As a psychologist with three decades of counseling experience I like to think I’m ahead of the curve on dealing with major life transitions. However, when my daughter, my only child, recently left home for college I was caught pretty much unprepared for the kind of emotional roller coaster I would go through.
When my daughter was born my life changed in a single day. I had to reset my priorities, marshall my resources, spiritual, emotional and physical, to take care of her. When she left for college my life also changed in a single day.
The first thing I felt was a deep sense of loss and grief about having her leave. Even though she was going to a school within an hour’s drive from home, there was an unmistakable psychological change, a coming of her independence, that I had not expected.
For a couple of days I felt about like I had felt as a high school senior when my girlfriend broke up with me–very down and depressed. I just sat in a chair and stared at the ground, didn’t have much of an appetite and pined after my lost “love” and feeling like I’d never snap out of this bad mood I was in.
But after a couple of days of bleakness I started to feel an enormous sense of possibility at the newly-available time and energy that I would now have as a result of my daughter’s leaving home. She did not need me in the same daily sense that she used to. Huge amounts of time were suddenly freed up and now I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life.
Because the feelings of grief had blind-sided me, a supposedly enlightened psychologist, I realized that for people who were not trained in human psychology, these bad feelings could come as even more of a surprise.
So I decided to begin having seminars for empty nest parents to help them cope with the loss when their child leaves home and to help them decide how they are going to use their increased amounts of time and energy creatively.
I’m going to have a seminar on Friday evening January 18th, 2008 and all-day Saturday January 19th for parents to discuss the empty nest. I’ll present my own experiences and some of the research I’ve read, we’ll do group exercises and others will share their experiences also.
