A few months ago, we found water damage in our home. The kind that meant we had to pack up and move out. If you’ve ever gotten one of those calls that turns your to-do list upside down, you know the feeling. As a therapist, I talk about change for a living. I have a whole toolkit of language for it – transitions, adjustment periods, the stress of ambiguity. I hand these tools to clients all the time, but something about standing in my own home trying to decide what to pack first, I realized how different it feels to actually need the toolkit yourself.
Not All Moves Are Created Equal, But They’re All Still Moves
There’s a difference, of course, between the move you didn’t see coming and the one you’ve been counting down for months. The unexpected upheaval due to water damage, a job relocation, or a landlord’s change of heart hits us with a jolt of loss of control. We didn’t set the timeline, and often we don’t get much say in the outcome either. Anticipated moves carry their own weight, even when we are the ones who set them in motion. Moving into a home you’ve dreamed about, or watching your child pack for their first semester of college, still holds real grief tucked inside the excitement. Even good change asks us to let go of something familiar before we fully arrive at what’s next. That in-between space, the “no longer here, but not yet there” feeling, is where a lot of the emotional turbulence actually lives. Whether the move is chosen or not, the nervous system tends to respond the same way: a little destabilized, a little on alert, just looking for some solid ground.
What Actually Helps
Here’s what I’ve relearned, both from the research and from living it myself over the last few weeks:
Name what’s actually stressful.
Often it isn’t the move itself but the accumulation of small unknowns that really get us. Where will the couch go, will the kids’ school schedule still work, will the new place even feel like home? Naming the specific worry, out loud or on paper, tends to shrink it down to something more manageable.
Keep one or two anchors steady.
You can’t control the chaos of moving boxes, but you can control things like bedtime, Friday movie night, or still having the dinner time conversation where everyone talks about their day. Small, steady routines don’t stop everything else from being up in the air, but they give you something familiar to hold on to while the rest of it settles down.
Let go of doing it perfectly.
Boxes will be mislabeled. Something will break. You might even eat cereal out of the box for dinner because the bowls are unaccounted for. This is not a failure of planning. It’s just what change looks like up close.
Give yourself and everyone around you permission to feel more than one thing at once.
Excitement and grief can share the same moment. Clients describe this exact contradiction to me all the time. Starting one chapter while genuinely grieving the end of another, without either feeling canceling out the other. Two things can be true.
Reframe when you can, but don’t force it.
This is the part that surprised me most. I didn’t consciously choose to feel hopeful about the move. My daughter handed it right to me. Somewhere around week two of living in our rental, she looked up at me and said, “Mom, it’s an adventure!” This was not performative optimism. She really meant it! And it grounded me in a way I really needed.
I am genuinely grateful for how my family handled these past few weeks. The flexibility, the humor, the optimism. My daughter’s “it’s an adventure” has become something of a family motto now, rattled off whenever plans go sideways. There’s something worth learning from a child’s capacity to find adventure in the unknown, even when the grown-ups around her are the ones losing sleep over it.
Change, chosen or not, asks something of us. It asks for flexibility, for patience with the mess, and for a willingness to let more than one feeling be true at the same time. If you’re in the middle of your own version of living “on the move” right now – a new house, a new chapter – I hope you can find your own small anchors, your own moments of humor in the chaos, and maybe even your own reminder that it’s an adventure.
Written By:
Licensed Professional Counselor (Supervisor)