Nurturing Family Bonds During Work Travel

By Caroline neal, lmft

In today’s fast-paced world, travel has become part of the job description for many professionals. Whether it's a weekly commute to another city, a long stretch overseas for a project, or irregular last-minute flights for client meetings, being away from home is often the norm.

But while work travel supports financial goals, career growth, and sometimes even a sense of purpose, it also places real emotional pressure on families. The parent who travels often carries a quiet burden: guilt for missed milestones, longing for connection, and the tension of balancing ambition with presence. Meanwhile, the parent or caregiver at home may feel overstretched, unseen, or emotionally disconnected. Children may struggle with feelings they don’t yet have the language for: missing their parent deeply one moment, pulling away the next.

For the couples who say, “We’re just passing ships,” and with children who wonder quietly, “Why does work always come first?” These aren’t signs of brokenness — they’re signals that the emotional infrastructure of the family needs tending. And while physical presence is important, emotional connection doesn’t have to stop at the airport gate.

The good news is that there are simple, meaningful ways to stay close, even from a distance. With intention, communication, and a shift from routine to ritual, families can remain emotionally connected. Here’s a few strategies for navigating the challenges of work- related travel and keeping your family strong: 

1. Create Rituals of Connection, Not Just Communication

It’s not about how often you talk — it’s how meaningful those interactions feel.

A quick “How was your day?” over FaceTime can feel routine. But a shared ritual — like reading the same bedtime story, sending a voice note every morning, or sharing “one good thing” at the end of each day — builds emotional glue.

💡 Therapist Tip: Rituals give predictability and emotional grounding — especially helpful for children and anxious partners.

2. Validate All the Feelings — Including Your Own

Children and partners may feel sad, distant, or even resentful. These are not signs of failure — they’re signs that connection matters.

Say: “I know it’s hard when I’m gone — I miss you too. I can’t wait to hear about your week.”

This opens the door for honesty instead of guilt.

💡 Therapist Tip: Kids, especially, benefit from hearing that their emotions are okay. Suppressing them to protect the working parent only creates distance later.

3. Make the Time You Do Have Count

When you're back home, try to be fully present. That doesn’t mean grand gestures — it means eye contact, real conversations, unrushed moments. Connection happens in the micro-moments, not just the big reunions.

💡 Therapist Tip: Phones down during dinner or a “10-minute check-in” at night can make a big difference.

4. Don’t Forget the Partner Holding Down the Fort

It’s easy for resentment to build in the partner who’s home managing school pickups, meals, or emotional meltdowns alone. Validate their experience. A simple “Thank you for everything you're doing while I’m gone” can prevent relational cracks from forming.

💡 Therapist Tip: Invisible labor breeds disconnection. Make appreciation visible.

5. Let Kids Participate in Your World

Share photos of where you’re staying, funny stories from the airport, or something you learned in a meeting. It helps kids understand where you are, and turns distance into storytelling — not mystery.

💡 Therapist Tip: This also helps younger children form mental maps, reducing anxiety.

6. Consider Family Therapy or Coaching When Needed

If travel is straining your relationship or your child is showing signs of stress (changes in sleep, behavior, or mood), a few sessions with a therapist can help the whole family build new coping tools and connection strategies.

The reality of work travel is often more layered than it looks from the outside. It’s not just a series of hotel check-ins and boarding passes, it’s the weight of missing bedtime routines, navigating long-distance tension with a partner, or hearing about milestones secondhand. For those at home, it can feel like you’re managing life in fragments, holding down the emotional center of a family while silently carrying loneliness or fatigue.

Be gentle with yourself. There will be missed calls, tired check-ins, and moments when you feel spread too thin. That doesn’t make you a bad parent or partner — it makes you human. What matters most is not that you always get it right, but that you keep choosing to show up — in texts, in video calls, in five-minute conversations that say “I see you. I care. I’m still here, even from far away.”

Emotional connection isn’t about geography, it is about presence. With intention, empathy, and communication, your family can weather the distance and grow stronger through it.

The Dilemma of Attachment and Authenticity

By Anne DeCore, AMFT

Trauma expert and renowned physician Gabor Maté has a new book out that I highly recommend. He writes poignantly about something that therapists talk about every day with clients. In “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture,” he states that the most widespread form of trauma in our society is the lower case “t” trauma of “disconnection from the self” in order to have attachment needs met by our parents. Because it is a largely invisible process, unlike upper case “T” trauma, people are often unable to identify how their childhood affected their development. I wanted to share Maté’s explanation of this process on the blog because I think this concept is essential for adults to understand as they self-reflect, and for parents to consider as they raise children.

Attachment is the core drive for proximity, responsiveness, and attunement from our caregivers from infancy and beyond.

Authenticity is the other core need: to be true to oneself, to honor our “gut” feelings, to express our felt emotions.

Maté explains the dilemma in these terms: “What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel?”

Maté tells us that the outcome of that dilemma is pre-determined. When a child senses that being true to their sense-of-self will not be acceptable to a parent, the child will conform to please the parent. We will always “secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel”. This adaptation is not something we have control over in childhood. Feedback loops with our caregivers over time get wired into our nervous systems and the internal adaptation to privilege inauthenticity becomes second nature. We even tell ourselves that certain traits within our personality are “who we are” instead of what they really are: the “scars of where we lost connection to ourselves”. A few examples of these traits are people-pleasing, hyper-responsibility, stoicism, perfectionism, compulsively charming, compulsively helping. Many of these adaptations in our families-of-origin are reinforced by society as admirable.

These adaptations work for us into adulthood until they don’t. There are costly consequences for repressing one’s thought, feelings and needs. Maté’s book impressively documents the link between inauthenticity and physical illness. Other consequences may be divorce, depression, addiction, and midlife fragmentation. These crises tend to force us to examine the self-concepts we hold. Often, these moments lead us to therapy.

Thankfully, Maté doesn’t leave us hopeless. He writes that developing self-awareness and self-compassion can carry us back toward authenticity. We can re-train the brain and nervous systems to expect both needs, attachment and authenticity, to simultaneously be served in our adult relationships.

Reference:

Maté, G. and Maté D. (2022). A Traumatic Tension: Attachment vs. Authenticity. In The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture; (pp. 96-112). Penguin Random House.