Welcome back to become a Cal Mama. I'm your host. I'm Marilyn Childress.

I'm a life and parenting coach. And last week on the podcast, I

talked about the concept of attunement. And it really is this

process of connecting with your kids and

coming alongside, seeing the world from their view.

It's a part of the comm mama process that I teach all the time.

I call that connect, and attunement is one of the tools

of connection. So, the

reason why I brought that up last week is

because I often hear moms talk

about how they're so worried that they're, like, traumatizing their kids,

that they're scarring their kids, that they're fucking up their kids, that they're ruining their

kids' lives. And they feel really worried about

that. And most of the time, they bring that

up to me because of a few isolated

experiences of them losing

themselves in an angry moment and acting in a way that they

don't love, like shaming their kid, name calling,

being threatening, acting in a way that causes

fear and pain for their child. And then they have

this overwhelming regret, overwhelming guilt,

and they feel afraid that they have done permanent damage.

And I was talking about this with Tiffany, my best friend, who I've

talked about on the podcast many times. She's been a guest. She's

been an interviewer of me in the, podcast where I

talk about recovering from trauma. I think that was

episode 100. So, anyway, Tiffany and I were

talking, and I was we're just we both raised kids together, and we were talking

about how moms often say I'm so worried I'm gonna traumatize my kid or I'm

gonna fuck them up. And then she said this sentence that was so

beautiful. She said, the only thing you need to do is

attune and repair. And it was so

simple and so beautiful and absolutely

true. If you want to raise kids that

don't experience trauma, attune to

them, connect with them, support them in their

emotional journey. Right? Doing that gentle parenting, that

connected parenting work that we've talked about a lot on the pod.

And when you don't do it, repair. Help

your child make sense of you acting crazy.

Right? Giving them a narrative to help them

understand that it was about you and not about them so that you

can shame free that moment and norm not

normalize that you're yelling at them, but normalize that, yes, it

doesn't feel good. It's a yucky feeling. And that's because I,

as the parent, was not emotionally regulated in that

moment that a mama had a temper tantrum. You know, mama had

a meltdown. Mama had a big feeling cycle, and I caused

pain and harm to you. So next week, I'm going to

give you a practice of repair and how to

do that work with your kids and, like, how to actually have those

conversations with your child. I'm sure I've talked about the pod.

We'll connect the previous episodes to this one in the

show notes. But I was thinking about

doing that. Like, I was like, I'm gonna do a 2 part series of attunement

and repair. And I realized that

we actually need to talk about the guilt that you

feel when you do something, when you

show up in a way that you don't like as a mom and as a

parent, and how if we don't

deal with the guilt that we feel

and we bring that into our conversation or or, like,

our repair conversation with our child, our

child isn't going to be completely free to

experience their feelings and process their emotion with

you because you will be bringing in your own

guilt. When you're looking to your child to

forgive you, but you haven't forgiven yourself yet,

it is going to be difficult for that conversation to be

centered in the child's narrative. It will be

be centered in your narrative. Now

I'm gonna talk about how to center a

repair conversation in your child's narrative more next week,

but I wanna talk now about your narrative.

What happened to you?

And what do you do with that guilt that you feel?

So when you have a rupture with your kid and you

show up in a way that didn't feel good

or you end up not connecting with them when they're

doing a bid for connection, like, you missed it or whatever and they feel hurt

and sad, you can feel really bad.

Right? It's like hurting our children,

it feels existentially wrong. We're like, this is my child

that I would take a bullet for, and yet here I am hurting

them. Right? It's just feels something very, very

wrong. And then it's so easy to make

it about us. Like something must be wrong with me

because I did this to my kid, because I yelled at them, because

I grabbed them harshly, because I name called them, because

I screamed in their face, because I shook their body, because I tossed

them on the couch. Like, these behaviors make you

feel like a monster. And if you're thinking,

I am a monster and you go into the conversation of repair with

your kid, your kid is gonna feel like they have to convince you

that you're not a monster, and that's not their job.

So instead of going into a conversation with

guilt, I want you to go into the repair

conversation with remorse. So let me break

remorse and guilt down a little bit.

So guilt, like, it can be informative. Right?

So shame is something's wrong with me. Guilt is I've done something wrong.

