WHY YOU CAN'T LET YOURSELF OFF THE HOOK
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 61.
Hello, my friends. I'm just back from vacation in Antucket with my family. There were so many parts of it that were just amazing.
First and foremost was that I spent precious time with my husband and boys. I found myself wanting to drink my boys in, almost as if my mind could envelop them in this big mama bear hug where I didn't have to let go. My oldest is headed off to college in just a few short weeks.
And I'll be honest, this has been the hardest year for both of our lives. Someday when I'm further away from it, with his permission, I'll share the journey we've been through. But suffice it to say, I am so incredibly proud of the man he's become.
I think as moms, we try so hard to protect our kids from disappointment and pain and heartbreak. And let's face it, they are going to experience it, guaranteed. Try as we might, we can't save them from it.
And I want to offer that whatever your child may be going through right now, whatever's in store for them, it's going to shape them in ways that will make them stronger and more resilient, and may even teach them what they're made of and what they really deserve in this world. I've seen my son go through something that would break most people, and he's on the other side of it, fully aware of what he's been through, but also so strong and in no way bitter. I've heard him say a number of times, it is what it is, just 100% full acceptance of reality, but also an appreciation about how the experience has shaped him as a man.
I would have loved to help him through it, but I couldn't. I learned through a number of horribly failed attempts that I couldn't help him. It was agonizing to me, but also incredible, unbelievable to see him come out of the other side so whole, so strong.
Not an ounce of resentment or regret, no self-pity, no self-recrimination. It is what it is. So this episode isn't about my son and his journey.
I wish I could say that I could take credit for whatever was his journey, but I find myself learning quite a bit from him about self-love, about letting yourself off the hook. I've talked before in this podcast about how coaching almost always comes down to the relationship you have with yourself, and since I had quite a bit of downtime during vacation to reflect on this, I thought I'd share some of what came up for me. One thing that comes up over and over again with my clients is that we're really freaking hard on ourselves as women and as moms, like so hard.
We would never in a million years talk to our kids or any other person, honestly, the way we talk to ourselves. You're so fat. You look terrible.
Why can't you get that right? You're not smart enough to do that. You don't have enough skill for that. You're so lazy.
These phrases, think about your child's face and just imagine saying these hurtful, degrading words to them. I could just see my boy's faces, like, wait, what? You're supposed to be the person that loves me the most in the world and you're telling me I'm not smart enough or that I don't have what it takes? Could you imagine? If you've had someone in your life that said these types of things to you, I imagine you might label them as toxic or terrible. Certainly not someone who you'd consider a friend or an ally.
But so why then is it okay for us to say these things to ourselves? The worst part about it is that we almost don't notice that we're saying these things anymore. It's so woven into the fabric of our self-view that it's like we think we're just stating the facts. I'm not smart.
I'm a mess. There's nothing special about me. I'm just getting old.
I'm so fat. I'm not strong. Just look at the evidence.
Look at the facts. When I ask my clients why they would choose to describe themselves in this way with such negative, even hurtful words, they often say that they don't know. Habit, I guess.
While I was on vacation, a few days in, I noticed that I felt this uncomfortable feeling of pressure, like there was something that I had to do. Hero was on vacation and I still felt this sense of urgency. I needed to get groceries.
I wanted to fit in a workout. To be honest, I also felt guilty. I can almost see the sand falling through the hourglass as time slips away with my boys.
I want to make every moment with them count. And we had plenty of adventures and dinners and great times together. But inevitably, on vacation, particularly in a place like Nantucket, there are just these lazy, do-nothing kind of days.
And I love them, but also I worry. Are the boys bored? Are they having enough fun? Are they going to remember this trip as amazing? Or are they going to pass on coming next year? I say all of this fully knowing that it's not my job to entertain my boys. And frankly, also that I have no control over their happiness or boredom or any other emotion they may be experiencing.
But the reality for me was that I was on vacation and it felt really important to me that they were happy and having a good time. There was one morning when my husband and younger son went out fishing and my older son decided to sleep in. I noticed I was able to breathe a bit more deeply.
And when I checked in, what I noticed was I wasn't feeling guilty. I noticed how the pressure had lifted. One son was off living his best life, fishing off Great Point with his dad, and the other son was sleeping in after a late night of writing music under the stars.
