CREATING PURPOSE FROM PAIN
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 29.
Hello, my friends. One of the aspects of being in this time of life in our 40s and 50s is that there is such an incredible opportunity in front of us to create something new for our lives, but that it often feels incredibly difficult for many of us to move towards this opportunity for many reasons. We might call it lack of motivation, anxiety, worry about our kids.
There's so many categories, but for the purposes of this episode, I want to find purpose when you feel overwhelmed by pain. I'm drawn to this topic maybe because it's such a focal point of my own experience right now, and it also seems to be a place that my conversations with many of my clients go. I've talked so much about the pain we experience during this time of our lives, the space between motherhood and the empty nest.
It's an unbelievable time of transition. First, our kids prepare to and eventually leave the nest. The process of letting go starts well before the moment when we drop our kids off at college or they leave home to start the next chapter of their lives.
No, this process starts at some moment in time, a moment that you don't even notice until later and the evidence starts stacking up. The process starts the moment when your child starts to pull away. Now, this doesn't have to be dramatic.
Some of our kids pull away simply by demonstrating their own independence, driving on their own, or just starting to take care of things on their own, doing their homework without being told, or making their own meals, no longer confiding in us everything that's happening in their everyday lives. This is all normal, totally part of the process of our children growing up. It can be beautiful when you're able to sit in the awe of it, how these babies of ours have grown into independent human beings.
How absolutely amazing. But of course, there are the moments when it doesn't feel so amazing. Our kids pull away in other ways that feel a little less comfortable and awe-inspiring.
It would be impossible to cover all the ways. It could just be an attitude shift, that they seem slightly annoyed by us at times, or they stop spending as much time with us. Their bedroom doors are always closed, and when you knock to check on them, you get the distinct feeling they're waiting for you to leave.
We offer our advice and reminders as we always have, but suddenly our kids seem less open to our input. Increasingly, we see our kids faced with decisions, and we can't help but have an opinion as to how they should move forward, whether it's something simple like how much they're studying, or whether or not they should ask for help, participate in this or that activity. We may have opinions about their friends, or how they spend their free time.
Just as we have since our kids were little, we have opinions about how our kids should show up, and increasingly, our opinions are less relevant, not particularly welcomed. We find ourselves navigating this odd dance of encouragement and boundary setting. We want to protect them from making mistakes, but our kids have a tricky way of doing things they're intent on doing, whether we condone them or not.
The point of all of this being, our kids pull away in big and small ways well before they leave home, and then they go, and there is a whole new relationship we have to forge with them now that they're living on their own, quote unquote, but still very much dependent on us financially, most likely. Not exactly independent. So if you have one child, this is a process that could take three to five years, this letting go.
It could take longer. Many of us continue to worry about our kids well after they've graduated college. In fact, is there a time when we won't worry about our kids? I'm beginning to think there isn't.
So one kid, that's a three to five year journey of letting go. If you have multiple kids spread over multiple years, that letting go period extends even longer. And for sure, whatever we've learned in terms of how to deal with letting go of our first child, it's going to be worthless in terms of dealing with the second and third child.
Each of our children are distinctly unique. Their own perfect combination of talent, strengths, weaknesses, pitfalls. It's a roller coaster to say the least.
And it seems like a cruel joke that this crazy transition happens at the same time our hormones decide to go completely haywire. Suddenly, it feels like we're having PMS three weeks out of four, hot flashes, waking in the middle of the night for no reason, heart racing, inexplicable weight gain, moodiness, depression, anxiety. Personally, I've spent quite a bit of time researching and trying to find the secret bullet to minimize my perimenopause symptoms, or is it menopause? Seriously, it's crazy that most doctors don't even seem to know how to help.
So there's this physical transition that's happening to us that's completely out of our control. Then we're experiencing a life transition with our teens, again, completely out of our control. Add to this, many of us experience other types of transitions.
Our parents' health might be failing. We might be experiencing our own health challenges. Aside from menopause, we might be facing the prospect of a divorce or putting our lives back together after divorce.
It also seems for many of us, we've spent so many years caught up in the whirlwind of raising our kids that we haven't stayed as connected to our girlfriends, or we find that now that the kids are moving on from high school, there's some relationships that we just won't carry with us beyond our connection to the school. It's a big time of transition for us, and we wonder why we find ourselves in pain, anxiety, uncertainty over the future. I just want to take a moment and give everyone listening a collective hug.
