<p>This is a shot in the dark.</p>
<p>Perhaps there is also something else… something else that happened to you personally many years ago and your son leaving is triggering the emotional feelings deep inside?</p>
<p>I absolutely don’t know anything about psychology but my instinct tells me there is something deeper…</p>
<p>coffee, your posts are heart-breaking to me. I could tell you things to make you feel better (like, I can’t believe how much parenting I’m still doing with a college senior! He’s not out of your life forever!), but I really hope you’re continuing to move on seeing the therapist and I agree with others about a trip to the PCP. Maybe he/she will have some ideas on how to get through the next few weeks. And, yes, I’m talking about a medication, if needed.</p>
<p>Coffee.</p>
<p>Here is the part of your first post that is such a concern:</p>
<p>“There are times I wish I could do something to immediately stop that pain, but I’m not that stupid.”</p>
<p>This reads as if you have contemplated suicide. </p>
<p>If this is something you have thought about please tell your therapist.</p>
<p>I did lose my sister and brother and father between 1981 and 1986. </p>
<p>I have an appt with therapist on 8/8.</p>
<p>Sobbing again now. </p>
<p>Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2</p>
<p>Do you trust/have a good relationship with your primary care doctor? I’d try to get in ASAP, before the therapist appointment, just to give him/her the heads up on what’s going on.</p>
<p>You suffered quite a bit of loss during a short period of time. Perhaps you have not grieved fully or allowed yourself to grieve? If so, perhaps now is the time to do so. It’s OK to cry and grieve. It’s OK to cry and grieve now about your past loss and it’s OK to cry and grieve about missing your son in the future. </p>
<p>Do you have someone to talk to who can help with relieving the stress in the mean time until your therapist appt? </p>
<p>Find a pastor, mental health hotline, friend, your wife, etc.? Please keep us posted and let us know how you are doing.</p>
<p>I feel that it is not just your son. You’re proud of his achievements and happy he is moving forward. I wonder if you are also feeling the loss of your siblings and dad/abandonment along with this “loss” of your son? Sometimes emotional reactions to loss/trauma can come years later. Sometimes the triggers are easy it identify and sometimes not. (We lost a child years ago, and every once in awhile, feelings of sorrow/tears will overwhelm me–for no apparent reason.)
Are you feeling “mortal”–that your job as a parent is over, that you are now old, that the most important, most productive and significant part of your life is over? I find that the feeling of aging, of time passing, when you reach a major milestone like this can very depressing, too, and I try not to think about it.
Perhaps I missed it, but you don’t mention your wife? Is your relationship with her more distant? Do you feel that when your son leaves, you’ve lost the most significant/satisfying relationship? I’m wondering what you can do to feel closer to your wife at this time.</p>
<p>I have had very close (probably unhealthily close in some ways) relationships with my two oldest (now adult) kids–one because he and I are on the “same wavelength”, and also, with both of these kids, I depended on them for conversation or companionship when my H was often away due to his work. I realized that this put a burden on my kids and I tried to hold back. I needed to re-build my relationship with my H (which was difficult, due to infidelity). Now I am looking forward to being able to spend more time with H when we have an empty nest.
