TRAP #7 - PERSONALIZATION (aka MOM GUILT)
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 71.
Hello, friends. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the world aligns to let you off the hook for something and you feel utter relief? I'm talking no matter what you do or have done, due to circumstances entirely out of your control, you're off the hook. And you're just so thankful.
Having COVID the other week was like that for me. There were a series of events I was supposed to attend, but then it came down with COVID and poof, all responsibility for showing up to those events was immediately lifted off my shoulders. And not just while I was sick.
COVID is like a five-day get out of everything pass, plus another five days when people don't really want to be around you unless you're wearing a mask. And even then, when you see someone with a mask on, don't you sometimes just think, really? If you think you're sick, stay home. What I realized too, was that if I was sick with just a regular bad cold, which is what this version of COVID felt like, well, I probably would have done what I've always done since my kids were little and probably before.
I would have just day cooled up and gone about my life because the show must go on. I would have preferred to be a little under the weather, but managing rather than shirking my responsibilities. That might sound like poor judgment, but how many of us have done that? Gone about our lives feeling terrible just because we feel too guilty about letting anyone down.
Many of us go through every day with this lens of responsibility, not wanting to have to deal with the guilt of not living up to that responsibility. But as I stayed home with COVID, not only did people completely understand why I was home and not attending events, but people were kind and supportive, checking in on me. It makes me wonder if I just had a bad cold or flu, why I couldn't simply say to the world, I have the flu, I'll be out for five days.
The answer, quite honestly, comes down to guilt. As you know, I've been exploring the series on mindset traps, and I bet you didn't know that guilt was one of them. But let's be honest, if there was a state of being that many of us moms face, it's the state of feeling guilty.
So that's the topic of today's conversation about the mindset traps of moms with teens as we approach the empty nest. As a reminder, I'm going through these traps in no particular order, so feel free to listen to them in whatever way works for you. Although I would say, as I'm learning through my own exploration of these traps, even if you don't think one of these traps is something you're dealing with, I encourage you to take a listen.
Because honestly, it's been eye-opening for me even as I think about the traps I still find myself falling into. So the past traps we've explored are confirmation and negativity bias, catastrophizing, validation seeking, the comparison trap, all or nothing thinking, and perfectionism. And now we're on to guilt.
Here's why you probably haven't heard about guilt as a mindset trap before. The technical term for the trap I'm exploring today is called personalization. The definition of personalization is that it's a cognitive distortion where we attribute external negative circumstances to ourselves, meaning that we believe we're at fault for these circumstances.
So by circumstances, this could mean someone being mad or disappointed, or something that's going wrong with our kids. Personalization involves us taking things personally even when they may have little or nothing to do with us. You can think of personalization as the way we interpret these circumstances.
You may have heard me describe before our interpretation of the world around us as our lens. Even think about it as a pair of tinted sunglasses. Personalization involves us viewing the world around us in a way that leads us to feeling guilt, self-blame, and taking unnecessary responsibility for events and outcomes.
Now I've titled this trap guilt for simplicity because I'm quite sure many of us identify with that word much more easily than the word personalization. But I want to clarify that personalization is not the same thing as guilt. As I mentioned, personalization might lead to feelings of guilt, but it's more about the thought error, the thinking pattern or lens that has us attributing circumstances of our lives to ourselves in a way that may be exaggerated or unnecessary.
And here's why this is tricky. Sometimes we are at There are just times in life where we mess up. I know in my life, particularly when I was younger, that there were times when I'd done something that was just wrong against my own morals and values even.
Maybe something mean or inappropriate. I know even as a mom, there have been times when I've really messed up. The thing is guilt is a specific emotion that we feel when we know we've done something wrong or violated our own moral or ethical standards.
Clearly if we've broken a law, for example, guilt in these cases is a normal and honestly important emotion for us to feel. It actually serves as a signal that our behavior was wrong and that we should correct it in the future or make amends for a mistake or error. You can think of guilt as an adaptive emotion.
The pain of the guilt teaches us to do better. And just think what would happen if we didn't feel guilt. You might know that the most telling trait of a sociopath or a narcissist is that they don't feel guilt or shame.
Sociopaths have difficulty with empathy, meaning they aren't able to see the world from others' perspectives. And so then they don't have a concern about how their behavior might impact other people. So good news, if you feel guilt on a regular basis, you're most likely not a sociopath, just in case you were wondering.