If this resonates with you, you are not alone in feeling this way. There's so much that we have to say goodbye to, and look, we really loved so much about raising our kids. Well, if we're really honest, we remember many of the good times in retrospect, and the tough times don't seem as bad anymore.
The sleepless nights of infancy, the terrible twos, the tantrums, the awkward stages of the pre-teen years, it all seems kind of precious now, even though at the time, I personally found myself at my wits end many times. It's interesting to consider that our children have really been a North Star for us for the past 15, 20, 25 years. No matter what else has been going on in our lives, for the most part, our primary focus has been on doing whatever we can to support and nurture our kids as they grew into adults.
This has been our purpose. And so it's really no wonder that now that we have no choice but to let go of this purpose, at least in the way it's looked up to this point, it's difficult. So often when I'm talking to my clients, and I've certainly felt this in my own experience, there can be a period of time when you actually don't really know what to do with yourself.
It might feel like you have a lot of extra time on your hands, and often my clients will say that they just don't feel motivated to do much of anything. Anxiety and fear of the future seem to be dominating emotions that we feel, and it often seems like these emotions are happening to us, like they're coming from outside of us. We can point to reasons why we think we feel this anxiety.
There are a whole host of reasons why we worry about our children, their safety, their futures, their choices, the repercussions of those choices. So much of this is now out of our control. So the only thing we feel like we can do is worry ourselves into a frenzy, because our kids are still such a focal point of our lives, even as they increasingly spend so much of their lives away from us, we still consider them a mission in our life.
And so it's almost like this underlying buzz of anxiety that feels ever-present and focused on our kids, but then there are all sorts of other reasons we feel anxiety, from our other relationships, parents, spouse, boyfriend, friends, co-workers, bosses, our health, politics. I'm sure we could all create a long list of things that we worry about. It's not hard to find reasons if you're looking for them.
So it's like anxiety becomes somewhat of an identity. We can become so used to feeling worried that we can't see anything else. What we really want is to feel better, to make the pain go away, but we're stuck because we can't change the circumstances that are triggering our anxiety.
Kids going out into the world, living their lives. I'm not sure if you've considered it, but as nice as it sounds to keep your kids at home, it's not hard to imagine the inherent challenge of keeping a bird from flying. Once our kids are ready to take flight, holding them back, even from a path we wish they wouldn't take, it just stops being an option.
We can't control our kids and their choices. We certainly can't stop time or demand that our loved ones are healthy, that we're healthy. We feel powerless to feel better because we can't always fix what we perceive to be the cause of our worry and pain.
And I don't know how you experience anxiety, but it can be physically overpowering. It can stop you in your tracks. And often the more we experience anxiety in a way that feels overwhelming, the more we can begin to fear this physical state.
We begin to have anxiety about our anxiety. Many of my clients come to me hoping to find a way to achieve some relief from this anxiety. There are many ways we tend to try to tackle this challenging emotion.
If you google ways to cope with anxiety, you might find suggestions like deep breathing, taking a walk, doing yoga or meditation. And certainly these strategies are helpful. But you can think of these things as treating the symptoms of anxiety, like taking aspirin for a fever.
It's certainly worth doing, but these strategies don't necessarily get to the root cause of the anxiety. Same with taking antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication. Again, this may be a helpful strategy in terms of coping with anxiety, but it doesn't solve the problem.
There are other ways we can try to cope. Escaping sometimes feels like an attractive short-term solution. This can look like any number of things that either take our mind off the pain or serve to numb us from feeling it for some period of time.
We can try to fill our schedule so we're too busy to indulge in the discomfort of the pain. We can try to seek pleasures that give us a short-term dopamine hit, like eating our favorite comfort foods, drinking alcohol, watching our favorite shows, scrolling on social media, online shopping. The world offers an endless number of opportunities for us to escape our pain.
So much so that it's culturally acceptable for us to engage in any number of these activities on a regular basis, even to excess. But when we try to distract ourselves from the pain, it's like shoving all of it into a full closet that will barely close. You open that door again and everything is going to come tumbling down on top of you.
And worse, because the mess you've created just makes the pain worse. Think about when we overeat to numb our pain. We only make the uphill battle we're facing with maintaining our weight even harder.