One thing that has helped H and me feel more connected when he is working long hours is texting. I never used to text. But I a few months ago I started saying Hi to H, or texting him a line from a song, saying “I luv u,” telling him what’s for dinner, brag about kids’ news, just small things like that, just a couple times a day. We feel more in touch and get a laugh out of this simple new habit. So, yes, you can text your son. But text your wife 3X as much.</p>
<p>Not much to add, Coffee. Except good for you for setting up an appointment with a therapist. As many others said, they’ve had problems when a child moves on. Me too. It got better for me, and it will for you too. Good luck!</p>
<p>I am thinking of you Coffee and I know you will get through this. You have received so much good advice here.</p>
<p>Thinking of you. You have a lot to process here. Please keep us posted.</p>
<p>Coffee12, </p>
<p>I felt very much the same when my youngest decided to travel cross country for college last year. We spent a tremendous amount of time together while in high school and have an amazing relationship. I was happy for her, but just beside myself with the feelings of sadness and what I would miss when she was away. </p>
<p>Immediately after dropping her at school, my H and I went on a trip to a city we had never been to, before. I took on an additional consulting job a few weeks after she left. I threw myself into my work and fortunately fall is my busiest time of year. Suddenly I was home more in evenings, because I wasn’t driving her to club practice far away from home every night. It was very different. Our empty nest was filled with two kids that returned home after graduating from college that year, so that added to the enormous changes in home Emotionally, it was tough for me and my H. We muddled through. We started remodeling our home to sell and move out of area. Suddenly, we are seeing what life is like after kids are grown. </p>
<p>Getting ready to send her back. It isn’t easy. I think this year we will be sad, but not as much as last year. </p>
<p>Hang in there. Lots of us have made it through. So will you (even if you think it is nit possible, now!)</p>
<p>I think I’m going to miss D2 more this year than last (rising sophomore). She is both more mature and more fun to be around now. </p>
<p>Who will I watch * Will and Grace* reruns with now?</p>
<p>:(</p>
<p>-- thought of you when i read this article, especially as you have spoken of your past losses.</p>
<p>August 3, 2013/NYT
The Trauma of Being Alive
By MARK EPSTEIN
TALKING with my 88-year-old mother, four and a half years after my father died from a brain tumor, I was surprised to hear her questioning herself. “You’d think I would be over it by now,” she said, speaking of the pain of losing my father, her husband of almost 60 years. “It’s been more than four years, and I’m still upset.”
I’m not sure if I became a psychiatrist because my mother liked to talk to me in this way when I was young or if she talks to me this way now because I became a psychiatrist, but I was pleased to have this conversation with her. Grief needs to be talked about. When it is held too privately it tends to eat away at its own support.
“Trauma never goes away completely,” I responded. “It changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away. What makes you think you should be completely over it? I don’t think it works that way.” There was a palpable sense of relief as my mother considered my opinion.
“I don’t have to feel guilty that I’m not over it?” she asked. “It took 10 years after my first husband died,” she remembered suddenly, thinking back to her college sweetheart, to his sudden death from a heart condition when she was in her mid-20s, a few years before she met my father. “I guess I could give myself a break.”
I never knew about my mother’s first husband until I was playing Scrabble one day when I was 10 or 11 and opened her weather-beaten copy of Webster’s Dictionary to look up a word. There, on the inside of the front cover, in her handwriting, was her name inscribed in black ink. Only it wasn’t her current name (and it wasn’t her maiden name). It was another, unfamiliar name, not Sherrie Epstein but Sherrie Steinbach: an alternative version of my mother at once entirely familiar (in her distinctive hand) and utterly alien.
“What’s this?” I remember asking her, holding up the faded blue dictionary, and the story came tumbling out. It was rarely spoken of thereafter, at least until my father died half a century later, at which point my mother began to bring it up, this time of her own volition. I’m not sure that the trauma of her first husband’s death had ever completely disappeared; it seemed to be surfacing again in the context of my father’s death.
Trauma is not just the result of major disasters. It does not happen to only some people. An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster. One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us. Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.
My response to my mother — that trauma never goes away completely — points to something I have learned through my years as a psychiatrist. In resisting trauma and in defending ourselves from feeling its full impact, we deprive ourselves of its truth. As a therapist, I can testify to how difficult it can be to acknowledge one’s distress and to admit one’s vulnerability. My mother’s knee-jerk reaction, “Shouldn’t I be over this by now?” is very common. There is a rush to normal in many of us that closes us off, not only to the depth of our own suffering but also, as a consequence, to the suffering of others.
When disasters strike we may have an immediate empathic response, but underneath we are often conditioned to believe that “normal” is where we all should be. The victims of the Boston Marathon bombings will take years to recover. Soldiers returning from war carry their battlefield experiences within. Can we, as a community, keep these people in our hearts for years? Or will we move on, expecting them to move on, the way the father of one of my friends expected his 4-year-old son — my friend — to move on after his mother killed herself, telling him one morning that she was gone and never mentioning her again?
