The Therapy Edit - On 5 tips for managing guilt from past parenting choices

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

In this Monday solo episode of The Therapy Edit Anna answers a question she hears a lot; how do you manage guilt that relates to previous parenting choices.We hope you find it helps.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, Psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hello there. I have got a really common question to share some insights with you today. It's all about managing guilt for previous parenting choices and challenges because I am very sure that you can quite easily bring to mind some of those moments in parenting that you feel so much guilt over. I can think back to certain scenarios where I just feel so much guilt and shame about. There's a moment in particular actually that's just sprung to mind that I often feel guilty about and have to go through the old guilt act technique. Definitely looked that up of mine

on my page and in previous podcasts around guilt to get some more insight. But yeah, it was a moment I was at a play group and I was potty training my oldest child and managing at the same time a newborn that had undiagnosed silent reflux. I was chronically sleep deprived. I had absolutely zero capacity to deal well with any challenges that arose in my day because I was on the floor metaphorically, emotionally, physically. I was so done. And I remember my son had had an accident. He'd done a poo in his pants. And I just lost it in this toilet. And I shouted and screamed. And I was just at the very end of myself. And I saw his face crumple in fear and upset and do you know what even now he remembers that moment he must have been

i don't know how old must he have been just three perhaps i can't remember but yeah i just remember actually he must have been maybe he was two but i remember that moment and i felt so guilty afterwards because it really wasn't okay i really wasn't okay and then he wasn't okay and i look back and i think flippinck those moments in which we often fear have we messed our children Have we scarred them? Have we emotionally damaged them in these ways? And other ways that I, that often, other things that often crop up for me are ways of parenting that I've implemented. And I now know so differently and I parent very differently to how I parented my first child in those first years. And we can often feel a lot of guilt around, you know, what we didn't know when we

didn't know it before we've learned things that have changed and transformed the way that we, approach life and parenting. And anyway, I was a few weeks ago, I spoke at an event with the amazing Mrs. O.T. Now, you must go and check her on Instagram because her writing is amazing, the way she articulates different feelings and experiences in motherhood. She's Mrs. O.T. on Instagram. Anyway, I was at this event, and we had a lovely, really honest chat. And in the Q&A section at the end, someone asked about managing feelings of guilt around

the decisions we've made in the past. in parenting and some of those moments of those messy moments. So to answer this, I'm going to read a section of my new book, Raising a Happier Mother. And within it, I include some words from Yara, another mum. And she said, she shared with me, we've just discovered that the stomach aches my son had been experiencing for the last two years were down to a food intolerance. I feel so guilty that I didn't know that. I should have worked it out sooner. So what I've written in this section, I'm just going to read it out to you, and I hope that it will really soothe some of that guilt and give you a fresh insight. So I have written, it can be so easy to guilt and shame ourselves

for not previously behaving in a way that we would now, or for making a different decision to one that we'd make now with hindsight. Good old hindsight, hey? We can really use hindsight as is a way to guilt ourselves for the decisions we made without having known the outcome that would follow them. Sometimes we just don't know the repercussions of certain decisions and we can feel really guilty. And then I've written, how could you have known what you didn't know? How could you have given what you didn't know you needed to give? How could you have made a perfect decision without being able to see into the future? We do the best we can with the knowledge and resources we have. I'm going to read that line again because I think it's so important.

We do the best we can with the knowledge and resources we have at the time. My parenting style has changed so much over the years because of what I've learned and read along the way. I can so easily look back at my earlier approach to parenting and feel such guilt for responding in ways that I wouldn't choose now or using techniques that I wouldn't want to implement now that I know what I know. When my son was four months old, he became increasingly unwell. Now, I gave him sickly tubes of cowpull and I rubed teething salt into his gums, assuming that he was teething really, really badly when hours later, we were being transferred,

blue-lighted to hospital in London for emergency bowel surgery. I felt this deep guilt that I didn't recognise symptoms of a bowel complication that, frankly, hours before, I hadn't even known existed and certainly wouldn't have been able to spell I still can't spell it. He had interception, whether intestine kind of coils back in on itself. And then I've written in life, things get revealed to us along the way that we couldn't possibly have had the capacity to know before. We were never created to obsess over infant sleep yet. I have a whole book in which I listed nap and wake times, desperate to see an improve, that might give me hope that I would have a routine to work with one day or might not feel

so sleep deprived. I just was desperately wanting hope. I have a shelf of often conflicting books that I devoured in the hopes that we might find some rhythm and predictability. But the more we know, the more we try to control different aspects of our lives, because there is apparently a perfect way to do it. Because if we read all these books, it's like there's this perfect way to do it and we're often falling short. So there is so much more potential to feel guilt and shame because we pressure ourselves to know everything about every aspect of parenting. The more I find ways to place everything I do into winning or failing categories,

the more guilt potential there is. But simply put, it seems pretty unkind, isn't it, to expect ourselves to have known what actually wasn't accessible to us then. It's really important to a little bit of, acknowledge, that it can feel extra challenging to let go of the guilt that might follow when something bad or difficult happens as a consequence of a decision that we've made or a decision that we didn't make. Sometimes it's really good to acknowledge as well that things really don't turn out for the best. And hindsight can be a really cruel reminder of this. It may be that there is

a grief to be grieved that things didn't turn out how you'd hope that they would. Or we might have to hold space for someone else's reaction to the circumstances when we do get it wrong in hindsight. But when we leave that guilt to shame us, regardless of how justified it is, you know those times when actually we do make a decision that isn't ideal or we do respond or react in a way that isn't really great. It impacts so many areas of our life and parenting when we just leave that guilt just to shame us and criticize us and feel like a bad mom, a bad person, no matter how you may have misjudged a situation, or how you wish you could turn back time and do it differently. You are not a bad person. You're a good person who made a bad

decision and you deserve to find a way through the guilt. Now, I can assure you that as hard as it may be to believe if you were to sit with a person who has committed the worst crimes and murder somewhere underneath all the mess and the dangerous decisions, you'd find vulnerability and a story worthy of compassion. Therefore, whatever you have done, there will be a reason or a drive that at its very root deserves compassion. If you can access that somehow, perhaps with a conversation with a good friend or some therapy, then you can find a way forward. So there are my thoughts, just a little passage taken from the book just to encourage you to find some compassion for the you that did the best you could with the resources that you had at the time, the knowledge

that you had at the time, the energy levels and the resources that you had at the time, find some compassion because that really starts loosening up the shame that can come with that guilt where we just feel like a bad person. You're not a bad person. We're all just doing the best we can with what we have and what we know and what resources we have available. So I hope that's helpful. There's obviously so much more in the book on this. This is just one little passage in a whole section around guilt. So you might want to have a little read of raising a happier mother. And I've absolutely loved just hearing your stories of how the book is helping you, which is everything I ever hope for. All of the stuff in the book is stuff that I've

learned along the way as a therapist, but also as a mum and those light bulb moments that I've had that I hope will help you as well. So basically compassion, being kind to yourself for what you didn't know and you didn't know it. And the things that you did when you didn't have, really have the resources to be able to choose otherwise those moments where things came out sideways. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you have enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and review for me. Also, if you need any resources at all, I have lots of videos and courses and everything from health anxiety to driving anxiety and people pleasing nail all on my website, anamatha.com. And also, don't forget my brand new book, Raising a Happier Mother is out now for you to enjoy and benefit from. It's all about how to find balance, feel good and see your children flourish as a result. Speak to you soon. Thank you.