THE EMOTIONAL OVERWHELM OF PARENTING TEENS AND THE EMPTY NEST—WHEN LIFE JUST FEELS HEAVY | EP. 183
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace. I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins.
If you've ever felt weighed down by sadness, anxiety, or just that heavy sense of overwhelm that makes everything feel harder than it should, this episode is for you. I'm going to share my own experience of navigating the empty nest and how to stop fighting your emotions and start understanding them instead. You'll discover why life is 50-50 and why that's actually good news.
I'll share how to find peace even in the moments that feel heavy. And by the end of this episode, you'll see that nothing has gone wrong and that you always have the power to choose how you want to show up in your life. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend. I'm having a lot of feelings. Do you ever get to this place in life where, no matter how hard you try, you just feel swept up in a more negative experience of life? It's like everything feels a little darker and a little less hopeful.
And you don't really want to be stuck here, but it can also feel hard to see a way out. I was just driving home, and I've been managing this feeling of sadness with my youngest now being off in college. I think of him as my bright light.
And without him in the house, it's like everything feels a bit dimmer. I miss his big smile. I miss the hugs and those small little moments in every day where I would get to see his beautiful face and just check in with him.
I miss knowing if his blood sugar was low that I was just a few steps away from being there to protect him. And he hasn't needed me to do that in a really long time. But I guess I've learned to feel comfortable that even though he was independent, I didn't have to let go of that safety net, my ability to be there if he needed me.
And now I'm five hours away. I notice that along with the sadness, I feel a buzz of anxiety. I just want him to be okay.
But of course, life goes on. You settle back into the new circumstances of your life, whatever they are. Sometimes we fight it.
Sometimes we invest a lot of energy in resisting the reality of what is. But as Byron Cady says, when you resist reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time. The truth is, resisting reality is just exhausting.
We tell ourselves, this shouldn't be happening. It's not supposed to be this way. We replay the past, imagining how things used to be.
We push away the present moment, feeling hurt or frustrated, and then resentful because we shouldn't feel this way. Or we think about the future, worrying about everything that could go wrong. And all this resistance puts you at war with reality.
Honestly, it's like we fight so hard against our emotional experience that we pile on extra judgment and resentment that all of it should be different than it is. And my friend, this just makes reality even more painful. This is a lesson I've learned the hard way.
And it's one gift I think I've given myself by doing the work of understanding my mind and how my mindset fuels my emotional experience and how I show up in my life. I am, as much as I can be, at peace with the sadness and the anxiety I'm feeling about my boys both being at college and my own transition to the empty nest. When I say I'm at peace, what I really mean is that I'm acknowledging the sadness and the anxiety, and I'm allowing them in.
These emotions make perfect sense to me. And of course I'm sad. Of course I'm anxious.
I miss my son and I want him to be okay. And I have so much love and compassion for myself as I experience these emotions. But at the same time, I'm very clear with myself, meaning I'm intentionally leaning into the belief that these emotions don't mean there's anything wrong with me, and also that I'm not always going to feel this way.
This is the color or the rainbow, really, of my emotional experience right now. And it's a little sad, a little blue, but I'm willing to be present with these emotions without making them mean I'll always feel this way. But the truth is also right now, I'm not quite ready to let them go.
But I'd be lying if I told you I was at peace in every area of my life. And so as you're listening, you might be grappling with the heaviness or resistance to your own emotional experience in some other way, maybe in your own transition to the empty nest. Or it could be in another area, like with your big kid still at home, dealing with attitude and motivation and missed connections.
So I thought I would take you through my own struggles right now to see if we can work through these heavy emotions of life together. So as I said, for me, I'm relatively at peace with the sadness and anxiety I feel about my transition to the empty nest. But the emotion I'm actually struggling the most with right now is feeling overwhelmed.
This feeling is honestly like my nemesis. It's been something I've struggled with all of my life. For me, the overwhelm has always stemmed from thoughts in my head, like, there's so much I have to do.
