“I FEEL EMOTIONALLY OVERWHELMED”—THOUGHTS MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS ARE ASHAMED THEY THINK | EP. 250
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.
Have you ever had a thought as a mom and then immediately felt terrible for thinking it? Believe me, you're not alone, and you're truly not a bad mom for thinking it. In this series on the thoughts us moms are ashamed we think, I'm exploring these thoughts and where they're coming from.
Because when you shift from judgment to understanding, that's when everything changes. Let's dive in. Hello, my friend.
I feel totally overwhelmed. This is a statement I have probably said to myself a million times over the course of my life, and I hear moms say it all the time. When I think back to when my boys were really little, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the stress of trying to get them on a schedule, trying to figure out how to meet their needs.
And at the same time, I was also overwhelmed by the sheer monotony of every day feeling like Groundhog Day. And as much as those little baby smiles and giggles made it all worth it, my day-to-day experience of my life often felt really overwhelming. And then fast forward to when they started going to school.
I felt overwhelmed in a everything they needed every single day. I felt overwhelmed wanting to make sure they were engaged when they got home or had fun activities to do over the weekend. And at the same time, I was trying to find outlets for myself, volunteering.
I was starting to do some consulting work. Even though I wasn't working full-time outside of the home in those early years, I felt overwhelmed juggling all of the responsibilities of my life. And what's so interesting is that as my boys needed me less, that feeling of overwhelm didn't go away.
In fact, it actually became amplified. Even though the day-to-day responsibilities decreased, especially by the time they were in high school, I hadn't let go of the responsibility of worrying about them. I was constantly trying to plan ahead for their future, thinking about how I could guide them, how I could point them in the right direction.
I wanted so much for them to be successful that I found myself strategizing in my head about how they could achieve the goals that I had in mind for them. And of course, when they struggled, or when they went down paths I didn't want for them, that created a completely different type of overwhelm. It was a mix of anxiety and frustration, like a big ball of painful emotion that I didn't know how to untangle myself from.
And you would think that when they went off to college, that worry would ease, that that sense of overwhelm and responsibility might lessen. But I work with so many women who are still feeling overwhelmed emotionally in the empty nest. Some are overwhelmed by the stress of worrying about their kids, watching them struggle and not applying themselves in college, and feeling like they have even less control over how to help or guide them.
And that sense of helplessness, layered on top of anxiety and frustration, can feel incredibly overwhelming. And then there are other women who feel overwhelmed by the empty nest in a completely different way. These moms have invested so much of their heart and their time and their energy into raising their kids, and now they're not quite sure who they are.
Their kids are off living their lives, and they're at home feeling lost and directionless. Like they put their own life on hold to raise their kids, and now they don't quite know how to rediscover themselves. And what's really fascinating to me is that now, in this stage of my own life, here I am an empty nester, but my days are incredibly full.
With this work, I've found such a deep, meaningful purpose in serving moms of big kids. I truly love what I do. And yet, I still find myself falling back into that very familiar feeling of overwhelm.
For me now, it's connected to this sense that I have so much to do, so much that I want to do, but that I'm not doing enough. And maybe I also have a belief that there's no way I'm ever going to get it all done in a way that will actually bring me peace. One thing I love so much about the work that I do is that, yes, I get the privilege of supporting other moms as they navigate the stage of life, but the women I work with are also my teachers.
And over the past couple weeks, I had a really powerful interaction with one of my clients. It was one that really challenged me to go deeper in how I was helping her see her own mind. And because of that conversation, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could better support her, how I could help her untangle what she was feeling.
And what I was reminded of so powerfully was that if you want to create the result of peace in your life, it's actually just a decision you make. Because as long as most of us, and myself included, are in this pattern of trying to problem-solve or to fix ourselves in order to make this feeling of overwhelm go away, we stay stuck. Now I'm going to go into more detail of what I mean by that.
But first, let me explain what I mean when I use the word overwhelm. When I think of emotional overwhelm, I think of painful emotions that stack on top of each other. Feelings like anxiety or frustration, resentment, hurt, sadness, doubt, loss, grief, inadequacy, fear.
In our lives, we often don't experience emotions as one simple thing. Instead, we experience emotions in a tapestry woven together. And when those emotions are painful, that tapestry feels less woven and more tangled.
In fact, with my clients, I often describe it as a big ball of emotion, almost like a ball of yarn where the threads are all tangled together in a mess that's hard to unravel. Typically, when we feel this way, we try to fix the way that we feel. And look, of course we do.
It's uncomfortable to just sit in pain. And so we try to go into problem-solving mode. In many ways, even this can give us some sense of relief from our pain.
