"I WISH I COULD MAKE THINGS EASIER FOR MY BIG KID”—THOUGHTS MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS ARE ASHAMED THEY THINK | EP. 302
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.
Can we just be honest about how hard it is for us when our big kid is struggling? And today I want to specifically focus on what happens when our kid is unhappy. Because it seems obvious that we would feel anxious if our kids were doing something unsafe or making choices that could really hurt them. But what I think is really interesting is that in a different way, it can be just as hard to watch your kid be unhappy.
When I think about the moms I've worked with over the years, I think about the mom whose middle school daughter is already dealing with mean girl dynamics. She's being left out of get-togethers or left off that group text, and her mom can see how much it hurts her daughter. I've also worked with moms of boys who spend all their time gaming and don't seem to want to do anything else.
Or the mom whose daughter tries so hard to find friends. She goes to school every day with a positive attitude. She keeps putting herself out there, and she still ends up sitting alone at the lunch table.
There's the mom whose son stays in his room most of the time and barely engages. He just seems quiet and withdrawn, and she can see that something's off. Or maybe your kid gets to college and they barely leave their room.
They're not close with their roommate, they haven't really found their people, and they don't seem to be engaging in their life at school in the way you hope they would. Maybe your kid's graduated, or they're out in the real world, they've taken a new job in a new city, and now they feel completely overwhelmed by the decisions they've made. Maybe all they do is work, or maybe they're lonely, they haven't found their footing yet, and you're sitting hundreds of miles away listening to how miserable they are and wishing there was something you could do to make it easier.
Maybe they're sitting at home after graduation and they don't know what to do, and they can't seem to get motivated to figure it out. I can think of so many stories like this. Kids who are struggling to find their place in life.
Sometimes they'll even say, I don't know what's wrong with me, mom. And when you're the mom, that can be so hard to hear. And you might have a kid who tells you everything, so you're in the loop on every excruciating detail of their lives.
You know who didn't text them back, or you know about that roommate conflict. You know about every detail of the interaction with the mean teacher or the demanding boss. You get the blow-by-blow about the friend who hurt their feelings.
Sometimes it can feel like your kid dumps all of their hurt onto you, and then you can't help but carry the emotional weight of it too. Or you might have a kid who tells you almost nothing, so you don't really know what's going on, but you can see that your kid is unhappy and disengaged. Maybe they're quieter than they used to be, or they're not doing the things that they used to enjoy.
They're either spending a lot of time alone, or just with people you find questionable. You remember a version of your child who seemed lighter or more open, and you start wondering where that version of them went. It is so hard to watch your child struggle.
When I work with moms, one of the things we spend a lot of time doing is understanding what their kid's struggle means to them. Because the struggle itself is one thing, but then there's everything our brains make that struggle mean. On this podcast, I talk about the many places our minds go when our kids are struggling.
Maybe your brain goes immediately to the worst-case scenario. Your kid's lonely today, and your mind fast-forwards 10 years ahead and imagines that they'll never find their people. Or your mind could go to blaming yourself for your kid's struggle.
We might wonder what we did wrong. We think we didn't prepare them for life in the right way, or we missed something. And then there's the place I think so many of us also go, which is we try to fix it.
When your kid struggles, it can feel automatic. We immediately start looking for something to do. What advice do they need? Or what resource can I find? Essentially, how do I make this better? When our minds jump to catastrophizing, or taking things personally, or even that urge to fix or control the situation, essentially the illusion that we have some control, what I find so interesting about these thought patterns is that when you step back and really look at what they create, they just keep us stuck in anxiety, frustration, and often guilt or shame.
Rather than solving our pain, they actually just create more of it. And the hardest part is that these patterns of thinking don't feel optional. I can't tell you how many times a mom has said to me, I just can't help it.
My brain automatically goes to the worst-case scenario. Or I don't know why I always take things personally. I always end up blaming myself.
And this is exactly why I created the Mindset Trap series on this podcast. And I'm actually going to start revisiting those traps again because I think it's so useful to notice where your brain habitually goes. But today I want to look at this from a slightly different angle because the simple reality is that when your big kid struggles, it is completely understandable that you are going to feel something about it.
I think about the times I've watched my own boys be unhappy. There were those moments in middle school when friends were mean, when girls weren't interested, and then eventually when the stress of school got to me too much. I remember those first breakups and how painful they were.
