Mum Guilt
Hello and welcome!
Well done my lovely for taking this step in the right direction to start to overcome Mum Guilt and get more joy back in your motherhood journey.
I'm Dr SaraLou, I'm a Women's Coach and General Practitioner in the NHS. I work with women who are feeling burnt out, stressed out and overwhelmed. So many of them who are mothers experience this inner chatter of 'Mum Guilt' and it holds them back and it weighs them down and it's exhausting for them.
On the surface they feel that they are professional women, that they are confident, that they are capable, that they are managing work. This is the face the world sees. But so often their home life is different: this negative inner chatter tells them about their worth as a mother, it tells them of a sense of failure, fills them with self-doubt and that's really quite an unpleasant experience for them to go through. This is Mum Guilt.
Mum Guilt is holding them back from meeting their own needs and their own self-care and is contributing to the overwhelm.
In the coaching space some of the work that I do with them is reframing mum guilt and exploring it for what it is as 'Mum Shame' and start to look at it in a way that it's actually a red flag that's telling us that we are not OK.
And through that more empowering mindset, that nurturing mindset, they’re actually able to move on and have a look at their overall wellbeing to overhaul it, to create foundations of self-care and wellbeing that are so strong that they can meet life's challenges with resilience and confidence and they can also start to enjoy life and thrive again in things that fill them with joy (and maybe even a sense of adventure).
Sounds good!
It's time to look at Mum Guilt (or what we knew as Mum Guilt) warts and all so that we can start to take a different viewpoint on it and indeed gain some freedom from it finally.
What I want you to do is to think about Mum Guilt and put it into context of what we're told in society. Time and time again we're given the message that "mothers should be martyrs" and that we should “never put ourselves first” and indeed that “doing anything for ourselves is selfish.” We know that's not true but our subconscious has this message and it's got really ingrained in our thinking and it can be a really strong internal message.
It's time to just turn this idea of Mum Guilt on its head and view it from a different point of view. I want you to just consider for a moment that this idea of Mum Guilt that we've been walking around with for years is actually something called shame.
You may be thinking ‘well what's the difference?’ True guilt is when we've acted outside of our values and morals and there's often a rupture in a relationship - whether that's with our children or other relationships. Now that does need to be focused on when it happens with the idea of rupture and repair but we're not going to focus on that with this set of videos today.
So could it be that this idea of Mum Guilt that we're feeling is actually an idea of Mum Shame? So this idea that Mum Shame is telling us that we have low self-worth, that we are failing as mothers, that we are bad mums, maybe that we are bad people even. Next time you experience it just pause for a moment and think: the message that it's telling me - is it true? Have I actually done anything? And quite often you'll find that this message and the negative inner chatter is coming through to you from your subconscious. When you actually explore it you see that the event that’s brought these feeling on is actually very small but the feelings and emotions that it brings up are so out of keeping with what's actually happened.
It's not saying that the thing that you did was 'bad', and does need 'correcting', it's telling you that ‘You are bad’, it's telling you that you've got low worth and that you are a failure. It's pretty potent stuff.
And when we hear this time and time again from our inner dialogue, it's exhausting, it's emotionally draining and it really erodes your sense of self worth, your self-esteem and how you view yourself as a mum.
And so that's the key take home message today - this idea that Mum Guilt that we've been talking about in society and amongst our friendship groups, lets rename it: it's Mum Shame. And what it's telling you isn't actually true. Yes our thoughts are there, but we are not our thoughts. Just because we have thought it does not mean it is true. Therefore we can start to let go of the power it has over us.