There's no way I'll ever get it done. And sometimes it even sounds like I don't think I'm capable of working through this. And I know I'm not the only one.
Recently, I've had quite a few clients share their own versions of this exact same feeling. Some feel overwhelmed because they never think what they do is good enough. And some are caught in painful emotions they fear they'll never get out of.
So they just feel overwhelmed by this thought that they can't escape their pain. Some of my clients feel overwhelmed just by the uncertainty in their lives, not knowing what's ahead. I often say that we experience our life through our emotions.
So when the tone of your emotional experience feels painful or negative, it's easy and honestly completely understandable to get caught up in it and wish it were different. None of us would ever choose painful emotions. So naturally, we resist them.
Really think about this. The reason we ever feel unsafe or uncomfortable is truly because of an emotion we're feeling. Anxiety, fear, dread, sadness, and guilt.
All of these emotions are uncomfortable. But these emotions and all of the other emotions we feel also intertwine to define the way we experience our lives. You can think about it like a musical composition.
When you're listening to music, you experience it through the vibration of the notes. Those vibrations come from an instrument or a voice and travel through the air. And then you feel those vibrations in your body.
There are times when you listen to music and those vibrations feel pleasurable. A song you love can almost make you feel like your whole body is operating at a higher frequency. You hear the harmonies and the rhythms, the way particular notes or chords come together, and it's just right.
I've been listening to a lot of country lately, and there's something about a few of Ella Langley's songs that just make me feel like, yes, girl. It's like I'm transported. When you listen to your favorite music, you can get chills when a particular melody or refrain repeats or when a chord resolves in just the right way.
You don't even think about it, but your body knows this feels good. But there are other times when the music feels dissonant, when the chords clash or the rhythm is jarring. You feel this tension, and it's actually uncomfortable.
Sometimes it makes you want to cover your ears or at least skip to the next track. There's a particular Metallica song that I remember coming across when I was younger, and it was like, I couldn't turn it off fast enough. My body reacted to it as if I was being attacked.
So we experience music as a vibration in our bodies, and emotions actually work the same way. When we're experiencing joy, love, or peace, the vibrations in our body feel harmonious, like our inner soundtrack is playing the perfect song. But when we're experiencing anxiety, overwhelm, or resentment, the vibrations feel like those dissonant chords, and our instinct is to want to shut it down or make it stop.
But just like in music, the dissonance of our emotions plays a role. In music, the dissonance creates contrast. It makes the beautiful resolution in chords possible.
And without that tension, music would actually feel flat. And the truth is, without the harder emotions, our lives would also be kind of shallow. We'd have nothing to push against or nothing to grow from.
No depth to our emotional experience. We'd all be running around like Stepford Wives. Everything's fine.
Everything's okay. Just think about anxiety for a moment. The physical sensations of anxiety could be a tight chest, or it could feel difficult to take a deep breath.
You might feel tense in your muscles, or you could even have a headache, like a pounding sensation in your head. Basically, none of those feelings feel good. They're not comfortable.
And sometimes that anxiety or fear exists because there's a real danger we have to address, but other times our anxiety is simply a response to something our brain has interpreted as a problem. And let's face it, there are so many circumstances in our lives right now with our big kids that we can interpret as a problem. Their attitudes, how they're doing in school, if they're struggling in some way, or pulling away.
When you see something happening that your mind interprets as a problem, you experience anxiety as a series of physical sensations in your body. But then here's what happens. We feel those physical sensations, and then we often use them against ourselves.
It's almost like we use the discomfort of these sensations to escalate the problem. We start to think something really has gone wrong, either out in the world or inside of us. So we naturally go on the defensive, fighting the reality of our emotions and believing those feelings shouldn't be there.
And of course that also makes sense. None of us would ever choose to feel bad. But the truth is when you're experiencing an emotion, what's really happening is simply a vibration in your body.
That's it. Something that really helped me early on in my coaching journey, and I've shared this before but it bears repeating, is the idea that life is 50-50. And here's what I mean by that.
