My husband and I work from home, so I'm very used to us both being in the house at the same time. However, it doesn't mean we necessarily see each other much during the day - he works in his office and I look after our toddler. We might cross paths at mealtimes but that's about it, so I'm used to being on my own with our toddler.
Today my husband left to visit his parents - a 6 hour round trip excluding stops, so he's going to be away for a full day and I found all sorts of distressing feeling surfacing the moment he left. It's not that my day is going to be particularly different to usual but just knowing he is not in the building has left me feeling desperately lonely, with a sadness that brings me close to tears.
This is a great chance to practice acceptance. I started by using the observer self to view my own emotions and then did a bit of objectifying feelings - looking at where the feelings are in my body, what size and shape they are, what colour and texture and then moving on to allowing those feelings to be there, breathing into and from them and expanding space around them. They didn't go away, that's not the purpose of the exercise, but I knew that they would move on in their own time and in the meantime I've eased some of the tension I had been building up around them.
Why did all these feelings emerge today just from the idea of my husband being away from the house, despite it actually making little difference to my day? Well it's understandable if I consider how my husband is a safety net for me if things go wrong during the day, so that would be a very natural source of worry. Also, the mind doesn't like change to the routine it is comfortable with and there could be an element of the prehistoric mind warning against letting a member of my group leave. So it is very reasonable that these feelings arose, I have no control over what emotions appear, but thanks to some simple ACT tools they didn't end up ruining the rest of my day.
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