What to do when your kids leave home.

They are leaving home.

The move feels so big. Sometimes it’s bigger for you. And sometimes it’s bigger for them. Camp, School, College, Apartment. Doesn’t matter. It feels huge, transformational. But even though it feels like it’s one big move, that’s actually not the way it happens. Leaving home is really done over years in the smallest of steps. Mundane steps that you don’t see as the runway to independence. It is a runway that was built brick by brick--with every goodbye and every goodnight. You and your child have been building the muscles for departure with every hello and good-bye; we are apart and we are connected.

With each drop-off and pick-up at school and at camp, your child has been building the capacity to hold his world and be held by yours—building the muscles to hold all of that in his heart. You forget that in addition to the many things your child is learning at school or at camp: math, science, history, swimming, archery—they are also learning attachment.

Attachment is one of the most important things we learn --and, unless there is a problem, one of the most invisible things we learn. Attachment is learned in the everyday back and forth of life. We teach it with peek-a-boo when they are babies and hide and seek when they are older. We teach it with every good-night and good-morning. We teach it with every mistake and every repair. It is hard to see because it changes shape all of the time. As a parent, attachment means being ballast—leaning to the side of the boat that needs to be brought in to balance. Sometimes it looks like holding and soothing and picking them up in your arms, wiping away tears. And sometimes it means holding the line, having the hard conversation, making them stretch: join a sport, get a job, pay your bills.

But at each milestone of stepping out and away, your child will walk on their new legs of attachment and feel them for the first time, again. They will wonder, “Can I do this? Can you? Will you remember me? Will everything be okay when I return? If I forget you, will you still be there? Who am I without you?” They will feel joy and pride in their new steps away, and fear and sadness at the loss of the more secure time they felt before. It is both. And holding both is really hard to learn. It takes most adults until mid-life to really have the ability to hold two truths in their arms at the same time and most kids can’t. They swing wildly between the poles—one day all excited and proud about the new adventure and the new friends, and the next day full of despair at the prospect of leaving.

And here’s the paradox for parents. We think that leaving home and the big milestones of our lives are about independence—but they are really about connection. Whether they are two, ten or twenty, your job is the same. You are already good at it. It is simple but not easy. You keep up your job as ballast. You help them hold both by holding the other: the other truth (yes, I will remember you), the other emotions (I know it’s hard, but you are learning so much), and the other end of the rope (I’ve got you, and you’ve got this, we are doing great, even if it doesn’t feel like it).

So as you send them off: to camp, to school, to college, to their new lives. Remember this. They are learning so many new things, but they are also, most importantly, learning attachment. They are learning how relationships hold over space and time. They are learning that love and care can stretch far and wide. They are learning that they exist, even when you can’t see them, and that you can hold them in your mind and heart—and they can do the same. They are learning that they carry all of the love and knowledge and resourcefulness of home in their own legs—that they can stand on their own feet and feel the sturdiness of them. And they are learning that home is woven through every cell of their bodies.

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

For a longer, wonderful read on attachment, here is an article by Robert Karen in the Atlantic. Or purchase his book, below.

A Safe and Necessary Distance for Healing

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Many years ago on a work trip I woke up in the morning to the crack of rumbling thunder in the distance. It was a compelling sound: close enough to see the storm, far enough away to watch it with interest and not fear. I was far away from home —working in Dubrovnik and my hotel room looked out over the Adriatic Sea. My room had a small balcony that was covered and I took my coffee out and sat and watched the storm as it dumped rain on the mountains across the way, as lightning shot down and thunder echoed along the coast. I am not sure why, but sometimes you can feel even safer, even more solid—when you are in a storm, but have just enough distance and safety to take it in. A safe distance from a storm can feel safer than when there is no storm at all.

For some reason, this storm so very far from home reminded me of how much I loved being in elementary school when there were thunderstorms. It would be nearly dark outside and you could watch the pouring rain through the big windows of the school, and yet inside it was bright and cozy and colorful. School was my safe place—so I think I could actually feel the dark and hear the thunder and experience myself holding what might have been otherwise frightening only because I had the safety and coziness of school to lean on.

It seems that in order to heal and hold what is hard, scary, or difficult that there is a requirement for a necessary safe distance.

Across our lives—no one escapes storms:  illness, loss, death, violence, grief, trauma. And when the storms of life hit you are in it: you are soaking wet, you are wind-whipped, tired, grief-stricken, terrified, anxious, angry, frustrated and disoriented. These storms often mark necessary times to seek shelter —to hunker down out of the storm. Hunker down enough to get through, to survive, and wait for the storm to pass.

But in the realm of healing from any real or repeated trauma I think that these storms—and their aftershocks tend to continue long after the actual storm. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years. The lighting continues to strike and the thunder continues to roll and your healing isn’t served by seeking shelter completely away from the storm, but rather the healing is served by being able to sit through the storms and observe them. And this is the healing of a necessary safe distance.