Anyway, the point is if you feel guilt because you've truly done something wrong, you apologize, you take accountability. But where's the line? How do you know when it's appropriate to take responsibility for something? Sure, if it's about breaking laws or rules, it's pretty clear. Or if you've done something intentional to hurt someone.
Okay, in those cases, the need for accountability might be cut and dry. But what about when someone's feelings are hurt and you didn't hurt them on purpose? Or when they get mad at you, but you don't know why? How about when people are disappointed in you when you did your best? And let's go on to our kids. What if something's wrong with them? Was it your job to protect and guide them? Or how do you feel when your kids actually blame you? They may even say the words, mom, it's all your fault.
I know in my life as mom, since the very beginning, I've felt guilt. During pregnancy, I felt guilt if I pushed myself too hard or ate the wrong foods. When my sons were born, I felt guilty that I wasn't better at breastfeeding.
I felt guilty when I didn't play with my kids enough or I put them in front of baby Einstein for too long. I felt guilty that I hired a sitter sometimes because I just needed a break. I felt guilty that I didn't enjoy playing and sitting on the floor for hours and hours with toys as much as I felt like I should.
And that's just the first few years of my boy's life. Now in our life with our teens, look at all of the room for mom guilt. How are they doing academically? I should have hired a tutor or been more on top of him for studying.
I shouldn't have let her take the AP class. I should have been more strict. I shouldn't have come down on him so hard.
Us moms of teens can be particularly prone to the mindset trap of personalization because of all of the unique challenges and changing dynamics of parenting as our kids grow up and pull away. I mean, we've been highly concerned for our kids' health, safety, happiness, and success since the moment they were brought into this world. But now we can feel like we have so much less influence and control over our teens at the same times the challenges and the pressures seem to get so much bigger and riskier.
Navigating teen friendships, dating, sex, drugs, alcohol. How can we realistically stop wanting to protect and guide our teens when the stakes seem so much higher? At the same time, our kids are trying to figure out who they are. And sadly, this often means that they're questioning everything.
Trying to figure out who they are separate from us. They go through mood swings. They may become defiant or just distant.
It can be really hard not to take this behavior personally as a mom. If we had only done things differently. Honestly, we might not even know what.
But surely, if we had just done something better, then maybe they wouldn't be acting this way or want to pull away so badly. I've worked with so many women who take the blame for their kids' changing behavior and even their disappointments and failures. Everything from the way they socialize, whether or not they have a group of friends, whether they get invited to parties or hangouts.
If our kids take drugs or use alcohol, it feels like our fault. We worry if we've done something. If our kids aren't open with their feelings.
We want them to be polite. We take responsibility for how appreciative they are. We take responsibility for our kids' grades, whether or not they make the team, what part they get in the play, what college they get into.
You might be listening and thinking, I don't take the blame. But I want to ask you, do you simply feel sad or disappointed when things don't go how you'd hoped with your teen? Or do you feel responsible? These are two very different things. It's natural for us to feel empathy when someone we love is in pain.
This is in stark contrast to the sociopaths I mentioned earlier. As moms, we can understand, appreciate, and even share the emotions of our kids because we can imagine what it must feel like to be in their shoes. And of course, it's also natural for us to wish it were different for our kids when they're hurting.
But on top of and separate from our feelings of empathy, we can also often feel responsible and even guilty that we haven't been able to keep our kids out of harm's way. Keep them from emotional pain. In last week's episode, I explored the mindset trap of perfectionism and how that can play out in our constant effort to help our kids stay safe and healthy and be happy and successful.
It can seem like nothing short of perfection will allow us to breathe a sigh of relief that we've done a good job. And since perfection, or our kids' happiness at a minimum, seems to be fleeting, then we're in for a constant state of not living up to the high bar we've set for ourselves as moms. When our kids are in any way not safe, unhealthy, unhappy, or unsuccessful, there's a loud voice in our heads telling us it's our fault.
So many of the mindset traps we've explored so far play a role in compounding the degree to which we fall into the trap of personalization. We compare ourselves to other moms, thinking that they must be doing something better than we are if we perceive their kids are somehow winning at the game of teen life more than our own kids. To make matters worse, these concepts of happiness and success are literally all relative.