It was like I finally gave myself permission to believe that everyone was happy and doing exactly what they wanted to do. What's interesting about this is that of course I want my boys to be happy and content. But for me, the ability to believe everyone was happy meant I was off the hook.
It took that moment of relief for me to realize how hard I was being on myself, how I'd stacked the odds against myself so that anything short of everyone having a blissful, thrilling adventure every moment somehow felt like a failure on my part. As I looked down deep, I could find those mean girl thoughts. They aren't having a good time and won't want to come on vacation with you next year.
They're bored out of their minds. You need to fix this. They can't find anything to eat at this restaurant.
You picked the wrong one. He doesn't like beach vacations. You should have planned something more exciting.
As I say this now, it sounds kind of ridiculous. But if I'm really honest with myself, these are the words and thoughts that were running through my mind and making me feel guilty. No one was blaming anything on me.
No one was even saying they were unhappy. I would just notice facial expressions and immediately take responsibility. This is what I love about managing my mind.
No matter how much I master this skill, my brain still behaves like a toddler with a knife. So much of what we think is subconscious, automatic. This is why we're so convinced that other people and the circumstances of our lives make us feel happy and sad.
Because we don't even notice the thoughts or the perspective that led us to observe the situation and evaluate it as either good or bad for us. So it requires a continual practice of observing our thoughts, observing our feelings, and just being curious. Why am I feeling guilty? Why do I feel this pressure? For me on vacation, it was all about these niggling thoughts that I'm not a good mom.
That if I was a better mom, the boys would be constantly happy on vacation. Also, that I'm lazy. That I should be more motivated to plan adventures or work out or whatever my mind was offering me at the moment.
It would be lovely, honestly, if being on vacation meant that we could be on vacation from our minds. Being in a beautiful place, having fewer responsibilities because we're not at home, taking time off work, these facts may make it easier to have more carefree thoughts in some respects. But it's interesting that vacation doesn't free us from these meme girl toxic thoughts about how we're not good enough or how we're doing it wrong.
Those thoughts persist even when we're theoretically putting ourselves in a situation where we think we'll be happy. So this experience really had me thinking about how we can let ourselves off the hook. I mean, honestly, if I had a hard time doing it on vacation, then it's no wonder that I'm really hard on myself during the regular schedule of my life.
I wonder for you, in what ways are you most hard on yourself? Do you also struggle with guilt or anxiety when you think your kids are unhappy? Do you take responsibility for their emotional well-being? I haven't met many moms who don't struggle with this on some level. The reality is our kids aren't going to be happy all of the time. None of us are, in fact, happy all of the time.
But somehow we think that it's our responsibility to ensure that our kids are. Talk about setting ourselves up for failure, not only because it's not realistic for us to expect anyone is happy 100% of the time, but also because we have absolutely no power to control our kids' emotional experience. We can't make our kids be happy.
And yet this guilt and anxiety over a kid's emotional experience persists, and we can't help but think if we were a better mom that we'd have the answer, that we could have kept them from being unhappy in the first place, or that we would know how to fix the problem for them. This is all a myth, my friends. It may be hard to accept, but it's simply not possible.
Our kids will be unhappy sometimes. We're unhappy sometimes. It's the 50-50 of life.
50% good, 50% not so good. That's the human experience, no matter how much we've been conditioned to believe that everyone else is happier than we are based on their social media posts. The cost of us thinking never-ending happiness is not only possible for our kids, but also our responsibility is that we are quite literally never going to be off the hook.
There are, of course, those beautiful moments when our kids are smiling and laughing and doing what they love. You can see it on their faces. And finally, for that fleeting, beautiful moment, you can believe that all is well with the world.
Let's not go so far as to believe that we're a great mom. Heaven forbid we take credit for our kids' happiness. But when they're unhappy, we shoulder 100% of the blame, or if not the blame, the responsibility to fix it.
Because let's be honest, we can't be happy unless they're happy. You know that saying, you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child. And we say this without a trace of irony.
It really can feel like our happiness is dependent on our kids' happiness. I've coached many women whose children struggle with depression or anxiety, and they're so often sucked into the depths with their kids. Of course, none of us would want our kids to suffer.
