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A woman, “Mrs Fraught”, sent the following email below to Annabel Rivkin and Emilie McMeekan, who write the column ‘The Midults’ in The Telegraph (UK):
My parents-in-law are downsizing, and my husband is so upset about it that he wants to buy the family house in Suffolk where he grew up. The problem is we have always lived and worked in London; the children are at great schools and happy; our friends are fab and mostly local; and we can in no way afford to take on another mortgage. It makes no sense. As lovely as the house and village are, they are for another family with another life. They have had a couple of offers, but he can talk about little else apart from moving home. We are arguing all the time and I’m at a loss about how to handle this.
At first glance, the issue seems straightforward; however, it is far more complicated. The writer’s husband is about to lose a place he has continued to revisit psychologically, and perhaps physically, over the years; a place he returns to in order to reconnect with cherished memories.
Mrs Fraught, by contrast, appears ready to let the house go. She does not seem to have the same cognitive attachment to it. Given their financial position, their children’s schools, their social life in London, and the practical demands of work and commuting, it seems unreasonable to her to reorganise their present life around a house that belongs, emotionally at least, to her husband’s past.
What her husband was experiencing was described by the columnists as “extreme nostalgia’. In their published response, they explained:
… [It] takes hold and makes us feel safe – sepia-ing out all rational thought and leaving us with a tinted view of what home and happiness mean. The world seems a fragile and febrile place right now; if only we could all go back to a better time and a better place where things were simpler. It’s not particularly surprising that your husband has latched on to the security of his childhood in Suffolk; imagine for a minute being 10 and on a BMX bike, buying Refreshers in the village shop and the day unfolding with no expectations or pressure.
Viewed through the lens of cognitive immobility, Mrs Fraught’s husband appears to be experiencing more than nostalgia. He is not simply cognitively attached to that place; he may have been living with the psychological conditions associated with cognitive immobility for years.
When Losing a Place Feels Like Losing Yourself
Those in the first stage of cognitive immobility — awareness and separation — become aware of the longing and loss that follow leaving a place, thing or relationship. As they experience this separation, they may try to cognitively re-experience what that place or relationship once provided or physically return in search of solace (Olumba, 2023). The second stage, retrieval, occurs, as I noted in Transforming Society, when:
… individuals attempt to resolve the issue of being entrapped in a location or life experience by making efforts to retrieve the lost item, person or home. If they cannot do so by physically travelling there or in person, they mentally re-experience the incidents by recognising and recreating memories, a process which can cause discomfort. When the unconscious remembering sets in, the mental journey becomes stressful.
In this man’s case, it might have been possible that returning to his childhood home over the years has helped ease his sense of loss and longing while preserving his emotional connection to it.
Now that the family home is about to be sold, the prospect of losing this space of comfort and refuge may have triggered his insistence that he buy it to hold onto it. This can be understood as the retrieval stage. People who enter this stage often require support. Without it, the distress can intensify and, as I have explained elsewhere, it could lead to anger, despair, a sense of loss, depression and even psychosis in the affected individual.
This stage of cognitive immobility resembles mourning, as it is marked by deep sadness, loss, and pain when present circumstances trigger memories of a lost place or former life experience (Olumba, 2023, p. 781; 2024; Kernberg, 2010).
It is therefore understandable why the letter-writer’s husband would resist the sale of the house. Selling it would mean more than losing a family property; it could intensify his cognitive immobility and leave him with one of its defining features: a disrupted sense of identity and home (Olumba, 2024). If the place that has anchored his memories disappears, nowhere may truly feel like home again. He may have what I call a homeless mind.
Moving Forward: From Retrieval to Stabilisation
Annabel Rivkin and Emilie McMeekan were right when they observed that ‘Right now, he is flooded with feelings of vulnerability and rootlessness’. They advised Mrs Fraught:
It may be healthy for him to get involved with the move. That way it’s not happening to someone else; he doesn’t allow himself to be a child in the face of his parents’ move, and feel like an abandoned child when it’s gone, but rather get in there and help. He needs to be part of their journey now, helping tuck them in to their new space.
I believe this is sound advice because what this man needs now is to move towards the third stage of cognitive immobility, which consists of ‘deliberate efforts to retain values and seek goals that will alleviate the loss’.
By becoming involved in his parents’ move and the sale of the family home, ‘Mr Fraught’ may begin to retain the values associated with that place rather than trying to hold on to the place itself. The process is unlikely to be easy. It may stir difficult emotions and painful memories. Yet actively participating in this transition could also help him gradually regain psychological stability and control. In other words, it might help him move into the third stage: stabilisation.
Many people struggle with a similar experience to that faced by this couple. Understanding why we feel so attached to certain places as well as recognising when those attachments begin to trap us psychologically is often the first step towards seeking support and finding a healthier way forward.
