MINDSET TRAPS OF THE EMPTY NEST SERIES
TRAP #11—RESISTING REALITY—WHY LETTING GO WITH YOUR TEEN FEELS SO HARD AND WHAT IT'S COSTING YOU.
Welcome back to the Mindset Traps of the Empty Nest series. This is trap number 11, Resisting Reality—Why letting go with your teen feels so hard and what it's costing you.
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest podcast with Small Jar Coach. This show is for moms of teens who are ready to let go with love, release anxiety, and rebuild connection with their teen and themselves as they approach the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins, a master certified coach and a fellow mom walking this path right alongside of you.
You don't have to navigate this season alone. Do you ever find yourself in these moments with your big kid where you just think, no, I don't want this. This isn't how it's supposed to be.
Believe me, I've been there. There's so many reasons this comes up for us moms. But today I'm going to explore the times when we fall into the mindset trap of pushing against what is.
The trap of resisting reality. In this episode, you'll learn how you might not even realize you're falling into this trap and the surprising cost of resisting what's right in front of you. I'll also share what becomes possible when you stop fighting what is and start making decisions from a place of intention.
This isn't about giving up or accepting things that are unacceptable. It's about reclaiming your ability to be present in your life and to feel empowered to make decisions in alignment with what you really want without waging a war with what is. Let's get into it.
Hello, my friend. I want to start this episode by telling you a story. It was my oldest son's junior year of high school when everything changed and not for the better.
Almost overnight, my sweet, earnest, open kid who used to tell me everything was becoming someone different. At first, it was just that he spent a lot more time locked in his room or on the phone. Then when we did talk, he was questioning me, being a lot more vocal about what I was doing wrong.
I naturally got defensive. I did try to listen and take his feedback into account. But also, I felt like I needed to tell him why he was wrong.
I remember being pretty justified in feeling this way. And over time, things got worse. He stopped opening up to me.
It felt like he stopped listening to me. The kid was always a rule follower, and all of a sudden, it felt like the rules didn't matter anymore. He blew through curfews.
He wouldn't come home when he said he'd come home. Needless to say, I was angry and frustrated because no matter what I tried, nothing seemed to be working. I'd try to talk to him rationally, but when that didn't make an impact, I'd start to threaten consequences.
And there were definitely a few times when I yelled. I felt like I was losing my mind. What was even worse was I thought I was losing my son.
He was involved in something that really scared me because it was changing him in ways that I didn't like at all. And for a while, I could see it in his eyes, the way he looked at me. It was this heartbreaking combination of disappointment and judgment.
It was like, here I am, the same mom who loves and adores you, but suddenly, I felt like I was the enemy. It was a really dark time. I wasn't sleeping, and my worry and frustration about what was happening felt all-consuming.
I was beside myself, constantly thinking, he shouldn't be acting like this. I shouldn't feel disconnected from my own son. I did everything right.
Why is this happening? Ultimately, this isn't how it's supposed to be. I was doing literally everything I could think of to try to hold onto my son. I wanted to make it better, to fix it.
I wanted to bring him back to the version of him that I knew. But what I was really doing was fighting reality. I didn't want to believe that this was the new normal.
And I absolutely refused to just give up and accept that this is who my son was becoming. I remember so clearly that moment when I realized how hard I was fighting against what I didn't want. And what I realized, even in the midst of that really painful time, was that I was caught in a mindset trap that was making all of it even worse.
I was stuck in the trap of resisting reality. And I want to pause right here and say something really important. Because if you find yourself in a similar situation with your teen, or just in the middle of any painful situation that you don't want, you might be thinking, so what? Am I just supposed to accept this? To throw up my hands while this happens? While my kid pulls away or makes bad choices? If I stop resisting, doesn't that mean I'm giving up? This is what I want you to hear.
My advice here is absolutely not to give up. You don't have to pretend to be okay with things that aren't okay, or condone behavior that you disagree with. You also don't have to stay silent when something needs to be said.
The antidote to resisting reality isn't just accepting reality and giving up. Instead, it's about giving yourself a new kind of power. The power that comes when you stop fighting the reality of what is, and start responding to the reality from a place of calm, clarity, and compassion.
As we raise and launch our kids, resisting reality is a tricky trap because it feels like love. And honestly, it feels like you're living up to your responsibility to be a good mom. But what I've learned is that this trap is actually a form of war.
