THE COST OF TRYING TO AVOID DISCOMFORT—FIVE WAYS IT MAKES PARENTING TEENS AND THE EMPTY NEST HARDER | EP. 303
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 much energy you spend trying to make sure you don't have to feel worried or disappointed or uncertain? Without meaning to, we try to control what our kids do, or we try to plan ahead and think through every possible outcome. Or we can find ourselves perpetually waiting for life to finally settle down so that we can feel okay.
But what if trying so hard to avoid discomfort is actually creating more of it? In this episode, I'm sharing five ways our attempts to protect ourselves from pain can actually cost us, and how learning to trust yourself, even when life doesn't go the way that you want, can help you feel more grounded, confident, and present in the life that you are living right now. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
You know, we spend so much of our lives trying not to feel. Truly, think about it. Of course, we want to feel happy and content.
And sometimes we do get those beautiful moments when everything seems to be exactly the way that we wanted. Our kids seem good. Our relationships feel steady.
And we feel on top of what we need to do. And for a minute, there's the sense that everything's okay. But those moments can feel so fleeting.
If you really think about your life, how often is absolutely everything exactly the way you want it to be? I'd actually go so far as to say that most of the time, there is something in our lives that isn't quite what we want. I mean, there is always something. Often, my clients will notice that they'll get through one challenge.
They'll get through something with their kids. Or a challenging situation will resolve itself. Or at least they'll finally understand what they're dealing with.
But then almost immediately, their mind moves on to the next thing. You would think we would have more of a chance to bask in the joy of everything working out. But more often, what happens is our minds just start scanning for the next potential problem.
Even in those moments when things are relatively peaceful, our minds can be looking ahead for what could possibly go wrong. So much of this comes down to the fact that we really don't want to have to feel painful emotions. I can think of so many times in my own life when I've engaged in behavior that was very clearly designed to save me from pain.
One way I've done this in my life is that I work really hard. At some point in my life, I learned that if I worked hard enough, I could prevent disappointment or failure. And look, there can be a lot of merit in working hard.
But there are also times when no amount of doing saves you from disappointment or pain. I mean, you can give something everything you have, and it still may not turn out the way that you wanted. The same work hard philosophy absolutely extended into the way I raised my boys.
I expected a lot of them, and I was like a ninja with their schedules. I planned and orchestrated all sorts of things because I believed that was part of being a good mom. And for a long time, it worked out pretty well.
Then they got older and developed their own ideas about how their lives should go. And suddenly, I realized that my hard work, all my planning and organization of their lives, it was in many ways another facet of my attempt to control what was happening with them. And I wasn't doing it because I'm some monster and I love control.
What I realized I've been doing all my life is trying to hold on to control because what I really wanted was to avoid pain. If I could get my kid to make the choice I thought was right, it felt like I wouldn't have to worry. Or if I could help them avoid mistakes, I wouldn't have to feel the pain of watching them deal with the consequences or the guilt of not having prevented them.
If I can make sure that things work out for my boys, then I get to never feel sad or helpless. What I'd always thought of as helping very often had an undercurrent of me wanting to protect myself from what I might have to feel if things didn't go the way that I hoped. And of course, this pattern didn't just show up in my parenting.
I've tried to change people in my life, tried to get them to do something different or think differently, because then I'd get to feel better if they were different. I've also tried to change circumstances in my life because I didn't want to feel whatever those circumstances were bringing up for me. And of course, sometimes changing a circumstance is exactly what we should do.
If something in my life isn't working and I have the ability to change it, why not do it? But at the same time, we can spend a lot of mental and emotional energy trying to change things just because we can't tolerate how we feel in relationship to those circumstances. And then there are all the things we do when we can't change the person or the circumstance. We try to do everything we know to do to make things better, and we can't.
So we're left with this terrible feeling, and we just want to escape it. For me, I've turned to wine or to eating. You might scroll social media endlessly or watch TV, an online shop.
Sometimes we even do things to escape emotion that seem productive, cleaning the house or exercising. And honestly, there's nothing wrong with doing any of these things. But notice how there's a difference between doing these things because you want to, as opposed to doing it because you need to do it to escape what you're feeling.