We have this false impression that we should be striving for constant joy, constant contentment and fulfillment, as if those emotions are supposed to be the whole of our experience. Like the vibrations in our body are always meant to reflect peace and purpose and joy. But the reality is that's a lie.
No one experiences this all of the time. The truth is our lives are made up of about 50% positive emotions, joy, peace, love, accomplishment, contentment, and 50% negative or painful emotions like sadness and grief, frustration, boredom, loneliness. I remember talking to my college roommate about this when I first learned it and her response was, that's kind of depressing.
Why settle for 50%? Why not strive for 90% joy? And I get it. If you think about it as I'm going to be in pain half of my life, of course that sounds kind of terrible. But here's why this message resonates with me.
Because it's the truth. So much of our emotional life comes down to how we interpret what's happening around us. Every single day we carry around expectations and really predictions about how our kids will behave, how people will treat us, how our to-do list will go.
And at least 50% of the time, reality doesn't match up with what we hoped and expected would happen. And when that happens, we feel dissonance. Like in music, when you hit that chord that just doesn't feel right, that's the moment when you think, this isn't how I wanted it to go, this isn't what I pictured.
And so of course we feel an uncomfortable emotion in response to that reality, but that's also not a sign that something's gone wrong. It's simply a part of being human, living life with expectations that don't always match reality. So here's what most of us do when that dissonance shows up.
At a very basic level, what's happening is you expected one thing and life delivered another. Like you expected your big kid to do what you asked and they didn't listen. Or your thought would go a particular way and it went completely other way.
You had a preference or a hope and reality didn't match it. And so naturally in that moment you feel disappointed. Maybe even sad or frustrated.
The emotional equivalent of a dissonant note. But instead of just feeling it, we resist it. We look around and we start assigning blame.
We think, they shouldn't have done that thing. Or they shouldn't have acted that way. Or they made me feel this way.
Basically we decide that there's a problem out in the world with my kid or my spouse or my circumstances. Or the problem could be me. That's why we get hyper-focused on changing our kids, trying to get them to behave or act differently.
Because we think if they change, then we'll get to feel better. Or we turn it against ourself and we think I have to change something about myself or what I'm doing so that I can feel better. And again, all of this makes so much sense.
Our brain just wants to feel safe and comfortable again. And it seems like the quickest way to do that is to fix the problem. But the hard reality is so many of our circumstances are actually out of our control.
At least in the moment. I mean, yes, over time we can change some of our circumstances. And with other people we can have conversations and set boundaries.
And sometimes people do change. But unless they want to change, they're not going to. So we find ourselves stuck.
We can't change the circumstances of our lives. And yet we're fighting against our feelings about those circumstances. And the more we fight, the bigger and heavier the emotions feel.
This, my friend, is a trap we can so easily fall into. This trap of resisting reality. It keeps us stuck, blaming others and ourselves, feeling exhausted.
And we do all of this instead of simply feeling the emotion and asking, what is this dissonance trying to help me solve here? The only thing that's really gone wrong when you feel a painful emotion is that you're experiencing an uncomfortable vibration in your body, like a dissonant chord in music. It may not be the song you wanted to hear, but it doesn't mean the music is broken. I do know that some emotions feel so heavy they can seem unbearable, like grief, heartbreak, deep disappointment.
They can feel like a knife to the heart. And of course it makes sense that we want them to go away. But what actually happens when we fight against these emotions, when we fight against these vibrations in our body, is that they get bigger.
We resist and we judge ourselves. We tell ourselves we shouldn't feel this way. And then to escape, we buffer.
We indulge in food and wine and Instagram scrolling or we just shut down. We can also lash out or overreact to the people around us, trying to change them so we don't have to feel what's happening inside of us. What if you stopped fighting? What if you could simply acknowledge that emotion and ask what it might have to teach you? Not to justify your belief that the circumstances of your life should be different or that you need to change what's already happened.