When we drink to numb the pain, we feel hungover. We don't sleep well. We feel exhausted.
We shop too much. We end up paying the price, literally. Scrolling on social media can offer connection, but also a staggering sense that our own life doesn't quite live up to the fabulous examples of the lives of our Facebook friends.
Compare and despair. Not only are these buffering strategies not solutions for our anxiety, but they actually can have a net negative impact. They can make us feel worse.
And we certainly aren't able to move forward. So what's the alternative? Because it can sometimes feel like a full-time job to figure out how to manage our pain and anxiety. So the thought of finding the motivation to create something new, even to get to the gym or to make the effort to get out there and make new friends, it just seems like a pipe dream.
It's almost like we've forgotten how to self-actualize. We're investing so much of our emotional and mental energy in coping, just trying to feel better. Dreaming big or even finding purpose seems to be too big, too unrealistic a hurdle.
So let's talk about how to overcome pain to get to the part where we find purpose again. I want to plant this seed. Pain can be an incredible source of power and strength.
Think about it. Almost anything that you've achieved or contributed to the world that has been meaningful in any way has likely come at some cost, some pain to you, some amount of struggle. Growth and transformation doesn't come from us playing small and not putting ourselves out there.
Growth comes from trying, failing, continuing to do the work, even when it's hard. Look, I would imagine if you're listening, you're a mother or father. Shout out to the men who have told me these podcasts resonate with them, too.
So if you've raised kids, this process of raising humans has been hard. Pregnancy for many of us, not the most fun. Childbirth, it goes without saying, hard.
Raising infants who don't sleep, very challenging. Tantrums, bad behavior, talking back, giving up many of the freedoms we had before we had kids, learning every single new stage as our kids have grown up over the years. Because for sure the minute we feel like we've mastered one step, one stage, our kids graduate on to the next one and we find ourselves totally clueless again.
The point is, you've done hard. You chose to do hard, in fact. You might have been incredibly excited to have kids, but you probably knew walking into the whole thing that it wasn't going to be a walk in the park.
In fact, even this stage, the one where we're faced with letting go of our kids, even this stage, if we really thought about it in advance, we've known it was coming. Maybe it felt too far off to worry about, but each of these stages have required us to grow, to transform, to level up, to be the next best version of ourselves as parents and individuals. So now, whether we've chosen this or not, we're being handed a new curriculum, a new opportunity to level up into this next version of ourselves.
I want to plant the seed because it could actually be true that this transition, whatever the exact circumstance of what you're facing right now, this transition is your invitation to grow, to learn, to become someone new, someone who takes the pain and turns it into something with purpose. Okay, I know what you might be thinking. How? What exactly do I do? Especially if right now you're feeling completely stuck and overwhelmed by the circumstances of your life.
It can feel hard to even make the leap to consider that this pain might have a silver lining. So this is where you start. One, acknowledge the possibility that nothing has gone wrong, that there's nothing inherently wrong with you, that you're experiencing anxiety or emotional pain right now.
When you touch a hot stove with your finger, you will immediately feel physical pain. When you feel this kind of pain, you don't think, there must be something wrong with me that my finger hurts. You just learn, oh, the stove is hot and when I touch a hot stove, I burn myself.
You likely won't do that again if you can help it. Now, how is emotional pain different? And is there a lesson we can learn from this example? Well, when it comes to physical pain, these symptoms, the pain of a burned finger is a warning sign, a signal to the brain that we should remove our finger to avoid serious damage. Could it also be that our emotional pain is also a warning sign? And not a sign that there's something wrong with us, that we're inherently broken because we have anxiety or emotional pain, but rather the emotional pain is a signal that the way we are experiencing the circumstances of our lives is creating emotional pain.
Let me say that again. The way we are experiencing the circumstances of our lives creates emotional pain. It's not the circumstances that are causing the pain.
It is in fact our perception of those circumstances. So I can imagine that you're thinking, but in some cases, some circumstances are terrible. And I want to challenge that with this thought.
Let's take the case of death. For example, when someone in the world dies, that is a circumstance. Death in and of itself is not good or bad.
It just is. In fact, it's inevitable for all of us. So death is a circumstance, but the way we think about someone's death determines how we feel about it.