I've had women come to me because they're worried that their kids don't go out with other kids, and other women who agonize through the highs and lows of the constantly changing dynamics of teen friendship, or yet other women who would give anything to go through a weekend without having to stay up all hours waiting for their kid to get home safely. I've worked with women who've worried that their teen hasn't had a romantic relationship as they head off to college, and other women who are worried about teen pregnancy and how often their kids sneaking out to see their boyfriend or girlfriend. I've worked with women whose kids are academically talented and stressed out of their minds, and moms who worry that they've been too lenient with their kid who doesn't care that much about school.
This isn't a contest, my friends. All of these are real challenges my clients have faced, and the main message is that when our kids are struggling, the first thing we often do is attribute all of these struggles and failures to something we should be doing differently. So how does personalization, or taking the blame for external events and outcomes, help us? And when I say help us, what I'm referencing is our brain's tendency to process information in a way that keeps us safe, brings us pleasure and comfort, and keeps things as efficient as possible.
I mentioned in an earlier podcast in the series that our subconscious brains process 11 million bits of information every second. Sadly, it sounds like a lot, but this is a small fraction of the amount of data that today's computers process. But interestingly, our brains process data in some ways that are similar to what you might think a computer might do.
For one, our brains are attuned to recognizing patterns in our lives. Our brains also tend to look for causes of these patterns and events. Ultimately, this is how we process or interpret everything that's going on in our lives.
Our brains look for patterns and connections, and also look for reasons why things are the way they are. Think of all of the information going on in your life right in front of you at any time. Your brain is constantly, subconsciously, trying to make sense of all of it.
Okay, so our brain is processing the information it receives, and it tries to organize this information in a way that's efficient and makes sense. But why then does our brain try to take responsibility for the information it receives? What's that about? Well, the other motivation for our brains to engage in personalization or taking the blame is that it actually helps us to feel more in control and less vulnerable if we think we're to blame. Because if what's going on is our fault, and we can just change ourselves, then we can prevent this terrible thing from happening in the future.
This illusion of control makes us think that we're safe. You could even think of personalization as a coping mechanism in times of distress. It might feel easier in some ways to blame ourselves rather than confront the uncertainty, complexity, and utter lack of control we have over so many of the circumstances of our lives, certainly over the circumstances of our teens' lives.
Now let's just go to this fairy tale land for a moment. If something's wrong with my teen, and whatever it is really is my fault, then if I can just fix whatever I've done wrong, even if it's a change in approach or something I've overlooked, whatever the transgression or error, let me just fix it, and then voila, everything's better. Teen safe? Check.
Happy? Check. Teen successful? Check, check, check. Sign me up for this fairy tale.
I honestly wish life was this easy, that I actually had control to fix all of the things that my boys are struggling with. The hard reality is I can't. There have been times when my boys have struggled socially.
I kid you not, there was a time when my son was in middle school, and I saw him during the school day beating his head against a tree. He was at recess. He should have been with his friends, but they were off about 20 yards away, seeming to be laughing and having fun, oblivious to my son hitting the tree with his head.
It took every ounce of strength I had not to march up to him and take him out of school for the day. The situation had nothing to do with me, but I agonized over it. Should I put him in a different school? Maybe he needs to talk to a therapist.
Should I be encouraging friendships with other people? What was going on with my son clearly had nothing to do with me, and yet I could think of a hundred things in that moment that I should be doing differently, and maybe things that would help my son feel more happy and connected. I've blamed myself when my kids have struggled in school, thinking it's my fault I let them take classes that were too hard. I definitely made it about me when my kids have broken rules or gotten into relationships I thought were unhealthy.
As a society, I think we just take for granted that we moms are going to feel guilt, but I want to offer another way of looking at personalization. Could it be that in our effort to be a good mom, that we're also exaggerating the importance of our own actions in terms of influencing our kids' happiness and success? Now, I don't mean to suggest for one minute that we moms don't play a critical role in the lives of our kids. We absolutely are amazing, 100 percent, but there comes a time in our kids' lives, and it starts early in their teen years, where it's just not about us anymore.
When our kids were little, we could give them a hug or a cookie, and all the hurts would seemingly be whisked away. Our kids trusted us. If we said everything was going to be okay, they believed us.