I mean, how much of what you do in your life is actually motivated by a desire to avoid a feeling? That's a question I find fascinating, because so much of our lives can become organized around preventing discomfort. We think we're solving problems or planning ahead, protecting ourselves or helping the people that we love. And sometimes we absolutely are.
But other times, underneath all of that is a very simple motivation. I don't want to have to feel what I might feel if this goes badly. A few weeks ago, I released an episode about the cost of trying to prevent our kids' discomfort.
I talked about the ways that we step in and try to fix or rescue our kids, sometimes to try to control them, because it can be so hard for us to watch our kids struggle. And then a few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my alumni circle. It's a group I created for women who have gone through my Mom 2.0 program.
And we started talking about how difficult it can be to just sit in discomfort. And that conversation stayed with me because I realized there's another side of this that's worth exploring. What happens when we, as moms, as women, spend our lives trying to make sure we never have to feel pain? Whether that's fear or helplessness, disappointment or rejection, uncertainty or regret? I mean, on the one hand, avoiding these feelings sounds like a perfectly reasonable goal.
Who wants to feel any of them? But I do think there is a real cost when avoiding discomfort becomes the thing driving our decisions. As I started thinking about this, I realized there are five ways preventing our discomfort bears a cost. The first one is something almost all of us do without meaning to.
In our attempt to prevent our future suffering, we can create an incredible amount of suffering in our present moment. And the clearest example of this is when we catastrophize. Something happens, or maybe something doesn't happen, and our minds jump to the worst possible outcome.
Your kid is really struggling emotionally, and instead of staying with what you actually know today, your brain starts racing ahead to what this could mean for their future. What if this gets worse? What if this changes the course of their life? Before anything has actually happened, you can already feel the fear and the grief of the future you're imagining. The same thing can happen in our relationship with our kids.
Maybe the relationship has been strained for a while, so your mind doesn't just stay with the pain of that reality. It can jump all the way to what if we never get back to where we were? What if they keep pulling away? And those fears may not feel irrational. The point is that our minds can take a painful possibility and make us experience the emotional pain of it before we know whether it will ever become true.
What's so interesting is why our brains do this. On the one hand, it seems like catastrophizing feels like useless worrying. But when you really think about it, it's our mind's attempt to protect ourselves.
Consider if you really could think through every possible bad outcome, and then have the power to prevent all of them. I guess in an interesting way, it makes sense. Why wouldn't we try to prevent that pain? Except for that's actually impossible to do.
We can even have the idea that imagining the worst will somehow make the worst easier to handle, like we're preparing ourselves for the pain. But most of the time, what it actually does is just make us experience that pain twice. We suffer in advance, and then again if that thing does happen.
Or if it doesn't happen, we have spent hours or days, sometimes months or years, feeling anxiety about a future that never came true. The second cost of avoiding discomfort is that we can end up handing our emotional well-being over to circumstances and people that we cannot control. This is a mindset trap I call emotional outsourcing.
It's basically all of the ways we tell ourselves that I can only feel okay when something outside of me changes. I'll feel better when my kid is doing better, or I'll feel better when they start talking to me more, or when we get through this hard time. And look, I don't mean that we shouldn't have emotional reactions to what happens in our lives.
In fact, it makes so much sense that we do. If my kid is hurting, I'm going to feel sad about that. But what I'm actually talking about is the extra layer of suffering we add on top of her very natural pain.
And that additional layer of suffering comes from this belief that the circumstance has to change before we can feel better. Now our emotional state is dependent on somebody else doing what we need or want them to do. My kid needs to call or respect my boundaries.
Or my partner needs to agree with me. My friend needs to respond differently. The situation needs to resolve itself.
And until that happens, I'm essentially telling myself I can't feel better. And so you can see how this dynamic leads us to try to change the other person or the situation. You try to explain yourself one more time, or you send another text, or you just think about it endlessly because your mind believes that your relief is dependent on getting this circumstance under control.
And sometimes that effort works. There are circumstances we can change. The problem comes when the thing I need to change isn't actually in my control.
And so when my emotional well-being depends on one of those things changing, I've put myself in a pretty powerless position. I'm basically saying I can't be okay unless you do something differently. And think about how exhausting that is.
It means we can spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to control something that is not in our control. And the irony is that this usually creates even more discomfort. Because now I'm not only feeling the original sadness or worry or disappointment, I'm also frustrated because the person won't change.
Or I'm anxious because the problem hasn't been resolved. I'm angry because I feel like I've tried everything. And I feel powerless because no matter how much I do, I still can't produce the outcome I want.
Very often, that second layer of pain becomes even heavier than the original emotion you were experiencing. The third cost of avoiding discomfort is that our lives can start to get smaller. When avoiding discomfort becomes one of the main things driving us, we naturally begin choosing what feels safest over what we actually want.
And I think this is especially relevant for us as moms in this stage of life. Our kids are getting older, pulling away, making choices that we can't control, sometimes struggling in ways that we can't fix. It can feel so consuming that we start putting our own lives on hold.
We tell ourselves that what's happening with them is more important than anything else. And in some ways, of course it is. But then our focus on that consumes everything else.
I think underneath all of this is this unspoken belief that says, I need to stay focused on this problem with my child, because if something goes wrong, and I wasn't paying attention, that I'll never forgive myself. And so our world starts to narrow. We spend so much emotional energy thinking about our kids, anticipating their problems, or trying to prevent their mistakes, or just managing our own worry about what they're doing, that there isn't much space left to think about what we want.
Instead of asking, what do I want my life to look like now? We stay focused on, how do I make sure nothing goes wrong? And this shows up outside of parenting too. You don't have the difficult conversation because you don't want someone to be angry with you. Or you don't put yourself out there socially because you don't want to feel rejected.
Or you stay in the job you really don't want because you're afraid you might regret leaving. You don't try the thing you've been thinking about because failure would feel too uncomfortable. On the surface, all of these decisions can feel practical, but often they're really decisions designed to avoid a painful feeling.
And the problem is that almost everything meaningful we want in our life requires some willingness to be uncomfortable. Loving people makes us vulnerable. Trying something new opens us up to failure.
Being honest sometimes means other people don't like what we say. Changing our lives also means letting go of something familiar before we know exactly what comes next. So if our main goal is staying safe from disappointment or rejection or pain, we can end up protecting ourselves right out of the life we actually want.
A comfortable life is not always a fulfilling one. And sometimes the price of avoiding discomfort is that we stop taking the very risks that might have made our lives bigger, even extraordinary. The fourth cost of avoiding discomfort is that we miss the chance to discover how capable we actually are of handling hard things.
I think this is one of the biggest ironies of trying to avoid discomfort. We tell ourselves, I can't handle that. I couldn't deal with it if that happened.
So we organize our lives around making sure we never have to find out. But then we also never collect the evidence that maybe we could handle it. And honestly, we even do this when we do go through hard things.
After the fact, instead of focusing on all the ways we got through the hard thing, we tell ourselves, well, that was terrible. I never want to have to go through that hard thing again. We remember the pain, but we almost always overlook the fact that we survived it.
We forget to notice the decisions we made, and the strength that we accessed, and all the ways we kept moving, even when we had no idea how things were going to turn out. And interestingly, we usually understand this much more clearly when we think about our kids. Intellectually, we know that we can't build resilience for them by making sure nothing hard ever happens.
There is a point where we know they need to go through difficult things in order to build that confidence in themselves. And yet, knowing that intellectually doesn't always make it easy for us to let them have those experiences. When we see the rejection coming, or the disappointment, or the consequences of a choice they've made, every part of us still wants to step in and soften it.
We do, on one level, understand that the hard thing may help them grow. But even more, we can wish that they didn't have to go through the hard thing at all. And I think we do the exact same thing to ourselves.
We say we want to trust ourselves. But sometimes what we really mean is, I want to trust myself to make sure everything goes well. I want to make the right decision at all times.