For example, if someone dies whom we don't know or have never met, we likely won't feel a sense of deep sadness or grief. But when someone we love dies, we feel grief because we likely think about what we are losing when that loved one passes away. Those thoughts about our loss create the pain.
And let me ask you this, would you want it any other way? How else would you want to feel but grief when you lose someone you love? I use this dramatic example simply to point out that life happens to all of us and we experience these circumstances with our own lens and interpret them in terms of how these circumstances will impact us. How our lives might be worse or changed because of these circumstances. And of course we do.
Life happens to us and of course we have an opinion about it. It is truly human nature. But the key here, really the secret to unlocking the ability to manage your emotional life, is to recognize that it's not the circumstances that make us feel positive or negative emotion.
It is rather the way we think about those circumstances. So step one, acknowledge when you feel emotional pain. The possibility that nothing has gone wrong.
You have thoughts about the circumstances of your life and these thoughts create emotional pain. This is part of the human experience and there is nothing wrong with you. Step two, once you've acknowledged that you feel this emotional pain and that there's nothing wrong with you just because you're feeling this pain, you can begin to stop resisting the pain.
You stop fighting against it. Just think about how hard it is to struggle against something. Like trying to close a door when someone's pushing from the other side.
It takes so much energy. And the minute you stop fighting, the emotional pain overwhelms you anyway. And it often feels even bigger because you're so exhausted from fighting against it.
Now allowing pain isn't fun. I get it. But unlike touching a hot stove which might result in a significant amount of physical pain, emotional pain has physical sensations.
But these sensations are often not painful. More likely they're uncomfortable, disconcerting. For example, your heart might race.
Part of your body might ache or feel tight. You could feel lightheaded or heavy, sluggish. It could feel like it's hard to take a deep breath.
None of these physical sensations are comfortable. But they're also not typically painful and certainly not life-threatening. The next time you find yourself in emotional pain, name the emotion.
Anxiety, grief, sadness, frustration, anger. Name the emotion and close your eyes and notice. Notice the physical sensations that happen in your body as you experience this emotion.
Where do you feel it in your body? Is it heavy? What color is it? Is it moving? Try to get really specific. As if you were describing this feeling to someone who had never experienced it before. And notice again that nothing has gone wrong.
You were simply experiencing the sensations connected to an emotion. Allow these physical sensations to wash over you and observe how they begin to dissipate when you stop fighting against them. The third step is to explore what this emotional pain has to teach you.
Truly, all pain is a teacher. Just as the physical pain of touching a stove teaches you not to touch stoves, emotional pain can help you discover truths about yourself. About the way you experience your life.
How you might be holding yourself back or limiting yourself in relationships with respect to your goals. This learning for me has been one of the most powerful aspects of having a life coach. It's not that you get to the point where you no longer experience emotional pain, but you do learn how to process the pain in a way that makes you stronger.
More connected to yourself particularly, but to others in your life as well. So reconnecting this concept to where we started. The pain of the empty nest.
The circumstances of our lives right now are completely out of our control for the most part. And so the way we think about these circumstances is the most powerful driver of our emotional lives right now. Learning how to accept, allow, and learn from this emotional experience is such a powerful, beautiful opportunity to step into the next version of yourself.
A woman. A mother who is creating a new relationship with her adult children. Who is redefining her purpose now that her children are leaving home.
A woman who is able to self-actualize in a way that she might not have done for some time in her life. Maybe in a way that she's never self-actualized. This is an opportunity to create a new relationship with yourself.
I saw a statistic recently that as we get older we spend an increasing amount of time alone with ourselves. This strikes me as powerful because we often think about redefining our purpose as looking for the next thing to do. The next focus area where we'll spend our time.
But I want to suggest that the most valuable purpose we can find in our lives right now is to re-establish our relationship with ourselves. For some of us we've never even explored this. Who are you? What makes you happy? What will fulfill you? Who will be there for you when you are in emotional pain? The answer is you.
Always you. So look, you can certainly find purpose in travel, volunteering, getting a new job, joining clubs, working out. There is always something you can find to do.
But consider that you are the most important purpose that you have. Until next time, friends.
Thanks for listening to the Small Jar Podcast. Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com, follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Small Jar Coach, and subscribe to this podcast. Remember, you are the author of your story.
