THE SEPTEMBER RESET—THREE STEPS TO BUILD YOUR EMOTIONAL CAPACITY FOR PARENTING TEENS AND NAVIGATING THE EMPTY NEST | EP. 283
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 noticed how quickly your mind can turn a new beginning into something you need to brace yourself for? As the new year begins, it's easy to find yourself bracing for conflict, preparing to worry, worried about the loneliness, or whatever challenge you think might be coming next. But what if, instead of using all your energy to try to predict and prevent every hard thing that might happen, you could build more confidence in your ability to handle whatever does actually happen? In today's episode, I'm sharing three practical ways to do exactly that, so that you can feel less reactive, trust yourself more, and dive into this new school year feeling empowered and confident. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend. A new school year is upon us, and I was thinking about how interesting it is that as a mom, once your kids get to the age where they're in school, fall feels almost like the beginning of a new year, kind of like a January 1st.
And I still feel that way, even though my boys are now in college, and my life, in many ways, no longer revolves around a school calendar. But September still feels like a new beginning to me. But I've been noticing lately that September also feels different from January.
The new calendar year comes after this stretch of time where, for many of us, life slows down a bit. Yes, the holidays can be stressful and busy, but there's also that week at the end of December when not much is happening. And then January comes and it feels like, okay, I'm ready to get back into the swing of my life.
There's this feeling of a clean slate, and it brings with it so much hope and possibility. September doesn't always feel that way. For us as moms, September can mark a significant change in our lives every single year.
And those changes can feel unsettling. Some of us have just had the emotional college drop-offs and are now standing by, wondering how our kid is doing. Some of us are launching into a new school year feeling hopeful but also anxious about how things are going to go.
Maybe you're entering the college process and you want everything to go right for your kid. Or it could be that your kid struggled last year and you're wondering whether this year is going to be more of the same. You might also be a new empty nester, and now you're trying to figure out what that means for you.
Sometimes we're also coming off of a long summer feeling frustrated by how it all went. Your kid could have been on their phone the entire time, or maybe not doing much of anything. And maybe you're more than ready for them to get back into a routine.
But at the same time, you're also dreading the power struggles over getting to school on time and getting homework done. So September may technically offer the opportunity for a fresh start, but a lot of us are not arriving to this moment fresh. In fact, we may be coming to it with a lot of baggage.
And I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like I come into September already exhausted. And I hear this in so many of the conversations I have with moms at this time of year. We look ahead at the next few months and instead of feeling hope about the possibility of the new beginning, we imagine all of the challenges that lie ahead.
And so we brace. Think about that word for a second. To brace.
Think about what your body does when you're bracing for something. You tense. You tighten or you clench your muscles.
You're actually using energy before anything has even happened. And I think when we find ourselves in these liminal moments, when we think challenges ahead, that's exactly what we're doing emotionally. We're bracing for the hard school year ahead, bracing for the power struggles or the homesickness.
We're mentally preparing for the college process or grappling with the loneliness of the empty nest. Moms will tell me all the time, I dread that next phone call. Sometimes they even dread coming home to whatever attitude they know they're going to face from their big kid.
And with all this mental and emotional bracing, is it any wonder that we're exhausted ahead of time? But even as I say all of this, I know it's hard not to brace yourself. One reason is that our brains are really good at projecting into the future and imagining everything that could go wrong. Are we catastrophizing? Sometimes, absolutely.
But I also don't think it's always useful to tell ourselves that everything's going to be fine. Because sometimes we're not entirely making it up. We know our kids.
Maybe we have a very recent history of them struggling or pushing back. So imagining that some of these challenges may continue doesn't necessarily feel like a huge leap. And sometimes we're already in it.
We already have a tense relationship with our kid. Or the nest already feels devastatingly empty. And so we're not projecting anything.
We're just in it. It's already hard. And what moms will say to me is that they fear that it's never going to get better.
You've probably had that experience where you try to talk to a friend or to your husband, and you tell them what you're struggling with or what you're worried about. And they say, it'll be fine. And they'll give you some throwaway advice like just give them space or stop taking things so personally.
