"Doing a Geographical"

When You Have a Very Strong Desire to Move House!

Write to me with any problem or dilemma at AskPhilippa@yahoo.com Subject to Terms and Conditions

Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Mural for the Santa Monica Library: Moving Picture Industry (with Gloria Stuart), 1934-1935, oil on wood, 119 1⁄8 x 114 3⁄8 in.

Dear Philippa,

I have had a long and mostly happy marriage and couldn’t ask for more in a partner as a soul mate. We have two children together. He has been the main breadwinner whilst I raised the family and put my career on hold and am slowly getting it back. The problem is that we live in a small town, and have done for 20 years. My husband grew up not that far away. His parents are still alive, though often have health issues. My parents are long dead, and I’ve always carried an inner sadness for the absence of my own family all through motherhood. I am however, desperate for a life change. I don’t want to remain in the same small town forever. I am someone who thrives on change. I came from a family who enjoyed this themselves. In my childhood there was always change and even though my parents didn’t stay together, there was a sense of adventure. My school years were stable, the irony being I grew up in a small town not dissimilar to the one I now live in, where everyone knows everyone’s business and quite frankly not enough going on. Once I had finished school, we moved back to a city again. Small town life did not suit either my mum or my dad.

My husband is a stable man, kind and loving, feet on the ground. I couldn’t ask for more in a partner, except our upbringings have been the opposite. His family didn’t thrive on change but on security. They have never moved. I sometimes wonder if this is why I was attracted to him because I didn’t have the same stability? The issue is that my husband doesn’t want to sell our house in the future and it has made me feel as if destiny is predicted, we’ll never move on. He is open to future possibilities, such as travel, life adventures, perhaps trying out places for a few weeks or months, and renting out our home, he is not adventure adverse by any means, and more than anything he wants me to be happy and I feel I should be. But he doesn’t want to give up the security of a home that he loves and the rational part of me knows and understands that. The other part of me feels bored, stagnated and trapped by the thought of staying in the same place and sometimes it does makes me unhappy.

I would like a new house project to get excited about and am less keen on renting out our home if totally honest. I know there are two people in this marriage, and his needs are no less important than mine, I love him and equally don’t want to take away what he values in life either. There are also elderly parents to think of, so moving isn’t a ‘light’ decision to make. It involves other people’s feelings and needs too. I think I perhaps do struggle with a sense of belonging. It’s hard to feel that once your own parents have gone, and I’ve never truly felt I belong here as I have in other places as hard as I’ve tried over all these years.

Perhaps my grief is tied up in this? Though I know you don’t have to lose parents to be a person who craves new life chapters and has maybe outgrown the one they are in? I think I am craving my chapter as a woman in midlife in every sense.

I would appreciate your reflection on my sense of ‘stuckness’ to a small place.

Thank you so much for listening.

MY REPLY

I understand the hunger and craving for a move, the chance at another life. Maybe it feels like if you woke up in a city, far away from the familiar you would find a new you. There would be a project to get on with, new places and people to explore, a new community to build. Excitement - almost like a chance to experience another life. And who would you be in a new place? And the fun of getting to know a new you. And maybe behaving how your parents behaved would somehow bring a part of them back to you?

Moving seems to offer this, BUT!!!! Would it? If new life chapters were there for the taking and buying of them, wouldn’t that be easy! There’s a strong emotional charge with this yearning, a charge that makes thinking and reasoning harder. What is clear though is that at the moment, you are bored, restless, even unhappy. The move feels like a fix, maybe even a quick fix. If you moved though, you’d take you with you and the restless, bored bit would be satiated for a while and then you’d probably want to move again and all the moving might work for you, but it won’t work for the person you’ve committed to spending your life with. He’s stuck in a different way. He probably doesn’t want to move for the reasons you do. He likes who he is in the house you live in. He might not even know where the house stops and he starts, he might feel that his house, his town is a part of him and his identity.

I think you may be both clinging, with a strong emotional charge, to the concept of your identities, routed in your respective upbringings.

He is offering a compromise - okay we move for a bit but my commitment remains in my small town. And I think that still feels suffocating to you, because it feels like, that means you would come back to the you that you are now which you want to escape. The you who misses her long dead parents and their sense of adventure and the you who wants more life.

I wonder what really facing your long held grief would do for you? Looking at it, feeling it, screaming and crying at it, not fearing it, not running from it but embracing and honouring it, going through it. Sometimes our sadness needs an airing. I wonder what a week on intense therapy would do? I think one adventure you might go on would be to try that. Something like the Hoffman Process Welcome to Hoffman UK - Hoffman Institute UK

Or maybe explore a writing/painting retreat on the Greek island of Syros? Where you’d meet new people Writing Holiday Courses with Skyros Holidays They call that “the holiday you bring home with you”

Or fine more like-minded people near to where you are. Try noon.org.uk - an organisation started by Eleanor Mills for curious mid-life women.

When I was in psychotherapy practice I saw quite a few patients who believed their cure was “doing a geographical” and some of them never stopped moving. I think sometimes the answer is to start afresh, build new community in a new place but more often than not, it isn’t.

But I understand the emotional charge for a move is strong. I find myself wondering how much any change would come from the place itself, and how much might come from giving this restless, creative part of you some kind of attention and expression wherever you are. When the desire for escape carries a strong emotional charge, it can make everything feel urgent and harder to think around, and you describe that pull so vividly. What does feel clear is that right now you are bored, restless, unhappy, and the idea of a move seems like the most obvious doorway out of that feeling.

I think you are in a puzzle. The feeling/doing part wants to solve it with action. The thinking/reasoning part of you needs to think about if there are other ways to solve it, before you give in to the urge.

Hopefully there will be more information for you in the comments.