Well, now that they're teens, not so much. In fact, our kids might bristle if we tell them everything's going to be okay. Whatever they're going through, whatever emotional turmoil, they may not want us to do anything about it other than listen, and often not even that.
But let me ask you, now that your child is a teenager, what do they really need from you? Do they need you to control outcomes for them? Do they need you to make them happy? And even if the answer to these questions is, yes, mom, please control the outcome, please make me happier, is this even possible? Are we being realistic in thinking that we have the power to control our kids' happiness? I want to offer that maybe we're not being entirely realistic, or even honest with ourselves. Maybe we're agonizing over a goal that's entirely impossible for us to achieve. Because here's the thing, our happiness is caused by our thinking, the way we perceive the circumstances of our lives.
Our kids' happiness is caused by their thinking, the way they perceive the circumstances of their lives. We probably know we can't control our kids' minds and their thinking, but instead we try to control their actions and circumstances. We try to fix everything around them in hopes that the right circumstances will create the right emotions, the happiness and feelings of success and validation.
But guess what? The circumstances aren't what create our kids' emotions, it's always their thoughts. Have you ever done exactly what your teen asked you to do and somehow they're still pissed off? You've aligned the circumstances exactly as they asked and somehow it's still not good enough, because it's not the circumstances. So what if we tried to let ourselves off the hook for manipulating the circumstances of our lives in the perfect way so that we could just drop the guilt? What are those circumstances that you want to create that make you think that that would be the thing that would allow you to let go of the guilt? Would it be a happy teen, a good report card, a mother that says thank you, a raise at the office, a COVID diagnosis? What are those circumstances that will allow you to believe that you've done all that you could? Think about how much stress and beating ourselves up we could save ourselves if we just decided that we've done all that we can do and that we didn't wait for external permission to believe that.
I, for one, am probably never going to wanting to do things to help my kids be happy, healthy, safe, and successful. In the past 24 hours alone, I've signed one son up for more wrestling classes and advised him on his efforts to raise money for type 1 diabetes, and I've hounded the other son to have a telehealth visit at school because he still seems to be sick. I'm a mom.
Cue superhero music. And I will always want to help my kids be safe, healthy, happy, and successful. It's such an incredibly worthy goal, and when they are these things, there is no better reward in life.
But also, I know I can't force or manipulate or control my sons into their own safety, health, happiness, and success. That is on them. If they need my help, I am there.
Sometimes they don't ask for my help, I'm still there. But I've learned that I can't control any of it, and sometimes they're going to be unhappy and unsuccessful. And God help me, they will do things that are unsafe and unhealthy.
My boys know that if they need me or my husband for anything, we're here. How many millions of times over the past 20 years have you proven this exact same thing for your child? Even when we do it wrong, we're there, supporting our kids in the best way we know how, fully loving, just wanting the best for our kids. When can we let that be enough? I've been in some scary, agonizing situations with my boys, times when I desperately wished that I could take away the pain or go back in time and do something differently, or sometimes fast forward time.
That pit in your stomach when you see your child in pain, really upset. It feels bigger than empathy, like not only am I walking in your shoes and feeling what you're feeling, but I wish I could take the pain away. I get it.
But the guilt, the part where you make the circumstances about you because you did something wrong, that part, it actually doesn't give you any more control over the situation. It doesn't take away the pain. It doesn't fix anything.
It only makes us show up in a way that's more about us than about our kids. We love our kids unconditionally. When can we let that be enough? As I return to normal at the tail end of my COVID quarantine, the burden of my to-do lists and all of the things I think I should be doing seem to be falling back on my shoulders.
The list isn't any different this week, but the way I'm thinking about it is. Last week I knew what was enough. This week I notice, for some reason, as I'm getting better, I'm re-entering life, I'm starting to notice thoughts where I'm blaming myself for not getting more done last week.
Talk about a circumstance out of my control. I can't change what I did or didn't do last week. So when I notice this guilt, I tell myself, I get to decide what's enough.
I decide how to approach the situation with love, doing my best, and I get to allow myself to let go of the rest. I decide what's enough. In parenting, that's probably one of the hardest decisions we have to make, but it's also the difference between holding on to the guilt and acknowledging where we have control and where we don't.
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.