There were even periods when they were trying so hard to make a girlfriend happy that they were making themselves miserable in the process. I've watched them feel overwhelmed and disappointed and scared and insecure. I've watched things not go the way they wanted them to go and them having to deal with the crushing disappointment.
Just last year, my son called me and said, Mom, I feel like my light is getting dimmer and dimmer every day. It is so hard to hear. And you know what? There is a part of my heart that is probably always going to hurt when my boys hurt.
And I'm not even sure I would choose anything different. I don't want the goal to be that my child's in pain and I feel nothing. And I'm guessing that you probably feel the same.
There is a reason we say you're only as happy as your unhappiest child. But I do think that we have a tendency to make our own pain around our kids' struggle even bigger, even heavier. A while ago, I learned a concept that I think is really useful to consider here.
And that's the difference between clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is the pain that comes from being human. Think of disappointment and sadness, loneliness, grief, fear.
It's essentially the pain of simply wanting life to be different than it is. I always think of grief as the simplest example. Because when you lose someone you love, of course you are going to feel grief.
No one would ever say to themselves, I can't believe I'm grieving. It's truly an emotion that everyone would agree you need to feel. In the same way, if you're really hoping something will happen and it doesn't, it makes perfect sense that you would feel disappointed.
These emotions don't feel good, but they are clean. They are essentially a part of life. In the same way, I think we experience clean pain when we see our child struggle.
Maybe we feel sad for them, or we feel hurt. We essentially wish it were different or easier for them. And there is clean pain in that.
In contrast, dirty pain is what happens when our brain takes that very real pain and starts building a whole story around it. This is where so many of those mindset traps come in. We catastrophize.
We make our kid's pain mean something about us. We start looking backward for what we did wrong, or ahead to everything that could go wrong. And because we're in pain, we start spinning and trying to find ways to make the pain go away.
So let's say your kid is lonely. Maybe they haven't found that best friend yet. Or they've moved to a new school or a new city and they don't really know anyone yet.
That loneliness is real. And of course it might hurt you to know that they're hurting. There is clean pain in that.
But then our brains can start adding to that pain. We start thinking, what if they never find their people? Or what if this gets worse? What if they get depressed? Then you start wondering if you should have encouraged them to go to a different school or prepared them better somehow. And because all of those thoughts add anxiety on top of the clean pain of hurting for your kid, you start looking for something you can do to fix it.
Now you're not only feeling the pain of knowing your kid is lonely, you're carrying fear about a future that hasn't happened, regret about a past you can't change, also maybe judgment about yourself. And this enormous pressure to somehow change what your kid is feeling. The clean pain is, my kid is lonely and it hurts me to know that.
The dirty pain is everything your brain piles on top of that. This shouldn't be happening. Something is wrong.
I should have prevented this. Now I need to fix it. And what if this never gets better? Look, in life, clean pain is unavoidable.
If you love your kid and they are hurting, you are probably going to feel some pain about that. But so much of the suffering we create for ourselves comes from everything we add on top of what is already hard. And this is where I think the thought, I wish I could make this easier for them, gets really interesting.
Because on the surface, of course that thought is about your kid. Of course you love them. You hate watching them hurt.
It feels like being a good mom to just want to take their pain away. And you know what? If there is some way for you to take away their pain, you'd probably do it. In all honesty, I would too.
But what I found is that if we're really honest with ourselves, it's not just that we want to make things easier for our kid. We also want to make it easier for ourselves. Because watching a child hurt is so painful.
And not being able to fix it is painful. Meanwhile, you're sitting here in this terrible powerlessness and you don't have a clear picture of when this struggle is going to end. And so our brains start looking for relief.
Maybe you start giving advice that your kid didn't ask for. Or you lie awake at night trying to think of what you can do or how you can approach them so they'll listen. You try to cheer them up.
Tell them this won't last forever. And the thing is, even when you know you can't change what they're going through, even if you've learned by now that there's nothing you can say, you can still feel this internal turmoil. This feeling that you can't find peace until you know your child is okay.
And sometimes our kid's struggle lasts for a while. And so then we're left stuck on this emotional roller coaster right along with them. And look, I'm never going to tell you that helping or trying to support your child is the wrong thing to do.
In fact, sometimes our kids do need our help. They may even need to hear the advice they don't want to hear. But I do think it's useful for us to be really self-aware.