It's our mind's way of fighting against the truth of what's happening. And the cost of that war is your peace, your presence, and your ability to connect with your teen as they are, right now, in this moment. So in this conversation, I want to show you how this trap shows up in ways that you might not even realize, and why it's completely normal that we fall into it.
So let's define this trap. Resisting reality is what happens when you see something in your life, your teen's behavior, maybe a change in your relationship, or it could even be the reality of how you feel, and your mind says, nope, this isn't how it's supposed to be. When you're in this trap, you're not just disappointed that things aren't what you want.
You can feel emotionally unwilling to accept what's happening. It feels wrong, unacceptable, like you want to fight against it. Earlier in this Mindset Trap series, I covered the should trap, when we think things should be different.
And it might sound like this trap of resisting reality is similar or related, and that's definitely the case. So let me cover how they differ. The should trap is about expectations.
It's that inner manual or rulebook you have about how you want your life to go, and it measures reality against what you want. So it's all these shoulds we have. My teen should be more responsible.
We should be closer and more connected than this. And often what happens with the should trap is that you have these expectations, and then you see how reality falls short of those. And then you feel judgment about that.
Basically, you make the difference between reality and your expectations mean something. In contrast, resisting reality is about refusing to emotionally accept what's already happening. It's less about your expectations and more about your reaction to the fact that your expectations haven't been met.
It's that moment where you find yourself thinking, I refuse to accept that this is where we are. Here's an analogy that might help. So imagine you're standing in the rain without an umbrella.
For either the should trap or the resisting reality trap, your mind says something along the lines of, it shouldn't be raining. But with the should trap, then you go into judgments like, I should have checked the weather, or I should have been more prepared in case it rained. Notice that this becomes a comparison between your expectations and the reality, and that this creates judgment in your mind.
Now, in the same situation, you're standing in the rain without an umbrella. The resisting reality would look something like, it shouldn't be raining, and I absolutely refuse to get wet. But meanwhile, you're standing in the rain, clenching your fists, looking up at the sky with anger, and getting absolutely soaked, instead of grabbing a raincoat or taking cover.
It might sound like a silly example. I mean, why would you stand there yelling at the sky when it rains? But believe it or not, in other situations in our lives, we do this all the time. Resisting reality is what happens when we encounter life as it is, life that's often messy and unpredictable and disappointing, and we push against it.
We refuse to accept it. While the should trap involves looking at reality through the lens of expectation and then judging yourself or your team or someone else as falling short, resisting reality is like gripping so tightly to what you want it to happen that you can't engage with what's actually in front of you. Now, let me share a few examples of what this looks like for us moms with big kids, because, again, it's not as ridiculous or obvious as us standing in the rain getting soaked.
Let me tell you a story about a mom I work with, and let's call her Laura. One challenge she had with her son is that he was coming home late, totally blowing through curfews. In fact, this story might as well be about me, because this was another challenge I was facing with my son when he was a junior.
So Laura was doing all the things I remember doing. She talked to her son about the curfew. She explained why it mattered.
He even agreed that he'd do better next time. But somehow, unbelievably, she found herself waiting up for him again. Absolutely dumbfounded that he'd totally ignored the curfew and wasn't responding to her calls or her texts.
Now, here's the thing. In this day and age when we're virtually connected with our kids, no matter where they are, many of us have some kind of tracking for our kids. We often know exactly where they are, but that doesn't change that we have no more power to get them to call or text us back, or to leave and come home when they said that they would, than we would have if we had no idea where they were.
So we can actually see that they're staying put, not coming home, and ignoring us, which can feel so incredibly frustrating. Now add to that, Laura told me, that when her son finally walked in the door, he didn't give any apology or explanation. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, what? My friend, you probably won't be surprised to hear that Laura lost it.
She absolutely couldn't believe that this was happening. It wasn't even just about him being late. She was pissed off about his seeming disregard for the rules and her feelings.
This wasn't the kid she raised. She told me, he's a good kid. He knows better.
So I don't understand why this keeps happening. So let's talk about how this reaction, as real and justified and frustrating as it is, how this can become a trap. But first off, I think we can all agree that Laura had a right to be upset and also to want her son to be accountable.