It's perfectly natural, and even a clean type of pain that sees someone you love struggle and feels empathy and love for them. But on top of this clean pain, this empathic sadness we might feel when we see a loved one in pain, on top of this, we feel this anxious resistance. A thought that whatever our loved one is going through, that they shouldn't be.
They shouldn't be depressed or anxious. They shouldn't have to experience the pain of a breakup. They shouldn't be bored on vacation.
They shouldn't dread going back to school in the fall. They shouldn't be so sullen or so moody. What are all of the shouldn'ts you think when you observe your child? And how often do you make yourself responsible? Either that you have to fix it, or that somehow it means you did something wrong, or you raised them wrong if they're experiencing these negative emotions.
When clients come to me, they're often hoping to find strategies, either to feel better about what's going on with their teenager, or honestly, strategies to get their teen to change so that they can feel better. It often comes down to the same thing. We're looking for the right thing to say or do.
We think maybe the answer is to cut back on their screen time or set an earlier curfew. Should we take away the car? How can we get her to eat her dinner with us? How do I get my child to stop being so disrespectful or clean up their room? How do I get him to listen? She's lazy. He has an attitude.
I feel like I'm walking on eggshells. Does any of this sound familiar? Look, it seems obvious that we would want our kids to be happy and healthy and all of the other things that we want for them. But here's the trap we put ourselves in.
We quite literally keep ourselves caged in the mentality that we would be happier if only our kids were happier. We might intellectually get that they're not always going to be happy, but surely if they were just a little bit happy in this particular way, then things would be better. If they just stopped doing this one thing, then everything would be okay.
If they were just a little bit safer. If they just listened a little bit more. But it's like an endless cycle of one more thing.
And so we're left in this perpetual cycle of not letting ourselves be happy or at the very least content at peace. We can't be those things until something happens. You've probably heard that phrase, carrot and stick, which we typically use to refer to a choice between reward or punishment.
And the origin of this dates back to when people would dangle a carrot in front of their horse or their donkey to get them to move forward. And the alternative was to whip them. So here's why this phrase comes to mind for me now.
When it comes to feeling better, many of us treat ourselves frankly like a donkey. I could use a different word. We're constantly dangling the carrot in front of our eyes.
The carrot being that thing that we really want. That thing that we think that when we get it, then we'll feel better. But if you've ever seen pictures of how this carrot thing really works, the carrot is being dangled by a contraption that hangs the carrot just in front of the donkey so that they think they're walking toward it.
But then as they move their body, the contraption moves with them and they're just moving the carrot forward. As they walk toward the carrot, they're never getting any closer. This is what we do to ourselves, my friends.
We push the carrot along with us so that we never quite get it. We never truly, once and for all, capture that feeling we're looking for because it always feels like it's just out of reach. Sure, sometimes we capture it for a fleeting moment and then somehow it's back out in front of us, out of reach again.
We want so much for our teens to be happy and safe. We do everything in our power to try to make those things happen. For one fleeting moment, we see them smile, they laugh, and they invite us in.
And the relief and happiness we feel in that moment is amazing. Until that carrot gets whipped out in front of us and it's out of reach again, we can't be happy until they're happy again. We want our kids to be safe and healthy and listen to our advice and they don't, so we worry.
We feel anxiety and frustration. We can't find peace until they do what we really want them to do. But we don't just do this with our children.
We do this in so many areas of our lives. I'd be happier if my husband would just appreciate me a little bit more. I'd feel more loved if I found a partner.
Life would be better if I had more female friends. I need to find something to do so I don't feel bored in the fall. I'd feel so much more confident if I lost 20 pounds.
I need to find a job so I can feel more fulfilled. If my boss would just appreciate my hard work, then I'd love my job. I wish I could just get my act together so I didn't have to feel so overwhelmed.
Look at all of those carrots. Out of reach, peace, happiness, fulfillment, confidence, appreciation, validation, love. These are the feelings, the emotional experience that we put just out of reach when we think there's something we need to do or something we need to fix or someone we need to change to get to feel those things.
So it's no wonder that we're so hard on ourselves. Honestly, when we're a donkey with a carrot in front of us, a carrot we really want by the way, and it's always just out of reach, well we keep walking toward it like the donkey who mindlessly keeps trudging toward the carrot, not realizing that the reason the carrot is always just out of reach is because the donkey is the one keeping it out of reach with the contraption on his back and he can't even see it. The contraption that's keeping our carrot just out of reach is our mind.