Because what we often do is we think, if my team would just listen to me, then I wouldn't feel so stressed. Or if my husband only understood me better, I wouldn't feel so alone. Or if my house weren't so quiet, I wouldn't feel so sad.
These are all versions of the same resistance. Wishing reality were something other than it is. And when we think this way, we give all of our power to the circumstances that we can't control.
We keep ourselves trapped in the belief that we can't feel better unless the world around us changes. But the truth is it's not the circumstances creating the uncomfortable emotions, the dissonance. It's truly the way we're thinking about those circumstances.
The story we're telling ourselves about what they mean. And that is something we actually can change. And you can do this by starting to ask yourself, what is this emotion really about? What was I hoping for that didn't happen? Or what might I need right now that I'm not getting? Maybe even how am I setting myself up for failure here? When you stop making your emotions mean something is wrong with you or your life, you give yourself a chance to see them for what they are.
Vibrations, signals, even invitations. Opportunities to understand yourself on a deeper level. It's interesting to think about this in the context of motherhood.
Raising kids has been an ongoing invitation to grow, to learn and to evolve and to show up day after day after day, even when it's been really hard. There are so many beautiful parts of motherhood, but it's also been stressful and overwhelming and at times heartbreaking. There have been so many moments throughout this journey where we haven't known what to do.
Times we felt frustrated or totally exhausted, but we stayed committed. We believed in the worthiness of the goal, to love and raise our kids. And so we kept going, we kept showing up, even when it was hard.
We recommitted to this work every single day. What's so interesting is that when you start to approach or even enter the empty nest, you can often look back on those years of raising your kids, and for some reason, your brain starts to filter out the bad and remember more of the good. Remember the laughter and the love and those special moments.
And our brains tend to quiet the memory of the hard parts. But the truth is, those years were 50-50 too. And we showed ourselves that we could hold both sides of that experience.
We could hold the joy and the stress, the love and the frustration, the pride and the fear. And I see moms doing this every single day. No matter how their kids are acting or what's going on, they recommit.
They want to show up with unconditional love. They want to keep building connection. And that is hard work, excruciatingly hard work at times.
But we do it for our kid, over and over, because we know they're worth it. Here's what I want you to see. You are worth that same recommitment.
When you find yourself in these places of emotional pain, whether it's sadness, overwhelm, grief, or just the quiet of the empty nest, this is the work of life. This is where growth happens. Life isn't about everything being easy or joyful all the time.
It's about learning how to feel, how to listen to what your emotions are trying to teach you, and how to keep showing up for yourself anyway. As the house gets quieter, we can find ourselves more in our own minds. And so my invitation to you is to remember that life was never meant to be perfect.
It was never meant to be joyful 100% of the time. The negative emotions we experience, they're not signs that anything has gone wrong. They're simply dissonant notes, part of the symphony of your life.
So maybe today you can think of yourself as the songwriter, the one creating and shaping the music. And those emotions aren't mistakes. They're part of the composition of your life.
They're the chords that still need to be worked out, or the notes that give depth and texture to your story. And when you allow them, when you stop fighting those emotions, and you open up space to learn from them, you can see more clearly, oh, I'm disappointed, or I feel loss, or this is me wishing things looked a little bit different. And that's all that this is.
Even in those moments, you still have power. You still get to decide how you want to show up, not from judgment or from blame, but from a deeper understanding of yourself. My friend, you've been doing this your whole life.
You've weathered the 50-50 of life before, and you've recommitted through the hardest parts of motherhood. And now, in this chapter of motherhood, you get to bring that same resilience and unconditional love, not just to your kids, but to yourself. So when you feel that wave of sadness or overwhelm, see if you can let it be there without fighting it.
See if you can hear it as part of the music, and then ask yourself, how do I want to show up for myself in this moment? Because even in the dissonance, even in the discomfort, you still get to choose. And if I can support you in this journey, I am here for you. Let's write the composition of our lives with intention.
Until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
