevitable that they want their life to be different than what we want for them, at least in some respects. Think for a second about what you'd like for your teen's life. What you want them to be doing, how you want them to be engaging in their lives, how you want them to be interacting with you.
Think about it. What does it look like in a perfect world? You may not even realize how deep this desire goes. But just notice.
What time do you want them to wake up in the morning? How do you want them to interact with you before they leave for school? How enthusiastic do you want them to be about school? What grades do you hope they'll get? What kind of friends do you want them to have? What about how they act when they get home? Or if they're in college, how often do you want to hear from them? What about how they're approaching college? What are they doing after they graduate from college? Whether you realize it or not, you've got a long list of ideas, actually expectations, hopes for what you want your child's life to look like, and also how their life will intersect with yours. Now imagine if you could realize this perfect dream, have all of your expectations met, imagine that you think that then you could be happy, totally at peace. But the problem is that inevitably, the reality of life, the reality of how your teen or adult child approaches their life, and how they interact with you, it just won't always, or maybe even ever, align with what you want for them perfectly.
So when your expectations aren't being met, your brain not only sees danger, but it can feel like you're being robbed of your ability to be happy, to have the peace of thinking everything's okay. So then our brains go to, if I could just get things to change in my favor, shift reality a little closer to my expectations, then it stands to reason that then I could be happy, right? But here's where this issue of control comes in. Because as you're trying your best to influence your child, to get them to change or more closely meet your expectations, your desires for them, the way they could experience or perceive your efforts is that you're trying to control their life.
Now, it's not always that dramatic. I was reading my son's college essay the other day, and I pointed out a sentence that I thought could be streamlined. And my son said to me, I like it the way it is.
Now, this wasn't a battle I needed to fight. But you can see how even over small things, you can get into this tug of war with your kids. Why haven't they texted me back? Get off the phone, you should be studying.
You never tell me what's going on with you. So getting back to this conversation about letting go, my client recognized that one of the things she needed to let go of was control. I interpret this as the actions we take to try to influence our kids into meeting our expectations.
In fact, the second thing my wonderful client said she needed to let go was her expectations. So these two concepts are really intertwined. We all have expectations.
It's the way we want life to be. And there's nothing wrong with having expectations. But when it comes to our kids, whether we intend to or not, our efforts to make our kids meet our expectations can very much come across as control, even if it's subtle and well meaning.
And the result with our kids can be that they'll pull away harder, at very least that they ignore us. And so the question is, what are we actually creating when we're trying to get our expectations met? Are we actually creating a result we want or the opposite? The truth is, our efforts to change or influence our kids might not actually impact our kids at all. In truth, they're going to show up the way that they show up.
It's not necessarily a reflection of what we're doing at all. But at minimum, when we're trying to fix or change a situation with our kids, and we're not successful, then we're creating our own pain. We want things the way we want them.
And we try to get those things to change to be the way we want them. And when we're not successful, and we think that we should be, we feel pain. We feel disappointed, we feel frustrated, we feel disconnected.
And the worst part is, we attribute this feeling to our kids. We think it's their fault, or evidence that there is, in fact, something wrong with our connection. But the truth is, all that's happening is that our expectations of what we want haven't been met.
And any efforts we've made to try to fix or change the situation, whether through actual control, or really, honestly, just trying our best to influence our kids, when those efforts don't pan out, and we think that we should have been able to make that change, then we're left feeling pain, and thinking it's our kids' fault, probably also blaming ourselves. My friend, what if it's not your teen's fault? And what if it's not your fault either? The only thing going on here is that you have expectations that aren't being met, and your efforts to change the situation aren't working. That's all.
It's no more dramatic than that. But what you're making all of that mean, that's where the pain is. So my client recognized that her work is letting go of her expectations and control.
But I also want to say that you get to have expectations. No matter what you do, your brain is going to have expectations. It actually might be impossible to entirely let them go.
But the opportunity here is to let go of your need to make your expectation for your child's life be exactly what you want it to be. As a coach, I am a huge fan of taking control of your decisions and self-advocating, standing up for yourself and doing what you need to do to self-actualize and create the life that you want. I spend a lot of time with my clients on this work.
However, there's a difference between me creating results in my life and self-actualizing for myself, and me working to manipulate the circumstances of my kids' life so that I can feel better. There's a difference between me knowing what I want for my life and respecting what my kids want for their life. I think it's also worth mentioning that our baby adults are in such a period of self-discovery and uncertainty.
And so it makes sense that they don't really know what they want for their life either. And sometimes it could even be that they're pushing away our version of what we want for their life simply because they're trying to test out the theory that maybe we're wrong. They're trying to figure out what it looks like to be independent and have their own ideas.
Sometimes they can be stuck in a situation that they don't want either, but they don't know how to get out of it. Or they're trying to make the best of a hard situation. So it's worth considering that even when what we see in our kids' life is concerning to us, or just not what we want for them, it could also be that they're also trying to do the best they can in the midst of a lot of uncertainty and insecurity and doubt.
Consider that when we exert a lot of influence on our kids to try to get them to meet our expectations, that we're adding a lot of pressure onto them just so we can feel okay. At the end of the day, that's what this is all about, my friend, as hard as it might be to hear. You can't experience anybody else's emotions but your own.
