Sadness around baby moving into own room

My baby is 6 months old and we will be moving him into his own room next week. I feel very emotional and an enormous amount of sadness around this. Before I had given birth, I imagined that my baby would stay in our room for at least a year. Now he is here, I love him more than I ever could have imagined, but also I now believe that mine and my partner’s bedroom should be for us and that we need that space for our own relationship going forward. I also note that we disturb our baby coming to bed, and disturb him in the night, and most likely he’ll get a much better sleep without us there. So I think the own room is logically the optimal decision for all involved.

I’ve tried to do some thought work on what the thought is that’s causing the emotion, and am getting a few ideas such as will he be scared alone in his own room, or are we rejecting him by putting him in his own room? The second one sounds like rationally of course that is not the case, but this thought evokes a strong emotion in me.

Answer:

Transitions often bring up big emotions, both easy and difficult ones. What I’m reading is a few things:

You had an expectation of how your sleeping arrangement would play out after baby was born
The reality of your situation does not match the expectation you had
You are making an informed decision based off of what you notice happens during your night time routine, and how you’d like to create room for your relationship with your partner to grow
You feel sadness around this change.

Start by answering this question: is it okay with you that you feel sad about this change? Why or why not? If you felt the same intensity of joy and anticipation, would you need to identify what thought/s were creating those emotions? When it comes to big emotions, trying to get to the source of them (the thought/s behind them) can be difficult because we actually need to process and allow the feeling before we do thought work to understand why we’re having it in the first place. So, how can you allow yourself to feel the feelings with a big helping of self-love, compassion, and acceptance?

Feel free to return for more coaching on this 🙂