Last week I was working with some very tender and painful feelings—old storms, buried storms, storms that in the past had sent me running for cover—storms that I just wasn’t able to hold or to watch. And last week I had found just enough safe distance to sit and observe them— the storms were close enough to see, and loud enough to hear —there needs to be a certain clarity so that you can really see your storm.  And this clarity made it so that I could see them enough to talk about them. Describe them well enough that I wasn’t alone with them. They were close enough to see, but far away enough away so that I wasn’t as afraid—and I could stay still long enough to work with them. This necessary safe distance is such a special place and it can be such a hard place to find.

We don’t just find this safe distance within ourselves. We also, and maybe especially, find it within a relationship.  We can get some necessary and healing distance from our storm by talking to and connecting with another person—getting the story out of our heads and hearts and bodies and letting someone else see it: see it and hold it from their perspective. What is healing, what provides us some distance is not that they see it exactly from our point of view, which we often think of as the healing element, but rather that they can hold it from their point of view—that we can borrow this distance—even for a moment.

I think this might help those of us who are in the business of helping other people—whether we are therapists, counselors or parents or loved ones. It seems that there is a misunderstanding of empathy and what it means to help someone through a storm. While I both believe and teach that empathy requires us to see something from the perspective of the other, to feel what it feels like to walk in their shoes—and this is one of the necessary aspects of empathy— I also believe that what can be truly healing is that you can have empathy but also hold your center. You don’t lose your perspective entirely—you allow your perspective to be ballast, to create that necessary safe distance.  

And when you are the person who is being helped, it is important, and may even be comforting, to not only feel understood, but also to have a bit of space left open by the other so that your storm, your feelings, your experience are yours to observe, to hold and to see –that you can hold the whole of your experience and yet not do it alone. You have the benefit of another’s distance from your experience. To feel understood but also be able to see your problem from their vantage point.  I think we forget that in moments of empathy— there is a mutuality—there is the experience of the person who is experiencing the storm— but there is also the experience of the person who is listening and supporting and guiding—and part of the empathic healing comes not because the two people have the same experience suddenly, but because empathy allows the person who feels badly to both be understood and to borrow, even if for a moment—a necessary and safe distance from the storm.

© 2023/2019 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

Inner Eclipses: Waiting for the Return of our Hidden Suns

“It began with no ado. Odd that such a well-advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.”
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

I have run into a lot of despair this week. At times my own. But also, others. People who hold others’ difficult stories. Who witness others’ suffering. People who don’t know how to support learning the way they want to. People who are ill or injured. It’s a despair that holds more than despair—it also holds care. It holds concern and responsibility. It holds a fierce persistence. And maybe, maybe, it holds the tiniest bit of hope. Hope that sometimes showed up as possibility, but often looked more like exhaustion and the willingness to surrender the old thing and let something else emerge.

In my imagination I picture despair not so much like night, but more like a total solar eclipse. Where the sun had been, it is suddenly gone. The world has gone dark. The color fades. Despair isn’t like night because night is supposed to be dark. But in an eclipse, there is darkness where there is supposed to be light. The loss of the sun feels total and permanent in that moment.

And maybe despair feels more like an eclipse than some long, dark night because I have lived through both: despair and eclipse. And I have gotten to see the totality of darkness, but also how it eventually passes. Neither remains permanent—no matter how permanent they feel at the time.

A solar eclipse happens when the sun, the moon, and the earth completely align. The moon passes between the earth and the sun, blocking the sun’s light completely. The sun will completely darken, but sometimes, if the weather is right, you can see the sun’s corona—the outside edge of the sun—something that’s often invisible. There’s a way that an eclipse is an integration of sorts: it only happens when things come into contact with one another. When too many truths collide. When you can see the problem all too clearly and the solutions seem impossibly far away.

In 2017 there was solar eclipse in August. Everyone in my neighborhood was out, including a family with kids. They were all in their driveway holding colored boxes—when I looked closely, I could see that they were cereal boxes.

The youngest boy in the family, maybe 8 or 9, came walking over to me, seeing me standing in my driveway without any equipment—and he handed me a Frosted Flakes box that had holes that had been cut and covered with foil. And one of the holes had a small hole. He pointed at where I could look through and said I could keep it—they had made a lot. So I got to peer at the eclipse safely, with Tony the Tiger and an 8 year old boy as companions.

The way to safely view an eclipse is through goggles or a tiny hole. You need protection so you aren’t hurt. And holding despair may be the same. You need the ability to take in just a small view of something so big. The things that happen that bring forth despair in us are things that are not only big--they are what makes us human.  Despair is the ultimate experience of being mortal—of knowing that in that moment our biggest power is the power to witness what is true, even if the truth is hard, or awful or unbearable. Witnessing despair doesn’t mean inaction. It just means, not yet.

I now have enough practice with despair to know that I get stuck when I think it’s my job to remove the darkness—as if I thought it was my job to move the moon so the sun could shine. I forget that it’s my job to witness—to see what is blocking my sun, our sun, the light in the world. I forget it’s the smallest voice, or the smallest parts of ourselves that offer the solutions—the cereal box, carefully taped—to witness the process, and see whatever we are capable of taking in at that time. To remember that the sun will emerge again, and at the edges of despair and darkness, sometimes things become more clear.