And so when you're fighting hard to change circumstances, or to get your kid to agree with you, or to change their life because you think you know what's right, what you're actually fighting for is your own emotional well-being. Because you think that if you could just get the world to meet your expectations, then maybe you could feel better. But what honestly happens is that you feel worse because your efforts don't work, or your kid starts fighting back or shutting down, or even worse, they might feel like they can't be themselves around you because you're so focused on what you want for them and who you want them to be.
And my friend, I've done this. It comes from such a place of love for our kids, because we truly do think that we know what's best for them. It isn't coming from a selfish place.
We want them to succeed, we want them to be happy, and of course we want them to be safe. So I know that the instinct underlying all of this is pure and good. But the truth is we want all of those things because then it will give us permission to be happy ourselves.
The reality of life is that our kids are not going to be happy all of the time, and we don't have to feel good about that. But their happiness and their success, even their safety, it's not a reflection of your value as a parent. There are actually no awards at the end of this journey.
There is no MVP of parenting. We're all just doing the best that we can. So the goal isn't to be perfect.
It's not to never make mistakes or even never to try and influence your kid and help your kid when you see them going down the wrong path. The invitation here is simply to take responsibility for your expectations. To be self-aware about what you want for your child and why.
There might be some expectations that you do need to fight for. These are the expectations that you're willing to set boundaries around or to let them be angry at you about. Because they're so important that the fight is worth it.
Only you can know what these expectations might be. But there are other expectations that are simply your mind's version of what you think is right or honestly what you'd prefer. But what if you could be willing to let go of those expectations in favor of honoring or at least being open to your child's expectations for their life? I'm telling you, if what you really want is connection with your child, if you really don't want to let go of them, being open to who they want or need to be right now is such a beautiful way to build an even stronger connection with them.
My friends, this is hard work. I'm not going to tell you it isn't. But I want to offer that the pain of trying to control things that are out of your control is worse than the discomfort of taking responsibility for your expectations and allowing yourself to feel disappointed about having things not turn out the way you want.
I refer to Byron Katie all of the time because I think she nailed it on the head when she said, When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time. We spend so much time trying to fight the reality of our lives, having expectations that will never match reality, and thinking that somehow if we just work a little harder or find a way to convince a little better that we can have our way and feel better ourselves. But it rarely works, my friends.
In fact, the only time it does work is when what we want aligns with what our kids want or when they end up agreeing with us about the right path somewhere along the way. The final concept that my client so beautifully realized that she needs to work on letting go is attachment. She talked about how much she's looked to her kids for connection, for her happiness.
For me, one of the most mind-blowing aspects of this work of self-coaching that I teach my clients is that your perception of your life has always been what's created your feelings of connection and happiness. It's always been you. When you think it's your kids, then you're looking for them to behave in a certain way so that you get to feel love.
You're literally in your mind thinking, if they can do x, y, and z, then I get to feel love. But if they don't act this way, then I feel disconnected. Your mind is interpreting what your child is doing and literally making a decision about whether or not you get to feel what you want to feel.
Our kids do what they do. You actually can't feel their love. But you do observe their actions and your mind decides whether those actions fit your expectations of what love looks like or not.
And look, teens and young adults can sometimes show up in ways that aren't our favorite. They can be self-centered. They aren't always taking into account our feelings.
But no matter what your kid is doing, you actually have permission to feel love for them. And my friend, I have absolutely no doubt that you love your child. There's not one woman that I've ever worked with, and certainly no woman who's listening to a podcast about life with teens and the road to the empty nest, who doesn't deeply love their child.
So your mind is already 100% bought into loving your child. Why are you waiting for permission to let yourself feel that love and connection? When my client is talking about letting go of attachment, she's talking about letting go of the need for her kids to show up in a specific way in order to give herself permission to feel what she really wants to feel, which is love and connection. Here's something incredibly powerful to consider.
When someone you love dies, do you realize that you still have a relationship with that person in your mind? A relationship is simply the sum of the thoughts you have about another person. And even when that person is past, you have the ability to think loving thoughts about that person. Of course, you also feel sadness because you can't see or spend time with that person anymore.
You miss that interaction. And that sadness might never go away. But you can also always revisit memories and reflect on all of the things you love about that person.
And in those moments, your mind is creating the emotion of love you get to experience in that moment. Even with that person no longer with you, that feeling of love is 100% created by you in your mind. It doesn't require participation from that other person.
So if you can do that with someone who has left this earth, you can absolutely do that with your children, my friend. You always have love for them inside of you. You don't need permission to feel it.
The reason you might be in pain right now is because life isn't matching your expectations for what you want. And you're fighting hard against that reality, trying to fix it, thinking that you need a particular reality, a certain set of circumstances, a defined set of interactions with your child in order to give yourself permission to feel better. My friend, you never have to let go of your child.
And I know that you will absolutely never let go of your love for them. And in fact, you have the power to create connection with them no matter what they do, no matter how far away they go. These emotions, love, connection, happiness, purpose, they are all created in your mind.
And you get to give yourself permission to feel all of them. The only things you need to let go are the obstacles standing in your way of giving yourself that permission, expectations, control, attachment. My friend, the power to feel love and connection and any other emotion you want to feel in your life, this power is already within you.
And harnessing that power and overcoming the obstacles standing in your way, that's exactly what I teach in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. My friend, you don't ever have to let go of your child.
Until next time.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