Or the best yet, go find a hobby. And you feel a little stupid or condescended to. Because on the one hand, sure, intellectually it sounds like good advice.
But on the other hand, if it really were that easy, don't they realize you would have done that already? But then you feel like there must be something wrong with you that it's not that easy. My friend, I've had some version of this conversation with so many moms. We can feel overwhelmed with all of these painful emotions.
And we know intellectually what we should be doing about it. And honestly, we've probably already tried to do those things. And yet we're still here, in pain, not able to escape it, and judging ourselves so harshly for it.
It's actually heartbreaking to me how many women I meet for the first time who cry during our call and apologize for it. They tell me, see, I'm a mess. They're convinced that something must be wrong with them because they're in the middle of these difficult emotions.
Believe it or not, when you're in this place, I think that spending a lot of mental energy trying to believe that everything's just going to be fine when you're in pain, I don't think it's actually the place where we should be spending our energy. And here's why. When you're facing a big transition or a real challenge with your big kid, trying to force yourself to believe that everything's going to be okay when your mind is really convinced otherwise, it's just not going to work.
First and foremost, it doesn't work because your brain calls BS. It essentially says, but what if it's not fine? Through the work that I've done with my clients, I feel like I've come to have such an incredible sense of awe for the default operating system of our mind. We spend so much time beating ourselves up for catastrophizing, when in fact, projecting into the future and imagining scenarios is the reason humans have evolved as quickly as we have.
The human mind imagined being able to fly like the birds, and we made it happen. Our mind envisions being able to talk to each other across the world, and now we can actually see each other on Zoom, no matter how far away we are from each other. This ability of our mind to imagine possibility and also problems has allowed us to engineer spectacular solutions in our lifetime.
And in countless ways, you have also been doing this as a mom. Your kid has struggled, and you're not only projecting in the future the terrible things that could happen, you're actively problem-solving to try to avoid those possibilities. It's actually incredibly beautiful when you think about it.
But here's where I think we get into trouble. We can become so focused on preventing the hard thing from happening that we never stop to ask ourselves what we believe would happen if it did. Because underneath all of the planning and the problem-solving, there's often another fear underneath it, which is, what if I can't handle it? What if my kid struggles again and I get pulled right back into the anxiety I was in all last year? Or what if this relationship only gets worse, and eventually they leave home and that's it? I lose them forever.
Or what if the pain I'm feeling as an empty nester never really goes away? What if this pain is just inevitable? The hard truth of life is that we will experience pain. There will be hard times, and our kids will struggle. In fact, we will struggle.
But sometimes we can even think about how we've handled past challenges and we judge ourselves for that too. We feel like we have past evidence of our inability to handle the hard times. So if the challenges of our lives are inevitable, instead of wasting energy trying to convince ourselves that everything's going to be okay, what if we started asking ourselves, how do I build my capacity to handle whatever lies ahead? Now, when I say capacity, I don't mean some superpower or some superhuman strength that we're supposed to build inside of ourselves.
What I really mean by capacity is building the belief systems about our own internal ability to face the challenges of our lives. Because when we feel like we don't have that capacity, our thoughts usually sound something like, I can't do this again, or I don't have it in me, or I can't take one more thing, or often, I don't know how I'm going to get through this. It's the sense that whatever is ahead is going to require something from you that you don't think you have in you.
Maybe it's patience, or it could be strength. Maybe we tell ourselves we can't tolerate the uncertainty, or we don't want to feel the sadness or the stress. The underlying thought is simply, I'm not sure I can handle it.
I wonder as you face this new school year if there's a part of you that questions your capacity to face the challenges ahead. And look, I don't mean you think you literally won't get through it. Of course you will.
We get through all kinds of hard things. What I mean is that you may be questioning what it's going to cost you emotionally. How much anxiety am I going to have to live with? How much sadness do I have to tolerate? Or how much uncertainty do I have to manage through? How exhausted am I going to feel? And am I going to lose myself in all of this again this year? That's often what we mean when we say I can't handle it.
