Over the December holiday period here in the UK I spent a lot more time at home than I usually do. And I loved it. My word to describe my experience of 2025 is ‘intense’, both personally and professionally, and by the end of the year rest was no longer a luxury, it was a necessity.
I especially love the time between 26th and 31st December, (labelled ‘twixtmas’ for those of us who celebrate Christmas), when all of the work of Christmas Day is over and there is space for rest, reading and, my favourite activity of all, long, long country walks. That, combined with good food and evenings in front of our open wood fire, reconnected me to many dimensions of my ‘home’. Home in my own body, home in our physical house, and home with my family.
For my mother in law who lost her husband of 60 plus years in 2025, she remains in their house, but her sense of home is lost with the passing of my father in law. He was what made her house her home.
Home is a complex concept.
For our daughter, ‘home’ has been temporarily relocated to Germany for her work. She is homesick for her original, true homebase, whilst also enjoying the excitement of a new place. The classic ‘both/and’ we love so much in psychotherapy land.
For our son, he is about to leave our home to set up a new home of his own. He is ‘nerve-cited’ as we like to say in our family. Both nervous at the very real financial burden of independent living for a young person and excited to have his own front door.
For many of my friends, colleagues and clients, home is a more elusive or even troubling concept. Their home location may be another country to one they live in. They may have been displaced from their home, due to enforced migration, financial pressures, relationship breakdown or many other reasons. Parental homes might have been a place of fear and a source of trauma, rather than the peace and safety every child deserves. The UK may be their home from birth, but the local communities around them make them feel unwelcome and threatened. A person’s actual house might be the only place they feel they can truly be themselves, unmasked and free from code-switching. And, for some, the least safe place for them in the house they live in and the people they live with.
In the broader sense of the planet as our home, that feels very fragile to many of us the moment, with the rise of shamelessness and superpowers and the fall of morality and courage, the global wars, and the ever increasing climate emergency.
Home is a complex concept. Please share with me what home means for you.