I want to prevent every mistake. I want to know that if I take a risk, it will work out. But when we keep organizing our lives around avoiding the of disappointment, or rejection, or failure, we miss the chance to recognize how capable we are of handling the hard things.
The fifth and final cost of avoiding discomfort is that we can spend so much of our lives waiting to feel okay, that we miss the life we're actually living. I think about how often we tell ourselves some version of, I'll feel better when this is over. I'll relax when my kid is settled.
I'll be able to breathe when I know what's going to happen next. We are always waiting for some circumstance to resolve, so that we can finally be present in our lives. And look, in life, sometimes that circumstance does resolve, where the problem gets handled, your kid gets through that hard thing, and for a little while you do get to feel relief.
But then your mind often just finds the next thing, because there is always something else that feels uncertain or unfinished. That is just life. There are always going to be parts of it that we wish were different, something that may feel unresolved.
We may be waiting on an answer, or grieving a change, or trying to make peace with something that we can't control. And if we keep telling ourselves that peace comes later, once all of those things are finally settled, we can end up postponing our own lives. We stay so focused on getting through this season, that we don't notice that our life is happening right now.
We're so busy waiting for things to calm down that we miss the moments that are already good. And I don't mean that we should somehow force ourselves to be happy or grateful when we're in the middle of something hard. But even in the middle of the worst seasons, you are living your one precious life.
The person you love is here, right now. There may be things you genuinely cannot control, but there is also so much that is in your power. And maybe that's the invitation here.
We can't control whether our kids struggle, or whether someone else disappoints us. We often can't control if things turn out the way that we hope. But we do have power over the relationship we build with ourselves in the of all of it.
And that's where self-trust comes in. And again, I'm not talking about trusting that everything's going to turn out okay. It's not trusting that your kids won't struggle, or that people won't disappoint you, or that you'll always make the right decision.
That kind of trust is really just another attempt to create certainty. When I think of self-trust, to me it's knowing that even if the outcome isn't what you want, even in those moments when someone is upset with you, or you make a mistake, or you have to work through something really hard, even in those moments you are still going to have your own back. You may have to feel sad, or even angry, or frustrated, or hurt.
You may wish with everything in you that the circumstance were different, but none of that has to mean that you abandon yourself. And I think this is where we so often get confused. We believe that feeling okay means not feeling pain.
But maybe feeling okay has much more to do with trusting ourselves in the presence of pain. And that is a very different kind of security. Because now my peace is not entirely dependent on life cooperating with me.
My kid doesn't have to make the choice I would make. Other people don't have to understand me. And I don't have to know how the story ends before I decide how I want to show up in the face of it.
Creating this kind of self-trust is the work we do inside Mom 2.0. I'm not going to teach you how to arrange your kid's life so that you never have to feel worried or disappointed. I couldn't promise you that. But what I can help you do is understand what is happening in your own mind when those feelings show up, so that fear and discomfort don't take you out.
You can learn to recognize when you're trying to control something because you don't want to feel. And you can notice when you're catastrophizing, or when you're outsourcing your emotional well-being, or when you're making your own life smaller. Because staying safe feels easier than taking a risk.
This work is really about learning how to stay connected to yourself when life feels uncertain, and how to make decisions from a place of self-trust instead of from an urgent need to make discomfort go away. Because ultimately, I think that's what self-trust gives us. Not certainty about what's going to happen, but confidence that we can be the version of ourselves that we truly want to be in the face of whatever comes.
My friend, I wish I could tell you how to create a life that never hurts. If you figure out that mystery, please let me know. But until we find that miracle, what I've discovered is that your power is in no longer letting the reality of pain decide how you live your life.
There will always be things we cannot control. And that is especially true when it comes to raising and launching our big kids. Also in life, there will always be uncertainty and disappointment and hard chapters.
But we don't have to spend our lives trying to outrun them. We can learn to trust ourselves to feel what we need to feel and keep showing up to our lives so that we are present in this one precious life. What if you are capable of feeling all of what this life has to offer? You have more power than you think, 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.