Am I helping because this is actually what my child needs right now? Or am I helping because I'm having a really hard time tolerating how they feel? My friend, there is nothing wrong with you if you feel pain because your child is hurting. I really want you to hear this because so often I think we feel this sense of shame that it's as hard as it is. The truth about this stage of motherhood is that there are going to be times when loving our kid hurts.
There are going to be moments when your kid is lonely and you feel sad for them. They're going to be disappointed and you're going to wish with everything in you that things had turned out differently. There may be periods when your child seems lost and you feel scared because you have absolutely no idea when they're going to find their way again.
And maybe even these feelings of powerlessness, maybe that is also clean pain. I think we can tend to treat powerlessness like a problem we have to solve. We feel it and immediately we think, okay, what can I do? There has to be something I can say, something I can do, some way I can make this better.
But the older our kids get, the more moments there are going to be when the truth is there really isn't anything you can do to make this particular thing better. And there is pain in knowing even that. But what if that pain doesn't need to be fixed either? What if part of loving your child is sometimes being willing to feel sad because they're sad, to wish something were different while knowing you don't have the power to change it, even to feel scared without immediately treating your fear as evidence that something terrible is going to happen.
I think that may be where some of our deepest work is because your kid does not actually have to become happy in order for you to find peace. And I don't mean that you stop caring. I mean learning how to make room for the part of you that hurts for them without allowing that pain to take over your life.
Maybe instead of asking, how do I make this easier for them? Sometimes the question is, can I let this be hard for me too? There is so much clean pain that comes from being a mom. And when you really think about it, it's also pain that we would choose over and over again. And I choose to love my boys.
In fact, I would never make another choice about that. And because I love them, I also choose to hurt a bit when they hurt. And I also want them to live these big, beautiful lives.
And striving for something big, a life that's extraordinary, it will come with struggle and disappointment. Anytime you put yourself out there, you risk rejection, even failure. But to not risk these things means you live a small life.
And that is not what I want for my kids. And so as a result, I also choose the clean pain that comes from watching their struggle. Yes, it hurts.
And I would choose it again and again. What if you don't need to find your way out of their hurt or the fear or even the helplessness? What if instead you could be willing to feel all of it? You watch your child go through something painful. And on the one hand, you feel sad because you wish with your whole heart that you could change it.
And you can also remind yourself that the struggle may be required for them to become who they are meant to be. The hard thing that they're facing is part of their path. Even rejection can teach them something.
Disappointment can redirect them. Loneliness can push them toward finding new people. And failure can show them where they need to grow.
And the hard truth is we may not know what any of this struggle is going to teach them until much later. But it is worthwhile to remember that we are just watching the middle of the story. We don't know yet how any of this is going to turn out.
And when we don't know, our brains love to fill in the blanks. And that is where the dirty pain comes in. That's when we start catastrophizing and blaming ourselves, trying to step in and protect them.
But maybe the invitation is to just sit with what is true right now. My kid is hurting. I wish this were easier for them.
And it hurts me to watch. And none of that automatically means something is wrong. I often think about the word trust and what it means.
And I don't think it's always helpful to tell ourselves I trust that this will all work out. In fact, what I often find easier to hold on to is trusting that struggle is a part of a full life. And this is exactly what I want for my kids.
So my work is trusting myself to be the mom I want to be for them as they go through the process of figuring out who they want to be. And this is the work we do inside my Mom 2.0 coaching programs. Because this stage of motherhood can feel incredibly disorienting.
You still care just as much, but you have far less control. Your kids are making their own decisions, having their own relationships, building their own lives. And your brain is actively trying to protect them from all of it.
But inside Mom 2.0, I help you understand what is happening in your mind when your kid is struggling so that you can separate the clean pain from all of the extra suffering your brain piles on top. You'll learn how to notice the catastrophizing and the guilt and the blame and that urge to fix or control. And instead of spiraling in this additional pain, you'll learn how to make more intentional decisions about how you want to show up.
Imagine still loving your big kid just as much, but no longer losing yourself inside of their struggles. If that sounds like the kind of work you need right now, you can learn more about Mom 2.0 through the link in the show notes. My friend, I know every part of you wants to make the struggle easier for your child.
But maybe it's time to stop asking, how do I make sure they're okay? And start asking, who do I want to be while I don't know how this story is going to unfold? Because there will be painful chapters and lessons that you cannot learn for them. But what if you could let go of controlling how all of this goes and trust yourself to know who you want to be while your child is still finding their way? 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.