The issue is that when you think this shouldn't be happening, and it's actually happening, you essentially go into emotional combat mode. And again, this isn't a flaw. It is a totally human response.
In fact, this is an underlying principle with all of these mindset traps, that they all make perfect sense. However, in this case, when we resist reality, we lose access to our power. Because instead of saying, okay, this is happening, what do I want to do now? We get stuck in, this isn't supposed to be happening, and I'm furious that it is.
And again, I want to be really clear with this, because this doesn't mean Laura shouldn't have boundaries or that she was wrong to be upset. And it also doesn't mean she has to just accept that her son is blowing her off. But what I want to invite you to see here is that her pain was multiplied by her refusal to believe that this was really happening.
Let's look at another example. And by the way, when I share these examples of clients, I actually have so many women who have gone through similar situations that I'm almost not even thinking of just one individual person. So I just want to reflect on how universal some of these experiences can be for us in different ways.
So the second story I want to share is about a client who I'll call Renee. Renee has a daughter who came home from her first year of college. Renee was obviously looking forward to having her daughter home and had all kinds of plans and expectations for what that would look like when she did.
She even rearranged her work schedule so she could be around during those first few days back, just in case her daughter wanted to hang out. But then her daughter got home, said a quick hey, and then disappeared into her room without saying much of anything else. Renee tried to connect and check in with her, and her daughter just seemed to be blowing her off.
When Renee tried to make plans with her, her daughter either said no or told her she already had plans with friends. Needless to say, Renee was disappointed and honestly hurt. So she started trying harder.
She'd drop hints about how long it had been since they'd had a real conversation. Then she sat her daughter down and told her what her daughter's behavior was making her feel. Renee's daughter eventually agreed to go out to dinner with her mom, but then she ended up bailing at the last minute.
So Renee had had it. When her daughter got home, they had a fight. Renee could not believe that her daughter was being so dismissive and disrespectful.
Then her daughter said something like, Mom, you're being so intense. Can you just give me some space? And that hurt even more, because all Renee was trying to do was reconnect with her daughter. So let's talk about what's really going on here.
Clearly, Renee had some expectations that weren't being met. She had imagined what having her daughter back home would feel like, and she had an expectation that they would be spending time together. And the fact that they weren't felt like that meant that they weren't as close as Renee wanted them to be.
And this part, this is the should trap. When you make the difference between your expectations and reality, it means something. But here's what was making the situation even more painful.
Renee was so focused on what she wanted and what she expected that she wasn't able to hear what her daughter really needed, that she might need time to decompress after she got home. Renee didn't want to accept that her daughter coming home might look different than she hoped it would. So instead of acknowledging what was, Renee kept trying to change it, trying to get her daughter to talk, trying to make her connect.
Even if her actions were coming from love, it ended up looking to her daughter like control. Because what she was really saying was, this can't be the way things are. I won't accept it.
And this is resisting reality. The more Renee tried to fix the disconnection, the more disconnection she created. The harder she tried to pull her daughter toward her, the more her daughter seemed to be pulling away in the other direction.
Instead of saying, okay, this hurts, and it's not what I expected, but this is where we are. How do I want to show up now? Renee stayed stuck in, this isn't how it's supposed to be. I need to make this different.
And in this space of resistance, there's no room for curiosity, no space for compassion. There's no room to meet your teen where they are. And I think we'd all agree that Renee isn't wrong for wanting connection.
But when she refused to accept her daughter's need for space, she ended up creating the opposite of what she really wanted. Let's look at one more example. This story is about a mom I work with who I'll call Tara.
Tara's youngest daughter went to college last year, and by all external measures, Tara was doing fine. Her kid was adjusting well to school, and Tara had a good job and a stable home life. She told me, I'm really lucky, actually, and I should be more grateful.
But what she was really feeling was off, totally lost, like she didn't know what to do with herself. She told me, I thought I'd enjoy the quiet, but I just feel sad and empty, and I don't really know why. Now, of course, part of what she was feeling was totally normal.
When that last kid leaves the nest, it's understandable to feel the loss of a role that's defying so much of who you are. But what made it so much harder for Tara was what she told herself about what she was feeling. She said things like, this is ridiculous, it's not like anything bad has happened.
She also said, it's been months, I should be used to this by now. And this is another version of the resisting reality trap. Tara wasn't just feeling sad, she was judging herself for feeling sad.