IN 1969, after working with terminally ill patients, the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross brought the trauma of death out of the closet with the publication of her groundbreaking work, “On Death and Dying.” She outlined a five-stage model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Her work was radical at the time. It made death a normal topic of conversation, but had the inadvertent effect of making people feel, as my mother did, that grief was something to do right.
Mourning, however, has no timetable. Grief is not the same for everyone. And it does not always go away. The closest one can find to a consensus about it among today’s therapists is the conviction that the healthiest way to deal with trauma is to lean into it, rather than try to keep it at bay. The reflexive rush to normal is counterproductive. In the attempt to fit in, to be normal, the traumatized person (and this is most of us) feels estranged.
While we are accustomed to thinking of trauma as the inevitable result of a major cataclysm, daily life is filled with endless little traumas. Things break. People hurt our feelings. Ticks carry Lyme disease. Pets die. Friends get sick and even die.
“They’re shooting at our regiment now,” a 60-year-old friend said the other day as he recounted the various illnesses of his closest acquaintances. “We’re the ones coming over the hill.” He was right, but the traumatic underpinnings of life are not specific to any generation. The first day of school and the first day in an assisted-living facility are remarkably similar. Separation and loss touch everyone.
I was surprised when my mother mentioned that it had taken her 10 years to recover from her first husband’s death. That would have made me 6 or 7, I thought to myself, by the time she began to feel better. My father, while a compassionate physician, had not wanted to deal with that aspect of my mother’s history. When she married him, she gave her previous wedding’s photographs to her sister to hold for her. I never knew about them or thought to ask about them, but after my father died, my mother was suddenly very open about this hidden period in her life. It had been lying in wait, rarely spoken of, for 60 years.
My mother was putting herself under the same pressure in dealing with my father’s death as she had when her first husband died. The earlier trauma was conditioning the later one, and the difficulties were only getting compounded. I was glad to be a psychiatrist and grateful for my Buddhist inclinations when speaking with her. I could offer her something beyond the blandishments of the rush to normal.
The willingness to face traumas — be they large, small, primitive or fresh — is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.
Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “The Trauma of Everyday Life.”</p>
<p>^^^^^peacefulmom, it’s possible that one of the mods may delete your post due to copyright issues if they see this, even though you’ve credited the author. </p>
<p>Can you post a link to the article instead?</p>
<p>I saw that column this morning, too, peacefulmom, and thought it was wonderful. </p>
<p>Here’s a link:</p>
<p><a href=“Opinion | The Trauma of Being Alive - The New York Times”>Opinion | The Trauma of Being Alive - The New York Times;
<p>Thinking of you, coffee.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4, </p>
<p>Without text messaging, it would be far worse! I am still going to miss my girl, but I think it will be better this time around. </p>
<p>Right now we are watching one of those ridiculous DIY house remodeling shows. It is pretty great.</p>
<p>The only thing better than what you have done is to see him succeed independent of you.</p>
<p>Bite the bullet, only contact him in responses. Let him set the guidelines. Have to worry a little bit about him being overly comfortable with the status quo.</p>
<p>Still here. Had a talk with my son, told him how proud I was,etc. Cried a bit told him not to feel guilty. My whole philospy with him growing up was to have him figure things out and do things by himself because I was not going to be here forever. This led right into him getting his driving permit at 16 and now at 18 I trust him with my life. I threw him into the fire of driving in not so comfortable situations and today he is a fantastic driver. I could drive anywhere with him and be asleep in the back seat. </p>
<p>Went to ‘our’ park last night for a walk. He said to me ‘Dad, want to fly the kite’?
Mind you that kite has been with us for a very long time. So we flew the kite. </p>
<p>I am so damn proud of my boy. We had a good bonding moment and for a few brief moments at the park it was like he was 10 again. Crying like a bastid typing all of this. </p>
<p>This rollercoaster better stop soon. </p>
<p>Anyway…I’m here. </p>
<p>Thank you all for your words of comfort. </p>
<p>Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2</p>
<p>Btw…we are two of the biggest technology geeks, so keeping in touch that way is IS NOT an issue.</p>
<p>Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2</p>
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<p>Yes, I agree. D2 texts me almost every day, sometimes more than once. D1 doesn’t text as much, but she’s in grad school and has less time. She’s always been a little more independent, too.</p>