Homesickness 2 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Hello again.  I’m going to continue talking today about homesickness.  This second section will look at a number of factors and today is kind of a special day to be talking about homesickness – the day of the valentine, the day of the heart. I think it’s very appropriate anyway. Last week you’ll recall that I talked about homesickness and I said that homesickness has been around for a long time. Indeed, the Celts had a lot of trouble being away from hearth and home.  They called it the most difficult burden to bear.  Secondly, I said it’s a heart affliction in that it hits us when we’re vulnerable.  Thirdly I said it can create tremendous doubt and a desire to return home.

Today I want to talk about the heart affliction, and treatment for it, since today is the day of the heart.  An observation first – our heart affects men and women differently.  That’s so obvious, but men and women process emotions and connections with emotions in many different ways.  Women sometimes feel like they’re all tangled up between emotions and connections with those emotions, while men seem to be able to disconnect.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing, though.  I think there are many ways in which women that I know process and handle feelings or emotions much better myself or other men do.

I want you to think about, men, what you can do for the woman in your life this week, especially with regard to the heart.  I think it’s important that we set aside today, and this week, as a symbolic time when we do a lot of thinking about the heart.  So if we’re looking for treatments of the heart, where do we look? What sorts of issues do we think about? The first treatment that I suggested last week was to create more home-like places, experiences and feelings, specifically.  Today I want us to think and talk about a heart and feeling place for us as a couple. This is important and I’m sorry that I may be ignoring some of my single friends but we’ll get back to a more generic form of treatment next week.  Please bear with me on this special day.

The first thing that we need to look at in terms of building more home-like or heart-like places is building appropriate memories.  Now, as I think through this it’s not going to be easy for us.  It’s not going to be easy for you if you’re in a place that’s very dissimilar to what home was like for you.   You’re probably going to need to make big changes.  For example, on Valentine’s Day in the United States there’s a lot of card sharing and gifts and people expressing their love, people sending bouquets of flowers, telegrams, and going out to eat in a lot of different places.  I’d say in my community, which is not one with many restaurants, there are still hundreds of options within a 30 minute drive for me and my wife to have a nice, ‘romantic’ evening.  You may not have any of those options.  You may not have any place to go out to eat.  We have to figure out – what are some of the issues underlying these celebrations of the heart that we can focus on?

Bear with me as I think about that.  I think one of the key elements of this is that time by yourselves as a couple.  A time and a place and space.  I think this is important.  Space might be a little difficult to accomplish but I know of some people who didn’t have a chance to get out but they did have a multiple-story apartment, or living facility, and they had an opportunity to get an hour or 2 for the kids to be taken care of by somebody in the living room area.  Then they could be in their own space.  It could have been the bedroom or it could have been up on the roof.  I know of one family that had a very nice home that had a rooftop place that they could have a quiet meal together.  Space is important.  Space is something that you need to strive for, I think, as an underlying thing as opposed to just the typical going out for dinner.

Some couples have taken this and said, ‘Well, how do married couples express their love, affection and commitment for each other in this context where we’re living now?’ They discover that there were some specific ways that were different but not necessarily different symbolically.  This couple went and got the particular gift that was appropriate.  Is your context like that?  Is there something that you can get that may not have romantic connections back home but it has the connections where you are and it allows you to express yourself that way?

As you look at that, we’ve talked about the gift, the symbol, and we’ve talked about space. Sometimes we think, Well, we have this special restaurant where we always went and we went to it for 10 years in a row and now we’re over here and there’s nothing like that.  There’s nothing even similar.  That’s great!  So you can now have 2 dissimilar places.  Find some place that can become tradition for you for the next period of time while you are where you are.  It’s great to check to find new traditions.  Never think of new traditions as somehow second-best.  There are not better or worse, they’re just different.  They’re new and they widen the repertoire of behaviours that you have in your relationship that allows you to do things.

Let’s look at this time that you’re not at home, but someplace else, as a time to get new things, new places, new behaviours, new whole traditional issues going that you can probably find yourself wishing you had access to when you’re back at home, should you return home for an extended period of time.  These will build the memories that we have and give us that much more home-like connection and the more heart-like connection in honour of today. Somehow or other it will over time replace some of the homesickness and the heartsickness that we have with warm and genuine feelings for this place where we are.  Then we will feel more comfortable there.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  It’s horribly, terribly, wonderfully, awfully optimistic on my part, but I’m really working with you here because I want you to really continue to develop an awareness of who you are here and a satisfaction, an increasing satisfaction, of who you are here so that you can feel more comfortable. Remember I’m really devious about that so we have to be careful about that with me.

Can you do something special for each other?  I hope so. I suggested that you listen to what your informants are saying, those surrogate family members that you have around you – your uncles, your brothers and sisters in-country, your hosts…  What do they say they do?  Maybe there’s something that one of your friends does that you want to try and do yourself.  It’s a different sort of thing.  It’s not something that they normally would do even in their own culture, but they have latched on to it.  That’s something that could be very good.  I know some people find themselves going to a western hotel for dinner. That may be a wonderful opportunity to get away, have your space, feel safe, secure and comfortable.  You may continue to do that but that’s maybe not something that you can afford to do all the time.  We don’t want to build anything into something that’s out of your reach financially, logistically or whatever.  We want to build in things that are relatively easy to do or to accomplish.

As you think about the rest of this week, this heart-week, maybe you do a lot of things getting ready for it and you’re sitting there feeling wonderfully confident about how many great things you did.  Let’s see the next 6/7 days before our next radio program – is there something special that you can do?  I want you to think of 3 things that you could do this week that would express the heart.  Men, I want you to do some things that would tell your spouse that you were really feeling positive, that you really want them to continue to develop heart-like feelings of home for this new place.  Women, I want you to look and see how your husband is doing.  What are some things that you’ve noticed?  Maybe by the weekend give yourselves an evaluation to see if anything has happened.

We’re about ready to close today so as you think about this, have a good time with your hearts this week.

Talk to you next time!