©2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Gurus in Life Preservers

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It’s summer and on my walk in the morning I can literally smell the sunshine coming off the lake that I walk by and my mind keeps going back to the lake at a camp where I taught swimming lessons. It brings me back to four girls who have been my gurus for the past couple of weeks. It was a wonderful summer for so many reasons, but nearly thirty years later, I hang on to the lessons that those girls taught me about courage and trust and perseverance.

I had one group of African-American teenage girls from Newark who had never been swimming before. And certainly never swam in a lake (“EEEEW there are fish in there! They are going to bite me!”) They stated from the outset that they were NEVER going to go in. But swim lessons were basically mandatory, so they had to come to the lake anyway, so the four of them humored me and came to the lake, but refused to wear suits and refused to get in.

So I called their bluff and I brought down a giant mixing bowl from the kitchen, and filled it with lake water. We had our lesson on the dock so they could learn to blow bubbles and do the rhythmic breathing required of the crawl stroke right there in the mixing bowl. They thought it was hilarious and played along. Then they practiced just dangling their legs in. When it was agreed that they could get in the water, they said they weren’t getting in the water unless they could do something. And that was, they each went and got two life preservers, and put both of them on. And two kickboards. And for the next couple of days they just stood in the water, brave enough to stand waist deep, wearing their life preservers and holding their kickboards. They didn’t care what they looked like. They didn’t care that they were the only ones with that much equipment at the waterfront. They just did what they needed to do. It was slow and incremental over the two weeks that they were there. Being brave enough to dunk their whole body in. Brave enough to pick their feet off the ground. And brave enough, eventually, to take the life preservers off and try swimming. And they did it. All of them passed the Red Cross Beginner’s test that session.

I have never forgotten this because I am still in awe about how brave they were to try something that they were so frightened of, and how smart they were to ask for what would allow them to feel safe enough to try. I have never forgotten their willingness to learn something that was so difficult for them and to keep at it. To be willing to be a beginner at something that all of their peers could already do. To decide that learning was more important than saving face.  And their genius at knowing themselves well enough and listening to themselves about their own incremental steps.

Maya Angelou used to say that we are never alone. That wherever we go and whatever we do we can bring others with us. We can bring ancestors, teachers, loved ones with us. Of my many inner teachers and gurus I pull on, these girls hold a particularly revered spot. I pull on them whenever I need compassion for myself or someone else who is up against a big fear. Up against something they wish they could do, but can’t. Something everyone else seems to do, but you can’t. They are the perfect visual reminder of what it takes to bravely overcome your fears—you get interested in taking on the challenge, you start as small as you possibly can, you oversupport yourself, and you stay with it day in and day out.

And this wisdom from them is especially useful when you are learning to dive in to emotions you find frightening. Almost everyone has an emotion that is more difficult for them than the others and if you have experienced trauma, the emotions can feel louder and more extreme. They can have an all-or-nothing quality not unlike how my camper girls saw the lake water: either I am safe on the dock or I will drown in the water. There is no middle ground.

The lake and swimming in it are intertwined. The girls were afraid of the lake and they hadn’t learned to swim. And I could say the same about my experience. My emotion and the way I protect myself from my emotions are also intertwined. It’s a big lake of emotion and I am still learning how to swim in them.

The key to stretching your capacity with difficult emotions is to do exactly what those girls did: Find the smallest possible increment to feel it. And stay with that until you are ready to move on.

What I have found helpful is the sheer repetition of talking about it: Sometimes even just saying the same sentence again. Even if it feels silly. Even if it is the emotional equivalent of blowing bubbles in a big bowl. Or sometimes if it gets to be too much. Stopping the conversation. Getting out of the water for a moment. And then dangling my feet in the water, heading back in to the conversation slowly. This practice of feeling something, pulling away from it, and heading back to it helps you reestablish a sense of control again.

Keeping those girls in mind helped me see what I needed to do. These past couple of weeks I have struggled with disappointment—an emotion I detest. I had the mistaken notion that ‘good disappointment’ looked like “Oh well.” As in, “Oh well, it didn’t work out.” But, in fact, this isn’t good disappointment, it’s indifference. This isn’t swimming with the emotion. This is staying on shore. What I needed to do was figure out what my life preservers were and stand knee deep in the emotion. Not drown in it. But just stand in it. Bravely. Knowing I had what I needed to be safe. And having the hope one day of freely splashing around.

The thing is you don’t have to swim perfectly to have a sense of accomplishment. The whole experience gives you pieces of that feeling. Every day those girls came to the waterfront—they tried something new, and they laughed, and they met a part of themselves they hadn’t met before. This is really what it is all about. You become bigger each time you meet a new part of yourself. You don’t make the difficult emotion smaller. You make yourself bigger. You meet parts of yourself you haven’t met before.  The lake didn’t change. The girls did. I didn’t master disappointment this week. But I ventured into deeper water than I had before without going under. I met parts of myself I hadn’t met before. And so what if I am still holding a kickboard as I stand in the water. It means I am closer to swimming than I was before.

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD