The Truth About Mom Guilt: Why You Feel It and How to Let It Go

Episode 176-   The Truth About Mom Guilt: Why You Feel It and How to Let It Go 

Do you feel like you’ve failed as a mom? Is your relationship with your adult child strained, distant, or full of tension? You’re not alone. Many mothers struggle with mom guilt, shame, and emotional disconnection from their adult children. But healing is possible—starting with self-compassion and emotional resilience. 

In this episode of Coaching Your Family Relationships, I share a personal story about a time I felt completely disconnected from my child and overwhelmed with guilt. I’ll walk you through how self-judgment keeps us stuck, how shame isolates us, and why emotional resilience is the key to repairing your relationship with your adult child. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

• How to stop judging yourself and start practicing self-compassion
• Why mom guilt and shame keep you from healing
• What emotional resilience is and how it helps you stay steady in family conflict
• A simple phrase to say when you feel overwhelmed: "I'm doing the best I can, and that's enough."

If you're feeling lost, stuck, or weighed down by guilt, this episode will help you take the first step toward healing your relationship with yourself—and with your child.
 
Listen Now and Take the Next Step

If you’re ready to heal the relationship with your adult child, I invite you to download my free online class.

Heal the Relationship with Your Adult Child
 
In this class, you’ll learn:
 

• Why your relationship with your child feels distant—and what you can do about it
• How to let go of guilt and shame so you stop blaming yourself
• The best way to communicate so you strengthen your connection instead of pushing them away

Click here to watch the class
 
Healing is possible, and it starts with you.

If this episode helped you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with another mom who needs to hear this today.
 
 

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with mothers and parents who are experiencing difficult relationships with their adult children, and they want to work on creating more authentic connected families.
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Connect with us:

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tinagosneycoaching/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching

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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

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Tina, Hey there. Welcome to the coaching your family relationships. I'm Tina Gosney, a certified family conflict coach. I work with mothers who are feeling disconnected from their children and they want to heal their family relationships so they can have more authentic, loving and supportive family units. This episode is for all the moms who are carrying such heavy guilt ridden loads in their parenting. I want you to know I see you. I feel your pain because I once was you, and no matter how old your children are small toddlers, teenagers or full grown adults, this episode is for you. This episode is for all the moms. And if you're a mom, you have probably felt at some time in your parenting career like a failure. You've wondered, you know, am I doing enough? Or maybe you feel guilty when you look at other moms who seem to have it all together, and you feel like you're just struggling. And maybe you even hid your hard times from other mothers. So if you ever felt weighed down by guilt and self doubt and you don't know how to move forward and you're so completely exhausted by trying to do it all, I want you to know that you're not alone. Today I'm going to talk about self compassion and emotional resilience. These are two things that are going to help you navigate those times that are really hard, when it seems like nothing is going right, and no matter how hard you try, it's just keeps falling apart. I'm gonna help you learn how to start releasing that guilt, but first we need to even see where the guilt is coming from, and we're gonna start building a stronger relationship that are more human, more authentic, not based on these perfectionistic ideals that we are not even capable of achieving. And this is one thing also that we really need to talk about, is, how do we measure success? Because if you've been measuring your success by how other people respond to you and what they do, then we need to have a talk. Now let's get into it. Do you know how much power there is in sharing our stories. That's why I share my stories with you, and once in a while I will share with permission, a story from one of my clients. When we share our stories and our struggles, we realize that we have so much in common, and we realize that we're not alone in our struggles. We can actually be there to lift each other, support each other, and encourage each other, but the challenge is that we are wired for connection. We are social beings. We need other people, especially when we're going through hard times, but when we feel guilty, when we feel less than when we feel shame, like when we feel like we're failing, our instinct is to pull away and hide because we don't want anyone to see us struggling. We want to maintain an image, this image that says, hey, I've got it all together. I'm not struggling. This is breeze for me. We think that if we show our pain and our mistakes or our uncertainty, that other people are going to judge us. They're going to think less of us. We're going to think that we don't measure up. And I totally get it, because I was there for so long in my life. And this, we come by it naturally, because our brains tell us that if we don't measure up, then our group is going to reject us, and when our group rejects us, that means we're going to die. This is the part of our brain that dates way, way back to our ancient ancestors, and they would literally die if they were not accepted by their tribe. Now our brains have not gotten the updated memo. Does not know that we will not die if we don't have the approval of others. So it still operates under that same assumption. It's that same belief that if I am rejected, if I'm judged, if other people don't think highly of me that I'm going to die. So there was a time, oh, this was well over 10 years ago, probably more like almost 15 years ago. There was a time when I was having a really, really tough time with one of my kids. I was trying so hard, I was trying so many things. I felt like I had to fix that kid. I felt like I had to fix the situation, and I knew that I was not showing up as my best self, and everything I tried backfired and it made it worse, and everything I tried was reinforcing to my brain that I was a failure. And that was affecting everything. It was affecting how I saw myself, how I interacted with my family, even how I got through my day or couldn't get through my day. I was upset a lot. I was super easily frustrated, and sometimes, quite often, I would just check out because being checked in felt way too overwhelming. I felt like such a complete failure, and I was thinking things like, I should know what to do. Why can't I fix this? Why does everybody else seem like they have it all figured out, except for me, and I had this other thought that was super painful. It was I have tried so hard for so many years, I've done everything I was supposed to do. I am not supposed to be going through this right now. This should not be happening now. Anytime we tell ourselves this should not be happening, that is a very, very painful thought, and it keeps us stuck, and that's where I was. So I remember this one specific day when the weight of everything was just coming down on me, and I was feeling so way down, so heavy, so everything was so dark, and I was just getting ready to leave the house, and I felt very prompted to just stop in my tracks, literally stop in my tracks. So I stopped, and I took a deep breath, and I said out loud to myself, I am doing the best I can, and that's enough, that one small moment of self compassion, a deep breath, some kind words, that was the little tiny bit of light that I needed to keep going. Now I was not used to giving myself an ounce of compassion, so I don't really think that that thought came from my own brain. I really believe it was an answer to a prayer, and believe me, I was praying a lot, and this one small instance of self compassion did not fix things everything overnight, but what it did do is it shifted my momentum, my focus, into a different direction. I started acting a little more kind to myself, a little more kind to my child and to the rest of my family. I stopped judging myself and carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Now, did that happen overnight? No, but that was the start. This was the start of me being able to let go of those things. So if you're feeling that heaviness right now, if self compassion feels impossible, start with this one, one phrase that you can say to yourself, and we should just to take a deep breath and say, I'm doing the best I can, and right now, that's enough. If you've ever thought I should have done things differently when they were growing up, or if I was a better mom, my children would want to have a relationship with me. Or, you know, everything that's happening right now, it's all my fault. If I was better, this wouldn't have been happening. If you've ever thought anything even remotely like this, then you don't just know what mom guilt feels like, you know what mom shame feels like. First, we start with the guilt, and then here's what happens. We judge ourselves super harshly, we compare ourselves to other moms who seem to have it all together, and we keep our struggles to ourselves because we don't want to be judged. And then by that time, shame has taken over our thoughts. It has taken over our emotions. Shame does not tell us that we made a mistake. It tells us that we are a mistake, and when we believe that we shut down, we withdraw, we lose hope and we hide. And here's the truth is that shame - it thrives in the dark,and another truth is shame cannot survive in the light. So the moment you begin to share your struggles and be authentic, the moment you allow yourself even a little bit of compassion. The moment you decide to have the courage to do something different, shame starts to lose its power, and that's where healing begins. If you've ever asked yourself, Why am I feeling this way? Why do I feel like I have to be perfect, or that my child's happiness is my responsibility? I want you to know that you come by this naturally, because so much of this is coming from our culture and society and the expectations around motherhood from the time that we. Moms, we are surrounded by messages that tell us a good mom is selfless and always puts their kids first. And another message is, if your child is struggling, it's because you did something wrong. And this is the kicker. This is a great one. A mother's worth is measured by how successful and happy her children are. These messages are everywhere. They're on social media, they're in parenting books. They're in the conversations we have and that we just operate from as we talk to other people. They are in the way that we talked about motherhood and that the messages that we receive about motherhood, and what is the result? Moms carry this impossible weight of responsibility. We believe that we should be able to control everything, our child's happiness, their choices and their relationship with us, but the truth is we are not responsible for their happiness. What we are what are we responsible for? We are responsible for showing up with love, integrity and being resilient, and the more that we let go of these unrealistic, unrealistic expectations, the more that we free ourselves up to be real, to be authentic, to show up as human beings and not perfect moms. And do you know what our kids need to see that we can be real imperfect people, and when we can show them that we can create this space for real connection? But one of the biggest reasons we feel like failures as a mom is because we measure success by something that we can't control if we're thinking things like, if my child is happy and successful and loves me, then I have succeeded, and if they don't, then I failed. But we cannot control what our children do and don't do. So how do we redefine success in a way that we have more control over because success as a mother is not about raising children perfectly. It's not about having children who outperform other children, or who are successful in everything they do and never have a failure or make a mistake, or even having children who you consider to be making the right life choices. Success as a mom, is showing up with love, integrity, courage and resilience. It's being someone that you're proud of, no matter what else is happening and how other people are responding to you. But let's be honest, showing up with love, integrity and courage, 100% of the time is not going to happen. It's like saying, Oh, just be your best all the time, and then everything will work out. Well, I'm not my best all the time, and I know that you are not also. So there are some times that I'm lucky if I can show up and know just when to keep my mouth shut. We are all going to have times that are hard, that we don't feel good, and that we let our not feeling good and our bad mood seep out into our life and into our relationships. So if we think, Oh, I just need to be the best me all the time, we're going to look at those times when we are not our best as a failure. We're going to just define ourselves as that, as a failure again. So when we're having a hard time and we make mistakes, what do we need? We need to give ourselves some compassion. There's that word again, compassion, and I know it's a hard word for a lot of people, but there are times that we just show up and we make a lot of mistakes. We're going to snap at someone, we're going to criticize, we're going to get into an argument where we know that we're wrong and we're going to keep trying to be right. We're going to fail to notice something pretty significant. There are so many ways that we can show up as our less than best self, but what if we looked at those kind of failures differently? What if we looked at them instead of like, you know, proof that we're not good enough? What if we looked at this just as something to learn from? Because the truth is that every mistake, every tough moment, is an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, and that learning and growing. Sometimes what we're learning and growing in is practicing giving, giving ourselves compassion and letting ourselves be human, and letting our kids see that we're human. They need to see that in us. If this episode spoke to you, if your family relationships are difficult, if you're having a hard time of letting go, letting go of the mom guilt and the mom shame, I want you to take the next step. Recently, I taught in an online class called heal the relationship with your adult child without guilt, anxiety or walking on eggshells. And in this class, I talked about our two main relationship needs, and how they can they feel like they're in conflict with each other, and how that creates relationships that feel strained and and what we do, the unhealthy things that we do to try to get them unstrained. I'm talking about how to break unhealthy patterns and what we need to be focusing on, instead of our natural go to ways that we try to solve problems, there is a different process we can go through, and there's a hint. I'm going to give you a hint here. It is not about getting them to change. You can actually get access to this class today through the replay. Even though the class happened, you can still get access to the replay. There is a link in the show notes, and you can watch that today. You can go there and download that today and watch that today. Thank you for spending time with me today. I want you to remember that self compassion and emotional resilience are not things that you just have. They are things that you practice. We get better at the things that we practice. And every second of every day, we're practicing something. So what are we practicing? Are we practicing being hard on ourselves and beating ourselves up? We're practicing being feeling really guilty and shaming ourselves. We practicing trying to be perfect and then never measuring up? Or are we practicing giving ourselves a break and having some compassion and challenging those cultural messages that we are getting that are so wrong and so unhelpful. You are worth practicing self compassion and emotional resilience. You are worth spending your resources. And by resources I mean your energy, your thoughts, your focus. You are worth spending those resources on every step you take, no matter how small is a step towards healing, your healing. I'll see you next time you.