This week we are talking about the inner workings of the mom-guilt cycle.
It’s building on the last few blog topics so let’s review!
First, you have a big desire for cooperation from the kiddos- and yet you are not sure how that looks so use your young strategies to actually demand compliance, take the position of ‘I know best’, and start making rules for what the child needs to do.
The focus is on getting your child to come along with an agenda- and when they don’t, or when they put up some resistance, then comes the red hot RAGE!
If you haven’t learned how to stay with that emotional charge of rage, then you yell, and act out on your child, discharging the energy.
Then you collapse into disappointment. Throwing your hands up you play the victim card of- it doesn’t even matter anyway!
Sound familiar?!
There’s one more point in the cycle that we are exploring- and that’s the subsequent guilt that follows the disappointment. After you collapse, you start beating yourself up- if only I was a better mom, if only I could just get myself together- then this wouldn’t happen.
Guilt is so pervasive in parenting, in our modern world it often gets played as a selling point for ways you can ‘fix’ your parenting.
And yet in Purejoy, we see guilt quite a bit differently- ready for something new? A new way to see guilt?
What if guilt is a refusal or a rejection of being truly intimate with whatever is arising in the moment- inside of you? Of really being present in the moment?
(side note: relationship with your child is only ever truly happening in the present moment)
Guilt is the mechanism you so wisely learned as a pattern to move away from this intensity.
As a child, if you expressed yourself truly in the moment, with the energy inside of you- you were likely shut down and denied for your vulnerability or maybe even shamed, or punished.
Feeling guilty you avoided the intensity of the moment and stayed in your perception of love.
Now as an adult, going to guilt, you move up into your mind, away from the intense experience INSIDE of you.
Wallowing in guilt, you build an energy of overpowering in your mind, rather than feeling the vulnerability of the very moment you are in- and then from the place you’ve mentally organized, ( usually a fantasy) you move to the external to get cooperation/compliance to keep you out of the intensity.
The cycle begins again.
You can practice this week.
When you hear, inside of you, this part that says- I’m so sorry, I’m so horrible, why did I do that?…
PAUSE move to your SafeSeat, and feel what is happening in your body, in your own experience, in your being.
Check in with your breath, sensations, feelings, and the voices inside of you?
What do you notice?
Are you feeling powerless, helpless, abandoned, or rejected?
Are the voices shaming? Guilting? Punishing? Beating you up?
Most likely it’s pretty intense! Yeah?
Would you treat anyone else that way? Say those things? Shame their tender feelings that way?
Checking in with the moment- noticing it’s intense and wild in there when you interrupt this pattern… are you willing to offer those feelings an intimate embrace?
Slowing way down- notice the deeper energetic cycle you’ve broken down over the last few weeks, in your parenting. Choose to show kindness to the one in you that only ever wanted what she wanted, couldn’t get it, learned to bury her innocent desire, and felt disappointment and guilt so deeply.
Are you open to physically holding your own hand, putting your hand over your heart, or even wrapping your arms around your shoulders and squeezing?
And say to this part of you, that is in the run around again and again of this mom-guilt cycle, a kindness.
Oh Love! Of COURSE you wanted them to listen, to do what you asked, to cooperate… whew, it’s a big one!
Of COURSE, you feel disappointed, and it’s so heavy and you feel stuck, I hear you!
Of Course this rage is so hot inside you and you don’t know what to do with it.
Of course love, this is so intense- breathe…
Stay with this part of you a little bit longer each time, offering it a warm embrace until you enter back into the present moment reality with your child.
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