How to Overcome Moving Anxiety

Anna, who is moving for the fifth time, confesses: “I always cried when I arrived and I always cried when I left”. The experience can be more or less painful, but it is still a tear. The psychoanalyst Alberto Eiguer says that “no matter how it is lived, moving house is always a test of abandonment”. It is about leaving one’s points of reference, but above all the emotional ties: friends, the neighborhood, familiar faces, a nursery or a school, a parish, and all those little bonds that are intertwined in daily life. Even if it’s for the best (not necessarily immediate), even if chosen, moving is traumatic. As with the prophets of the book of Exodus, changing one’s home can be difficult, but it is also a call to live another mission. It is a path that allows you to grow,

Agree not to look back

If it is painful to detach yourself from your old place of life by moving, it is essential to force yourself to build a new one, without trying to prolong what has been experienced before. Cristina experienced this: “We moved to an apartment quite close to the old one. At first I wanted to go back with the children to the gardens where they often played, but I forced myself to go regularly to those in our new neighborhood ”.

It’s not so much about cutting ties forever, but about transforming old bonds into new relationships. Isn’t it by learning to separate that one learns to preserve the essential? In this period of upheaval, it is particularly opportune to pray, to confide to Someone one’s sadness, hopes, doubts, the friends left behind, those who will come forward, and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit to discern future choices.

A move involves a lot of confusion and many steps to take. It takes several months to fully absorb it, recognize one’s physical, psychological fatigue and accept living in boxes for a certain time (provided that this does not drag on forever), it allows you to move on.