To inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be. Learn about tackling mental health problems like Anxiety and Depression as well as simple tips to understand the world better, in a down to earth and genuine way with the Best Selling Author and Psychotherapist Richard Nicholls.
Empty nest syndrome is one of those things people feel a bit embarrassed to admit to. Your child leaving home is meant to be a success story, so why does the house suddenly feel so wrong? In this episode I look at what's really going on when the nest empties, why it's grief rather than a disorder, what your attachment system is up to when you're still listening for the front door at 11pm, and why the research on what happens next is far more optimistic than you might expect.
Hello, hello. Happy Friday folks. You got a few minutes? Good. 'cause I wanna talk about something today that people sometimes feel a bit embarrassed to admit to, and that's empty nest syndrome. That flat, hollow, what do I do now? feeling, when your child leaves home. And the reason people feel daft about it is because on paper it's a success story, isn't it? You did your job. You raised a human being who can go off into the world and function without you. It's kind of the whole point of parenting, really. And yet there you are, stood in their empty bedroom, feeling like someone's died, and then feeling guilty about that because nobody has died, have they? They've just gone to uni. So let me say the most important thing first. Empty Nest Syndrome isn't a diagnosis. You're not gonna find it in any manual of mental health conditions. It's a description of something completely normal, which is grief. Because grief doesn't need a death does it? Grief just needs a loss. And when a child leaves home something genuinely is lost. It's not the child. They're all right. They're eating pot noodles and ignoring your texts. What's lost is a role, a daily, hands-on role that's shaped nearly every decision you've made for 18 or 20 years. What's in the fridge? What time you get up, whether you can go out on a Friday night. All of it is organised around this other human. And then more or less overnight, the job changes completely and nobody hands you a new job description. And there's a biological bit to this as well, because attachment doesn't just run one way. We talk a lot about children attaching to their parents, but parents attach right back. More fiercely, if anything. And that bond comes with a built-in monitoring system. So for years, your brain's been running a background programme. Tracking where they are, whether they've eaten what time they're gonna be home. And when they leave that programme back there doesn't get uninstalled. It just keeps running with nothing to monitor. So you still listen at the front door at 11 o'clock at night and you cook too much pasta for about three months. That's not you being daft. That's an ancient attachment system doing its job. It's just a bit behind on the news. It takes a while for the brain to update its map of the world. A bit like when you go round the supermarket and they've changed the layout, you keep walking to where the bread used to be. Give it time, your brain catches up. But here's the bit that might surprise you. The research on all of this is actually pretty optimistic. The image of the empty nest as this bleak marriage ending wasteland comes mostly from the seventies when the phrase took off. And back then, if the kids left home, one parent often lost their entire occupation in one go. Well, modern studies tell a different story. Most parents feel a genuine pang. They adjust within a few months, and then they slowly start enjoying themselves. And couples interestingly tend to report that their relationship gets better once the kids have gone, not because they spend more time together, but because the time they do spend together stops being about logistics. Conversations about something other than who's doing the school run tomorrow? Can you imagine? So if you are in the thick of it, let it be grief. Don't rush to fill every quiet evening just to avoid the feeling, because avoidance feeds a feeling. It doesn't shrink it. Have the little cry in the empty bedroom. There's nothing wrong with that. That's love, just with nowhere to put itself for a bit. And then when you're ready, start asking the more interesting question. Which isn't, who am I without them? But Who do I get to be now? Because underneath the parent role, there's a person who existed before all of this, and it might be the first chance in two decades to go looking for them. I went a lot deeper into all of this in a recent episode over on Patreon. The identity stuff, what it does to couples, how to reshape the relationship with your now adult child without gripping too tightly. So if you want the full version, patreon.com/richardnicholls is where to find it, along with a few hundred other episodes. Right, the weekends calling, and I'm not gonna argue with it. Look after yourselves and I'll catch you next week. Bye for now.