We don't mean I won't survive this. We mean I don't want to feel what I imagine I'm going to have to feel. Now, I wish I could tell you there was a magic formula for avoiding the pain of life.
I haven't found it yet, but I promise if I ever do you'll be the first to know. I know it's easy to see the facade people put on in their day-to-day life and think they have it all together. But the reality is just because someone looks confident on the outside doesn't mean they never doubt themselves.
And being strong doesn't mean you never feel anxious or sad. I think of myself as someone who is highly motivated and I also regularly feel overwhelmed. And as you well know, parenting big kids comes with this incredible dichotomy of emotions.
You can love your child so much and still feel incredibly frustrated with them. You can also be proud of them and yet terrified for them. You're excited to see them grow up and become independent, but you also can feel hurt as they pull away.
This is one of the strange truths of being human. Opposite emotions can and do exist in our hearts at the same time, and one doesn't necessarily replace the other. They often simply coexist.
So when I think about building capacity to handle whatever comes, I think there are really three parts to it. The first part is building your capacity to feel. And by that I mean increasing your ability to experience discomfort without immediately deciding that the discomfort itself is a problem.
Because so often the moment we feel anxious or sad or helpless, we start fighting against the feeling. We tell ourselves, I shouldn't feel this way. I need to calm down.
I need to get over this. I should be handling this better. And now we're not only feeling the original emotion, we're also judging ourselves for having it.
And notice how that judgment also adds to the weight of the emotions we're already experiencing. We're not only in pain, but now we're layering on self-judgment for that pain. My friend, we were meant to feel the full range of human emotions.
And so the first part of building capacity to hold these emotions starts with acknowledging that there is no wrong emotion. We were designed to feel all of them. Now that doesn't mean it's always fun, and I get that we don't want to stay stuck in the hard emotions.
But when you set yourself up to be afraid of what you're feeling, those emotions will actually have more power over you. I was having a conversation with a client the other day and she told me she's terrified to feel lonely. And yet, this is an emotion every single human will feel at times.
What if the feeling itself isn't the problem, but rather a signal? If we could learn to stop judging ourselves for our emotions, that's truly the first step to understanding what they have to teach us. The second part of building your capacity to handle what comes is learning how to allow the discomfort of your emotions long enough so that you don't immediately react to them. I'm willing to bet that you are well aware of the ways you react to your emotions.
Some of us react to our anxiety by checking in with our kid again. We feel frustrated, so we remind our kid again, or we start lecturing. We feel rejected, so maybe we pull away.
Or we feel afraid, so we start trying to control the situation. We could also feel lonely, and then we look for something to distract us from that feeling. And there are times when these actions make sense.
But there is a difference between doing something from a place of intention, meaning that this is something I really need to or want to do, and taking action primarily from our need to make the painful feeling go away. The problem with reacting so that we can avoid our pain is that if that's the only way we've learned to deal with painful emotions, then we're stuck always reacting in these ways, and often in ways that we regret, rather than building the capacity to sit with the feeling long enough to understand it. It's fascinating, actually, that when you think about painful emotions, we spend so much time and energy trying to avoid them that we never stop to appreciate that as uncomfortable as difficult emotions are, they're not actually painful.
What is anxiety? It's a tense feeling, maybe a racing mind or a pit in your stomach. It's really a series of physical sensations that are no doubt uncomfortable, but on a pain scale, they wouldn't register very high. And yet we can begin to feel anxious about our anxiety, and that only exacerbates our need to make it go away.
But what if you can build the capacity to believe that any feeling is something you have the ability to tolerate without immediately reacting? Your kid doesn't answer your text, and you notice that anxiety rising, but you don't immediately need to send another one. Or your daughter calls upset, and instead of rushing into solutions, you stop and listen for a little longer. Maybe the house feels painfully quiet, and rather than immediately trying to outrun the loneliness, you let yourself be there with it for a little while.