She was making her emotional experience wrong. And yes, there's definitely some should trap happening here. Tara had an idea of how she was supposed to feel, what it meant to handle the empty nest well.
But what was also keeping her stuck was that she was refusing to accept her actual experience. The truth is, she was feeling sad and lost. But instead of turning toward those feelings with compassion and curiosity, she tried to push them away.
She didn't want this to be her reality, and so she resisted it. She kept telling herself that she just needed to get over it. But the more she resisted, the worse it got.
So she couldn't understand why she felt so broken. And this is an example of resisting reality that isn't about the way we relate to our kids, but more in how we relate to ourselves. When we say, I shouldn't feel this way, we cut ourselves off from what we actually need the most, which is self-compassion and support.
Now, I'm not saying that the answer is that you should wallow in sadness or any emotion that's hard. But in Tara's situation, the truth was she was sad. That was her reality.
And her suffering was only made worse because she was refusing to let herself feel it. As we've talked about with all of these traps, it makes perfect sense that our natural instinct is to resist reality. It is a very human response to our lives, especially when we're facing painful or challenging situations.
So in order to understand this, once again, let's return to that motivational triad, that default switch in our brains that causes us to instinctually seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. Now think about what happens when reality doesn't match what you wanted or hoped would happen. In simple terms, it's not fun or pleasurable.
It's actually kind of painful. And it most definitely feels like work. So obviously to your brain, this is all a recipe for disaster.
So it makes sense that your mind's natural response is to try to escape this. It thinks, nope, this can't be right. This shouldn't be happening.
I have to fix this. To your brain, fighting reality actually feels easier in the moment than feeling what's true. It actually feels more comfortable to take action, to do something, either to get mad or to try to control or change something, than it does to sit in the pain, in the anger or the grief or the frustration.
It feels easier to blame your teen or yourself than to feel the weight of disappointment or fear. Your mind would rather stay busy trying to change what's happening than to stop and experience what is. This is why resisting reality actually feels so natural.
It's just your brain doing what it's evolved to do, to try to avoid pain and keep you safe. But the problem is that when we resist reality, we don't avoid pain. We often compound it.
Byron Katie offers one of my all-time favorite pieces of wisdom, and that is, when you argue against reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time. This trap resisting reality shows up in so many ways for us as moms. Sometimes it looks like us trying to control our teen's behavior by lecturing or tightening the rules.
Other times it looks like trying to get them to connect or trying to anticipate problems before they happen. Sometimes for us, emotionally, it can look like us trying to stay upbeat and continue to be fine so that we don't have to feel stuck in painful emotions. But here's something interesting to consider.
It's not actually the behavior or the action we're taking that's the problem. Sometimes the most loving and appropriate thing to do is to set the boundary or to try to connect or to just take a breath and move on. So this trap isn't necessarily about the action we're taking itself, but the energy behind it.
So in these situations when something is happening that you don't want, I invite you to ask yourself, am I responding from clarity and intention or from resistance? Clarity looks like, okay, this is what's happening. What do I want to do now? But resistance often looks like this shouldn't be happening or I shouldn't feel this way. Basically, I refuse to accept that this is the reality.
And then you take action from that resistance. This is when you're in the trap. Because when you resist what's real, when you resist the truth, you lose access to what's possible.
But when you start from the truth, even when it's hard, you can choose how you want to respond. And this is where your power is. So what does it look like to step out of this trap? Let's go back to the examples of the moms I shared earlier.
Laura's son was repeatedly missing curfew. So for her, the turning point came not from giving up, but from dropping the disbelief. Instead of focusing on what shouldn't be happening, she began with what was happening.
That her son was repeatedly not coming home from curfew and when confronted, he showed no remorse. That was her reality. But once she stopped resisting that fact, basically stopped spiraling in the frustration around her son's actions, she started thinking more clearly.
She still cared about the curfew and wanted to protect her son. But instead of yelling at him about how he should know better or trying to force him to understand her perspective, she calmly told her son the new boundary. It looked something like, if you're going to ignore the curfew, the car stays home.
You don't have access to the car anymore. It was a simple boundary that she had control over. But even more importantly, she didn't need him to agree or approve or feel good about the boundary.
