I have lived in my current house for 9 years this summer. That’s the second longest I’ve lived anywhere, next to my childhood home in England that I was brought home to from the hospital a few days after I was born.
When I was 10, I moved to Barbados, West Indies, with my mum and began years of moving around frequently. We lived in 5 houses in Barbados, although we lived there for only 4 years.
After that. it was Central Florida, South Florida, the Florida panhandle, back to Central Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, back to South Florida and then up north to New York State, before moving to Oregon in 2009.
Within each area, there was often more than one move. If I count the number of houses, apartments and Airstream trailers I’ve lived in, if I’m adding it up correctly, I get to 24. At one point in my early 20s, I think I moved 8 times in a year.
While I have great tetris-like spatial perception skills from packing so many boxes and moving vans, unless I get to live in a cabin in the woods, I plan to live in the house I’m in for the next several decades.
The grief of moving
Moving can be painful, and not just from lifting all those heavy boxes.
Major grief can come from moving. Whether it’s from a lot of moving homes, especially growing up, or a major move from a place you’ve lived for a long time.
What is that grief and where does it come from?
Early moves
If you moved as a child, you likely didn’t have much say in the process.
I decided to move to Barbados with my mum, leaving my brother, a baby half-sister, my dad and stepmother behind. Even though it was my choice, it wasn’t much of one. It was that or have my mum move far away from me to a little island in the Caribbean, which I didn’t think I could stand. She was my sunshine, my warmth and source of love. If she was going, I was going, too.
However, I didn’t realize that moving to Barbados meant a forced exile from England. My dad didn’t want me to come back and visit, so I lost my connection to friends and my homeland. It’s a loss that’s still tender today.
For most kids, when their family moves, they don’t have a voice. They’re told it’s going to happen and they have to go along for the ride.
Perhaps they’re told they’ll get to go back and visit old friends. But does it happen? Usually not more than once or twice. You’re told instead to say goodbye to that old life and focus on what’s new. New home, new school, new friends.
So what do you lose? Where does the grief come from?
Grief is the conflicting feelings caused when a familiar pattern of behavior changes or ends.
Moving means the things you’re used to, that are familiar to you, change.
You lose your connection to the place you lived, to your friends, to the things that are comfortingly well known to you. You may also experience a loss of control, with adults making decisions that hugely affect your life, not always for the better.
Even if you were excited about a move to a new place, those feelings were likely mixed up with feelings of sadness about leaving your familiar space.
Children’s first moves are often a powerful experience of loss, that’s usually not processed or even really talked about.
Later moves
If your move was later in your life, especially after living in the same place for many years, it can be a real loss, too.
This is especially true if you lived with a partner or child who is no longer with you, due to death, divorce, estrangement or simply growing up and moving out. There are some many memories contained in your home, that moving might feel like it’s saying goodbye to them and to the relationship you had with that person.
There’s real grief here.
The losses you experience may be similar to those as a child. You lose the familiarity of your routine, your neighborhood, the people you see regularly in your daily life.
If you’re moving to a new town, you lose relationships with the people in your life you routinely see, including folks like your dentist, doctor, hairdresser, etc., or even the cashier at the bank or checkout clerk at the grocery store who you briefly chat with regularly.
In addition to these losses, moving away from a home full of memories is likely to reignite the grief you feel around the loss of a meaningful relationship.
Whenever I’m in New York, I still visit the home I owned where I brought my children home from the hospital. Their dad is in New York State so I have to visit to bring them home from visiting him on vacations while they’re still too young to fly by themselves.
It’s been a blessing in disguise, because I get to see the house in which I had so many hopes, dreams and expectations for my future and for my kids. Standing outside on the sidewalk, I’ve been able to emotionally process what felt incomplete.
How do you heal from the grief of moving?
In order to heal from the pain you’re experienced around moving, you need to do a few things.
First, you need to become aware of the losses you’re grieving.
What did you lose as a result of your move? Was it connection to family and friends? Was it the loss of your homeland and its culture? Were there other losses that occurred at the same time, such a change in financial circumstances?
Then you need to identify what hopes, dreams or expectations were changed or weren’t met. How did you feel about it then — and how do you feel about it now?
Is the grief you feel about moving related to one or more relationships that feel incomplete or painful for you?
Leaving England was a loss of connection to my culture, a loss of language (I speak American now, not British English). It was also the loss of friendships.
And it was a loss in my relationship with my father, who I’ve seen only 5 times since then, most of which have been for a brief dinner. That, for me, along with the changed relationship with my brother who I no longer lived with, were my most painful relationship losses from that time.
Learning how to complete the pain of what’s emotionally unfinished from your move will help you heal.
Moving without grief
Change is an inevitable part of life.
While I like the idea of never moving again, and spending my remaining decades of life in the lovely house I’m in now, I don’t know if that’s what my future holds. Maybe once the kids are grown and out on their own we’ll pull up stakes and get that house in the woods.
A move might be in your future at some point, too.
It doesn’t have to leave you in pain or feeling incomplete, though. Here’s what you can do.
The Grief Recovery Institute recommends you find a friend or family member to go on a tour of your home with. If it’s someone who also has shared memories of the space, that’s even better.
Go through your home and talk about the things you experienced and shared in each room, happy and sad, sweet and sour. Remember the important milestones and tell stories about when they happened.
Thank each room for keeping you safe, for protecting you from hot or cold weather, for sheltering you.
As you leave each room, say “goodbye.”
This may seem silly, but it’s a way of finding emotional closure and expressing what’s in your heart about your home before you leave it. It will enable you to move without feelings of pain and loss.
If you’d like some help with healing from loss, whether it’s from a move or any other reason grief has visited your life, you’re welcome to schedule a free discovery call with me to see if we can work together.