How to stop feeling guilty as a mom?

Read the article by our partner Sandy Kaufmann, life coach. She helps women regain emotional serenity by healing from their past to build and maintain fulfilling relationships with their children and themselves.

Sandy will also be one of our speakers at the Mothers Talk on 22.08 Back to work (part 1) on the theme of "Le congé maternité : tout savoir et comment le vivre en toute serénité". More information and registration here.

Whether it's when you give yourself a moment without your child or when you haven't acted as calmly as you would have liked, guilt is often the daily bread of your life as a mom.

And even if you rationally know that you have the right to take time for yourself and make mistakes, it's hard to free yourself from the weight of guilt.

So what to do?

Understanding why we feel guilty

Guilt is an emotion that arises when we judge our actions as wrong.

This emotion allows us to ask ourselves whether our actions were appropriate, and if not, to correct them for future occasions.

Guilt therefore comes from our assessment of what is right or wrong.

What influences your inner judge

Your inner judge will refer to your value system to define whether your action is good or bad.

And your value system is influenced by many factors:

Your own expectations
of what a mother should do to be a good mother. These expectations may be influenced by the environment in which you live, the culture of your home country and also the media.
Your parental patterns
At some point, you've evaluated your parents' upbringing and tried to reproduce what you thought was right and change what you thought was wrong. This process is more or less conscious and often needs to be re-evaluated when you become a parent, because for a child, a parent who sacrifices everything for him or her is the best-case scenario. For example, if your mother was totally self-sacrificing for her children and you had a happy childhood, it's possible that you're unconsciously trying to reproduce her pattern and that you're constantly striving in your life to find a balance between your role as a mother and your role as a woman, thus constantly feeling guilty. Or conversely, if you were unhappy with your parents' upbringing, you're afraid of reproducing the same patterns and feel guilty whenever you do something wrong. Finally, you may have suffered from certain behaviors of your parents and you systematically reproduce them, which makes you feel very guilty.
Your level of emotional independence
Do you find it easy to go against what your partner, family, friends or even society says, because it simply suits your needs?
Your self-esteem
In the past, did you find it easy to put yourself first in your life, or was that already selfish? The arrival of a child gives you good reason to de-prioritize yourself, and requires a higher level of self-esteem than when you didn't have children.

How do you get rid of this guilt?

The next time you feel guilty, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is the action I have taken or want to take legitimate?

2. Why do I think it's bad?

3. What might have influenced this judgment?

a. My expectations as a mother?

b. My parental patterns?

c. My self-esteem?

d. What do others think of this action?

4. What would the lawyer who should be defending you say about this?

For your "inner judge" to understand that your action was not so bad, he needs to experience that the consequences of your action are not bad.

If I take the example of the mother who doesn't dare take time for herself, the inner judge needs to see that the world didn't finally fall apart during the time she took for herself.

If you feel you've done something wrong to your child, it's important to make amends by explaining to your child that you've done something wrong. To right your wrongs, your child needs to hear that it wasn't his fault that you acted the way you did (it's your problem, he doesn't "deserve" this treatment), that you love him and ask for his forgiveness. If you think he's been shocked, give him a few drops of Bach Rescue flowers for children, so that his organs don't register the shock.

And if this continues...

If the guilt doesn't go away, or if you're still reacting in a way you don't like, it means that there are deeper wounds related to your parenting patterns or self-esteem that need to be healed, and that you need professional guidance. You can watch my free webinar to understand where this guilt comes from in the past.

Becoming a mother is a major life change, and very often it brings out all the things we haven't "sorted out" with our family or ourselves. It's also the perfect opportunity to do some in-depth work to avoid passing on certain patterns to our children.