Now, you have done this, no doubt, countless times, pausing before reacting. I wonder if you could look at these moments as building capacity, teaching your nervous system, I have the power to feel this without needing to escape it. When you learn how to do this, to recognize that a feeling can be intense without being dangerous, you build the capacity to stay present with that feeling long enough to decide what you actually want to do next.
The third part of building your capacity to handle what comes next is building self-trust. And by this, I mean fostering that belief that you do not need to have everything figured out ahead of time in order for you to be okay. This is such a big one for us as moms, because so much of our anxiety can come from wanting to know what to do before we actually have enough information to know.
Is there something I should do here? Should I step in? Or should I back off? We'll never really know the impact of our actions until much later. Is my kid really struggling, or do they just need some time? Again, the answers are never really clear. We want certainty, because certainty feels safe.
The truth is though, so much of parenting big kids does not give us certainty. And even in our own lives, we have no idea what's ahead. So building self-trust means becoming more willing to say, I have no idea what's ahead.
And instead of interpreting this as I'm failing, or I should have the answer, you begin to believe, I will do what I need to do if and when the time comes, and that I always have the ability to make the next best decision. And that doesn't necessarily mean every decision is going to be perfect. It's believing that you can make a choice, learn from it, adjust if you need to, and then keep going.
And I think this is one of the most important ways we build capacity, because when we don't trust ourselves, every uncertain moment starts to feel urgent. We start overthinking and second-guessing ourselves. We ask five people what they think, and we try to predict every possible outcome because we're hoping that if we can just think hard enough, we can eliminate the possibility of getting it wrong.
But my friend, we often can't. And at some point, having the capacity to handle whatever comes means being able to say, I may not know exactly how this is going to go, but I trust myself to respond to what is actually happening when it happens. This is very different from telling yourself everything's going to be fine.
It's actually saying, whatever comes, I don't have to solve all of it today. I trust myself to handle the next part and the next part when that comes. Consider the power of bringing these three steps together.
First, you build your capacity to feel by not treating every difficult emotion as evidence that something has gone wrong. Second, you build your capacity to pause and give yourself enough space to experience the feeling without immediately reacting to it. And this paves the way to build self-trust because you create space to decide with intention how you want to respond.
And in doing so, you build trust in your ability to handle whatever challenges you might face in your life. We sometimes think of having capacity to handle difficult emotions as strength, but I actually think it's more about being mindful. Hard emotions are going to come.
We're not always going to know exactly what to do, but can you become someone who can stay with herself through the uncertainty and the sadness and the fear long enough to make her next best decision? My friend, this is exactly the work we do inside of MOM 2.0. So many of the women who come to me already know intellectually what they should be doing. You don't need more advice. You need a place to actually build the capacity to do what you really want to do, even when you're in the middle of painful emotions.
Inside MOM 2.0, that's where we practice understanding what you're feeling, learning how to stop reacting automatically, and building the self-trust to handle your relationship with your big kid and your relationship with yourself with so much more confidence. If you're listening to all of this and thinking, yes, I know what I'm supposed to do, I just can't seem to actually do it when I'm in the moment, I want you to know that this is actually a learnable skill, and it's exactly what I teach in MOM 2.0. You can find more information about it in the show notes. My friend, as you head into September, maybe this year you can stop bracing for impact and trying so hard to make sure everything goes well, and instead simply ask yourself, how do I build my emotional capacity to meet this year as it unfolds? We cannot know exactly what's coming.
There will likely be many beautiful moments ahead, and there may also be disappointment and uncertainty and conflict and loneliness, but you don't have to brace for all of it today. And that's the shift I want for you this September, not feeling detached or trying to strive for certainty, but finding more capacity, more room inside yourself for the life that you actually have. Because when you stop using so much energy trying to outrun the hard parts, you actually create more space to be here for all of it, the fear, the love, the change, the pride and the grief, the possibility of your life.
And ironically, this is actually what empowers you to create a life you love. Happy new school year, my friend. 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.