It sounds like woo-woo BS, I know, but I'm telling you with absolute certainty that it's your mind that's keeping you from feeling at peace, from feeling happy and fulfilled and confident and appreciated and loved. And until you really embrace this reality, until you become aware of the contraption, the mental obstacles keeping you from feeling what you really want to feel, those feelings are always going to be just out of reach, maybe captured for one moment and then whisked away again, feeling so out of your control. Coming back to me on vacation, where one would think that I would be in a state of happiness and bliss with my favorite people in my favorite place, and yet there I was on vacation, still with my mind, still with that contraption that even I sometimes forget is there.
The mental gymnastics of my mind and all of the things that I want and need to happen so that I can feel just a little bit better. If only the boys looked happier so I could relax and believe they were happy. If only I'd gotten myself up to work out so I could stop feeling guilty about the huge meal I had last night.
If only my husband would volunteer to get groceries so I didn't have to feel resentment. It's always someone's fault or something's fault, my fault, other people's fault, something outside of me or about me that's at fault and keeping me from feeling better. But when we tell ourselves to just relax and let it go, that doesn't work either.
When my boys don't look happy, it's like I have this compulsion to do something. If I tell myself to let go of my workouts every day, it's only going to be harder to fight the inevitable weight gain that seems to be a staple of my life. If I let my husband off the hook, then I have to take it all on myself and that's not fair.
Here's the problem. We only give ourselves two options. Try like crazy to make the impossible happen.
Make our kids happy. Force them to be safe. Make good choices.
Beat ourselves up until we do what we think we should do. Rail against other people until they change. That's option one.
Option two is to give up. Just let our kids be unhappy. Stop trying on all fronts.
Let other people walk all over us. Both options feel terrible. So if you find yourself stuck in this pattern between two awful options, is it any wonder you feel stuck? There is another option and that is quite literally to confront the contraption that's keeping that carrot just out of reach for you.
And that contraption is your mind. It's the thoughts you have about your life that's keeping you trapped between swimming upstream to achieve an impossible goal and giving up. So how does your mind keep you from feeling at peace or happy, fulfilled, confident, loved? The question to explore first is what are the thoughts that are making you feel anxious, unhappy, unfulfilled, insecure, unappreciated, unloved, without purpose? We think that we feel this way because of things out of our control.
Either something that's wrong with us or something that we're just not capable of or something that's wrong with other people or just wrong with our life. And as long as we put the responsibility on circumstances out of our control, we'll continue to walk like that donkey with the carrot always out of reach, never allowing ourselves to feel what we really want to feel. But our minds create peace.
Our minds create happiness and joy and fulfillment and love. All of these beautiful feelings come from our minds, not from the circumstances of our lives. My thoughts about my children make me feel an incredible depth of joy and love and pride.
Your thoughts about my children might make you feel curious or maybe even indifferent. But when it comes to your kids, you likely also have thoughts that make you feel love and joy and pride. And we also have all of these other feelings about our own kids, anxiety, frustration, fear, and sadness.
All of these feelings based on our thoughts about our kids. Until you embrace and take responsibility for your emotional life, your happiness, joy, peace, fulfillment, the love that you feel, all of those feelings are going to be just out of reach. You're going to have to keep working and trying and wanting to be better or for other people to change and be better, only for those feelings to continue to elude you.
Instead, I want to invite you to let yourself off the hook. Now that doesn't mean you have to stop caring. There's nothing I can or even want to change about my thought that I want my children to be happy, safe, and healthy.
As my son would say, it is what it is. I will always love them. I will always want them to be safe, happy, and healthy.
But there is contraption with a carrot hanging on a hook that I am always striving toward and that contraption is thoughts about what my responsibility is to fix my kids, to make things better for them, all the terrible things that will happen if I don't fix it, what it will mean about me as a terrible mom if I don't do the right thing. It's those additional thoughts that have me on a hook of perpetual struggle. And this is the place where we can let ourselves off the hook.
But first we have to understand our mind. This is the work we do in my coaching program Mom 2.0. You get to let yourself off the hook without ever giving up on your kids, without giving up on yourself, without letting down all your boundaries. You can create peace, happiness, joy, and fulfillment, love right now.
But first, you have to let yourself off the hook.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