Maybe because we feel more in control if we're doing something to solve the problem. And sometimes even that overthinking that we do is enough to give us a little bit of relief. It somehow feels productive.
When it comes to our kids, especially in the teen years, we try to solve for what they're doing. You can think, if I can just get them on the right track, if I can just get them to make better choices, then I won't have to feel anxious and frustrated. So we try to talk to our kids, sit them down, explain what they're doing wrong or what we expect from them.
We set boundaries and try to enforce consequences. And we spend a lot of time thinking about how to do all of that in the right way. And sometimes some of those things do help.
But other times, even after all of that effort, the pain and the emotional overwhelm doesn't go away. Sometimes it's because our kids haven't changed. Maybe despite everything you've tried to do, they're still not listening.
Or other times they are doing better, but you haven't quite let go of the worry that something else could happen. So you stay vigilant. And you start to get the sense that no matter what you do, you can't feel better or feel more confident that your big kid will be okay.
So now on top of the anxiety and the frustration we already feel about what our kids are doing, we start to feel frustrated and inadequate about ourselves. We start to think, why can't I feel better about this? We feel frustrated that we can't let it go. But now we're layering judgment and self-doubt on top of anxiety and frustration.
And that big ball of pain just gets bigger. The same thing happens when we feel hurt or disconnected from our kids. Maybe they're pulling away and we feel hurt or rejected.
So again, we go into problem-solving mode. We try to fix the relationship. We might tell our big kid what they're doing is hurtful.
Or we might try to figure out what's wrong or what we did wrong. We analyze the past and every interaction with our big kid. We try to adjust the way we're approaching them.
We're essentially looking for the solution that will bring us back to feeling connected. And again, sometimes that helps. But when it doesn't, when our efforts don't create that feeling of connection we're hoping for, now we're not just hurt, we feel hopeless.
Maybe we fear that things are bad now and that they're only going to get worse. So again, we layer emotional pain on top of emotional pain until we feel completely overwhelmed by painful emotions. And this doesn't just show up in our relationships with our kids.
For some of us, as we transition to the empty nest, when that house is quiet and the kids are gone, you feel that sense of loss or listlessness. It's so natural to think, okay, I just need to find something new, a new purpose, a new hobby, maybe new plans or new things to fill my time. Again, there's nothing wrong with any of those solutions.
If you find something you love, something that lights you up, it's fantastic. But what I see over and over again is that filling up the calendar doesn't actually solve the feeling. Because the emotion isn't being created by the empty calendar.
And I see this so clearly in my own life right now. Because my version of this isn't having too little to do. It's actually having too much.
I have big goals and so many things I want to create. And I actually know what to do to manage my time. I know how to prioritize my list of things to do and how to calendar my tasks and be efficient.
In fact, most of the time, I'm incredibly productive. And yet, at the end of the day, I can still feel overwhelmed by emotion. And this illustrates something really important.
Because the truth is, the problem isn't actually how much or how little is on your list. And when you step back and look at all of the examples I've shared, from when your kids were little, to when they were teenagers, to when they leave the nest, or even in my life now with everything I want to create, these circumstances are completely different. And yet, in every single one of these examples, we can experience emotional overwhelm.
It shows up when you have too much to do and when you don't have enough to do. It shows up when your kids need you constantly and when they don't seem to need you at all. So really think about this.
It's not the circumstances themselves that create these feelings. And there are two ways we can actually know that. First, if the circumstances of our lives created our feelings, then we would all feel the same way in all of these situations.
Every mom with a struggling teen would feel the exact same level of overwhelm. And every mom with a quiet house would experience the empty nest in the exact same way. Every woman with a long to-do list would feel the same pressure.
But we don't. The same circumstance can create anxiety for one person, sadness for another, peace for yet another, and maybe no big emotional charge at all for someone else. The second thing to recognize is if circumstances were the real problem, then changing the circumstances would solve the feeling.
And yet we've also all tried to do that. We've tried getting our kids on the right track, and we've tried improving our relationships and filling our time, trying to become more efficient. And again, sometimes we can change those circumstances and maybe get a little relief.
But they don't consistently change the feeling. If our emotional overwhelm were truly being caused by what's happening in our lives, then once we fixed what was happening, that overwhelm would go away. But that doesn't always work.
In fact, it often just finds a new situation or circumstance to focus on. And so this offers us an invitation to start asking ourselves a different question. Not, what do I need to fix out there? But, what is actually creating this feeling within me in the first place? So if the problem isn't actually our kids, and it's not the empty nest, and it's not the list of things we have to do, then what is it? For so many of us, this is the moment where we turn on ourselves.
