Have you ever tried to push an emotion away instead of dealing with it? Doesn’t work so well, does it? It’s a bit like trying to push a beach ball under water. It is bound to pop up again sooner or later.
I had my own week of pushing down a beach ball. Ten days ago, my oldest moved out. She and I have always had a very strong bond. A friend of mine, who has a son a few years older, has been making foreboding remarks about the challenges of adjusting to children moving out for the last few months. Resolutely, I had refused to listen and “have her put suggestions into my head”. After all, her son had no siblings and the term “empty nest” did not apply to me at all.
When you google “empty nest syndrome” definitions like this one come up: “Empty nest syndrome is a feeling of grief and loneliness parents may feel when their children leave home for the first time. This can result in depression and a loss of purpose for parents, since the departure of their children from “the nest” leads to adjustments in parents’ lives. Empty nest syndrome is especially common in full-time mothers.”
I just couldn’t see how that could possibly apply to me. I have my work which I love, a close loving partnership, another daughter and a stepdaughter. Does that sound like an empty nest? I was worried about how my younger daughter would deal with her sister being away from home. I feared she would miss her best friend and mentor. Her older sister is the one she is closely bonded into. However, I was not expecting to feel grief myself.
My daughter moved out on Friday. On Sunday, my stepdaughter, who is an intuitive little one, asked me twice out of the blue “Are you okay?” I replied to her I was feeling tired but secretly started wondering what she was picking up on. By Monday, I was starting to realize that I was suppressing something. The bond with my oldest is strong and I trust it will change and become in some ways even deeper than it is. So that was not it. Yet, I felt moody, restless and just not myself.
It took a couple of meditations and some muscle testing to realize what was being triggered. A very old primal fear came up. I traced it back to being barely four years old. At that time, shifts happened in my family with one of my sisters being born and my mother almost leaving my father due to another crisis. The experience I had back then was that it is not safe for me when shifts happen among the people I love. Once I had uncovered that limiting belief, it was easy to clear it out.
We can clear out fears or limiting beliefs using PSYCH-K® or another belief change technique. In addition it can help to use NLP-based techniques of refocusing on what we want at this point in our life. This helps us to further adapt to changes and to be able to direct our creative energy towards our own/new goals.
Sometimes we underestimate periods of transition in our life. We are getting married or moving in with someone. We are having a baby. We are melting two families. Somebody moves out. We are getting a promotion into a more challenging position. Somebody in the family is retiring. All these are usually “happy” events. Yet, just like losing our job, a break-up of a relationship, a separation, a divorce or losing somebody through death, transitions shake us and require adjustments. They can trigger emotions and fears. They might bring limiting beliefs up to the surface. They are, however, a gift. They are an opportunity to do our growth work.
Are you going through a transition in your life?
For Life Coaching and Emotional Healing Work
Contact Angelika
905-286-9466
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