Is it hard for you to let go of your children as they leave for college?
Do you have fear or trust issues when it comes to them making their own decisions and being independent?
Would you like to re-connect to your children now that they are away from home?
Feel a sense of loss or nostalgia about your newly adult children?
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This is a story of how we guided courage, connection and intimacy back into a family relationship in just one weekend at our center, Sacred Valley Spiritual Retreat in Mount Shasta.
We had a mother and daughter couples retreat recently, and their main objective was re-connection after the daughter left for college and mom was feeling the empty nest.
The mother was feeling disconnected to her daughter. The mom was very active in her daughter’s education and social life all through school as an educator and teacher.
The two were very close, but the daughter was feeling like she really needed the space to be on her own to make her own choices without mom’s influence. She felt her mom was overbearing and was pressuring her to make certain decisions she was not ready to make.
It’s hard as a mother to see your child break away, disconnect and let go. As a mother you may have fear that something will happen to them, that they may make painful choices and for this mom, she didn’t fully trust life to take care of them because she felt that was her job.
What happened for this mom that as her daughter left home, her own issues began to surface. She spent a lifetime avoiding her own pain and living to protect her children from the pain she experienced. We call that the rescuer ego addiction – feeling you need to ‘save or fix’ everyone and everything, which is a result of your own fear and needing to control life. Not only does it overstep personal boundaries and responsibility, but it enables others and takes their power away. And for the person rescuing it creates resentments and a disconnection to their own being.
This mom was now at a crossroads to figure out why she was so unhappy in her life and was looking to fill the void with rescuing and co-dependency with her daughter.
Her daughter felt her mom as a person who was very unsafe in her own body and subsequently felt very unsafe as well in the world. Not only did the mom not trust life, people or herself as a result of a traumatizing childhood, her daughter made every effort to find safety in being strong and doing activities like Karate for example to feel safe. In the end, she took on mom’s patterns and is also mistrusting of life.
This pattern does not help the daughter feel independent and confident in college. It is hard for her to trust her own choices, which she knows she needs to do.
Our work with this relationship was to identify for each of them why they felt unsafe in the world, where in the body this resides and what emotions were present.
We were able to identify the originating events in wherein lay the belief systems and emotional hooks that were causing them to have their current stories and the subsequent behaviors that they are operating from in their lives.
We created a very safe and loving container to begin the process of releasing these past traumas and shifting their perspective through powerful coaching dyad processes, honest communication and powerful modalities such as breathwork, guided imagery, meditation, yoga, hypnotherapy, Shamanic Reiki healing, and sound therapy.
The shift in perspective in hearing the “full story”, speaking their true feelings and needs was so powerful for both of them. Some of the most poignant was the guided imagery that helped them to “see” things differently in their own minds.
They felt so much lighter, connected and empowered as they left the center. They expressed that they felt they had really positive tools that they could implement in their lives and emotional honesty and intelligence that will help them to stay connected and grow.
If you are needing ways to re-connect or see yourself in this example, please reach out and set up a phone consultation with us, we’d love to help you reach success in your personal development and business endeavors.
Bringing you home to your heart!
Nicole + Alan
Photo by Claude Piché on Unsplash