We make this all mean that there's wrong with us for feeling this way and not being able to feel better. And what I've seen over and over again, both in my own life and in the women I work with, is that this layer of judgment becomes one of the heaviest layers of emotional pain. Because now we're not just experiencing anxiety or frustration or sadness, it's all of that plus self-judgment.
So this is actually where I always start with my clients. Before we try to solve for anything, we have to stop making ourselves wrong for feeling what we feel. Because the truth is, every single emotion you have makes perfect sense.
Not because your circumstances are objectively creating that feeling, but because of how you're thinking about those circumstances. The truth is, our thoughts feel really true. And so of course our emotions are real.
Of course we feel overwhelmed. Nothing has actually gone wrong here. And this is such an important point to sit with, because when we believe something has gone wrong with us or out there in the world, that's when we go into fix-it mode, trying to fix our kids or our lives or ourselves so that we can feel better.
It's the sense of constantly looking outside of ourselves for some magical solution that will make everything feel better. But if you can consider that your emotional experience is actually being created by your own lens, by your perception of what's possible or what's missing in your life, this opens up a completely different set of emotional possibilities. And I see this so clearly in my life right now.
When I look at this recurring sense of overwhelm, I can see that it has absolutely nothing to do with that running to-do list of my life. Because the reality is, I don't have to do any of it. I don't have to do one single thing on that list.
No one's requiring it of me. And yet I feel this pressure as if it's happening to me. And when I really slow that down and take a look at it, I can see what's actually creating that feeling, that it's simply my thoughts, that I have too much to do, there's not enough time, that I'm not doing enough.
And it's these thoughts that are creating my feeling of overwhelm. It actually has very little to do with the list itself. And this is the same for the mom who's worried about her big kid.
It's not the child or what they're doing or not doing that are creating these overwhelming emotions. It's the thoughts. They're going down the wrong path.
If I don't fix this, their future's at risk. Or what they're doing means I've failed as a mom. These thoughts create feelings of anxiety and frustration and overwhelm.
Because the truth is, another mom could look at the exact same situation with their big kid and think, they're figuring it out. This is part of their journey. I trust what I've taught them.
Same type of child with the same problems, the same behavior, but a completely different emotional experience. And the same is true for the mom who feels lost in the empty nest. It's not the quiet house.
It's the thoughts. My purpose is gone. I don't know who I am without them.
My life feels empty now. These thoughts create heaviness and sadness, this sense of loss. Because another woman in the exact same situation could be thinking, this is my time.
I get to rediscover myself. And there is so much possibility here. Same empty house, completely different emotional experience.
This is where you can find your power, my friend. Because if emotional overwhelm isn't coming from your life, if it's not coming from your kids or your calendar or your circumstances, then it's not something you have to fix out there. It's something you can understand within you.
And that doesn't mean you stop setting boundaries or repairing your relationships. And it doesn't mean you stop pursuing goals or creating a life that you love. It just means you stop expecting those things to be the thing that creates your peace.
Because peace isn't something you earn once everything's handled. It's not something that shows up when your kids are doing exactly what you want, or when your house is quiet in the right way, or when your to-do list is finally complete. Peace is something you have to decide to create.
And the truth is, most of us have never been taught how to do that. We've been taught how to manage our time, or how to be productive, how to show up for everyone else. But we haven't been taught how to understand our own minds and untangle that big ball of emotions.
We haven't been taught how to understand that source of emotional pain. And that is exactly the work we do inside of Mom 2.0. The Mom 2.0 program isn't about fixing your kids or deciding which hobbies to pursue. This program is designed to empower you to be the mom and the woman you actually want to be in this stage of life.
The mom who can feel anxiety and not be taken over by it. The mom who can love her kids without carrying the weight of their lives or their moods on her shoulders. The woman who can look at an empty house or a full calendar and still feel at peace.
Because when you learn how your thoughts are creating your emotional experience, everything changes. Not because your life suddenly becomes perfect, but because you finally have the ability to create peace inside of it. So the next time you hear yourself think, I feel totally overwhelmed, I want you to pause.
You don't have to start problem solving or fixing or rearranging your life to feel better. I want to invite you to just pause and notice. Because that feeling isn't coming from everything you have to do, or from everything your kids are doing, or what's missing, or what's too much.
It's coming from what your mind is making it all mean. Your mind is trying to make sense of your life in a way that feels so true. But when you can recognize that overwhelm isn't happening to you, but being created within you, that's when you realize you don't have to be at the mercy of your life.
What if finding peace is just a decision? Until next time, my friend.
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.