She didn't need him to validate her feelings. She simply communicated a boundary that she was in control of enforcing. And in doing this, she felt more at peace.
Not because her son immediately agreed to start following the rules, but because she stopped arguing with the truth and creating a power struggle. For Rene, stepping out of this trap meant recognizing that her daughter needed space, but also that her behavior wasn't a rejection of her. Rene's daughter was simply acting in response to what she needed in that moment.
And with this awareness, instead of pushing for connection, Rene took a breath and said, okay, she's home, she's safe, and she's doing her thing. She didn't let go of her hope for connection, but she did hear and respect her daughter's need for space. So she stopped hovering and started showing up with warmth and openness, but without pressure.
When she made dinner, she didn't create an expectation that her daughter would join her. And sometimes her daughter actually did. Rene's shift in energy invited her daughter to connect without the risk of letting her mom down.
And as time went on, Rene and her daughter did connect increasingly. And not because Rene demanded it, but because she stopped trying to control how it had to look. She was still hopeful for something different, but she was no longer fighting against the reality of what was.
Finally, for Tara, no longer fighting and resisting her pain opened her up to understanding it. She realized that she missed the version of herself who was needed every day. When she was fighting and discounting her feelings, she didn't have the space to appreciate that she was experiencing a loss that was really true for her.
So when she finally was able to see it, she let herself simply feel it. The grief and the loss of being a mom who was needed. Instead of telling herself she shouldn't be sad, she got curious about what that sadness might be pointing her toward.
And in that space of compassion, she started exploring what she might need next. What would make her feel alive and connected and fulfilled again. My friend, this conversation isn't about telling you what you should accept.
It's not about giving up or doing nothing or pretending things don't hurt. It's about getting curious about what might become possible if you stop fighting what is. The honest truth is that when you stop resisting reality, you give yourself the chance to see it clearly.
You see truly what is. Not through the lens of frustration or fear or disappointment, but through the lens of truth. And facing reality, even the parts that we hate, is always the starting point for real change.
This is where your power is. Not in fighting against reality, but in responding to it with intention and clarity and unconditional love. What this creates for you is that instead of telling yourself you shouldn't feel the way that you feel, you just let yourself feel it.
You honor what's true for you without the judgment. There's actually an incredible feeling of peace that comes from simply accepting the truth of what is. I remember this so clearly with my own son.
I had been thinking, this isn't my son, he shouldn't be acting this way. And every time I thought that, I felt more hurt and angry and powerless. But the moment things started to change wasn't when he changed.
It was when I did. I stopped fighting reality and started responding to it with intention. This is who my son is right now, full stop.
I faced the truth of that. And then I asked myself, so who do I want to be? The most surprising and beautiful part of this journey for me was that in dropping the fight, I started to see the reality for what it was. Often we're so caught up in telling ourselves our kids or other people shouldn't be doing what they're doing, and we miss out on the chance to ask the question, why might they be doing what they're doing? What if this isn't about me? It's simply about them, what they need, how they're doing their best, even if I don't like it.
From this lens, I could see it so clearly, how my son was struggling, how he was desperately trying his best. He couldn't open up to me about it at the time, but when I stopped fighting reality, it all became very clear. The last thing I wanted was to be another place where he had to fight.
I wanted to be the one safe space that he could count on, no matter what. Even if that meant I would have to wait a long time for him to trust me or come back to me, I was willing to be that version of myself for him. And wouldn't you know it, when I stopped fighting what was, that was when things started returning to the version of a relationship that I had been missing.
It definitely didn't happen overnight, but over time we found ways to reconnect again, because I had created the safe space for it. And this is the most important thing I want to invite you to take away here. We don't create change by fighting against what's real.
We create change when we learn how to meet reality with compassion and intention. I'm not saying it's easy, especially when it's your child and the stakes seem so high. But if you've been stuck in this trap, resisting reality in your relationship with your teen or in your own emotional experience, I just want to remind you that you're not doing anything wrong.
You're human. You're a mom who cares so much. And also… you don’t have to stay stuck.
This is the work we do in my coaching program. It’s not about learning to just acceptrealities we don’t want. It’s about learning how to see clearly — so you can respond to reality with clarity, peace and intention.
That’s where your power is. Not in resisting reality. But in responding to it — as the mom and woman you truly want to be.
Until next time, my friend.
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.