But a lot of times we confuse shame and guilt and we get

caught up in it. Remorse is a little bit

more externalized than even guilt. Remorse is I

have regret. I have remorse over an

action I took. I did a thing, and I

don't like I that I did a thing. And we wanna try to

make this conversation with ourselves as

far apart from our core self as possible. We wanna be

able to externalize our behavior and have

compassion for the feelings that are inside that

led to the behavior. When you act in a

way that you don't love, you are

acting that way because of your own emotional

needs, because of something that's going on inside

of you. And we wanna have compassion

and love and acceptance for your emotional

state of being. Right? If you feel overwhelmed,

we wanna have compassion for that overwhelm. Yes. You

behaved in a way that you don't love, but I want you to separate your

behavior as much as you can from your core self.

So guilt, it can be, it can

make us feel really alone and ashamed of

ourselves. It can keep us, focusing on our

worthlessness. It can keep us in cycles of self

loathing. It's a very self centered feeling,

guilt is, and it can be very destructive and keep us

stuck. And that's not gonna be

what like, having that guilt isn't gonna get you

to a new state of action

because you're gonna feel stuck in the cycle of I'm a bad

mom. I'm not good at this.

Something's wrong with me. Those thoughts are

gonna spiral you and you're not gonna be able to take action. Even if you

tried to do repair, even if you tried to have a conversation with your kid,

you would end up making them feel bad for you

and seeking their soothing of you. Right? You

would be like, please forgive me. I'm so sorry. And you would feel you're coming

from a needy place. So before you go to get

forgiveness from your child, I want you to practice self forgiveness.

How can you ask your child to forgive you if you haven't forgiven yourself?

If you, again, if you look at your child to make you

feel better, if you need something from your child, that's a

codependent relationship. That's not a healthy

parent child relationship. As a parent, I am

an, like, an an internalized

organism. I can take care of myself within myself.

That is what it means to be a leader in your family, to be a

strong parent. Now, of course, you can get support from peers. You can

get support from your coach, from me, from your mom, your

family, your sister, your friends. Of course, I want you to

get support and help bring these

conversations to a place where you can feel peace. But I don't want

you seeking that support from your child. I don't want you to look

to your child to that you need their forgiveness.

We want to invite your child to forgive you because it will feel better for

them and they'll have better connection with you. And I don't want you

to be, coming to that conversation from

this self centered, woe is me. I'm a bad person.

Please tell me I'm okay. Not being

okay until your child forgives you is

codependency, and it's not good for your kids. You

wanna be able to self regulate

even after you do something wrong to go back and soothe

yourself. Okay? Self forgiveness, it

also releases that shame that we're talking about, that mental

spiral of, like, I'm a bad mom and getting

stuck in that place. If you forgive yourself

and you go through this process that I'm gonna walk you through these four parts

of self forgiveness, if you do that,

then you can release the shame. You don't have to identify with the

behavior. It doesn't have to define you. You can see

that temporary emotional state you had of overwhelm,

anger, resentment, frustration, whatever that

feeling was that led to your behavior,

you can separate the 2 externalize. I

acted away not because I am away. I acted this

way because I felt this way and I didn't know what to do about it.

That is how you unshame

yourself. Seeing that

when you, when something's wrong with you, if you

think that something's wrong with you at your core, you're bad, That's

a fixed state. That's part of your essential core self. That's

your self-concept, and that can feel really hardened

and rigid. And it can if you feel that

way about yourself, if you think that way about yourself, it's gonna be

very hard to make change. How can you change

something that's permanent? That's part of your core self.

Mama, you are not a bad person. You had

a moment of overwhelm. Recently, a mom was talking to me. She

has 3 small children, and she was trying to get, like,

the baby to bed. And then the older 2 were playing, and they

kept disrupting her. And she just was like, how do I meet

all these people's needs? And she felt really overwhelmed, and she acted in

a way she didn't love towards her kids. And it's like,

yeah, it's overwhelming to have small children,

to have teenagers saying fuck you to you in your face or whatever they do.

Right? That's hard. And you are a human and

you're going to have a human reaction.

Now, of course, the more regulated you are, the better

you take care of yourself day to day, the easier it will be for

you to pause and reset and take a break

and kind of get curious. What do I need? How do I need to take

care of my body? How do I need to take care of my mind? And

give yourself permission to reset the whole situation.

But if you have a very short trigger and

you have, you know, something that happens and then you respond to it,

that we wanna grow your pause. Right? We wanna grow the length

of time between the thing and your reaction to the thing. Now

some of you are really good about not reacting right away. You're like,

I was calm for so long, and it was like 30 minutes of

meltdown, and then I just lost it. Like,

okay. Excellent. During that 30 minutes, my guess is

that you weren't actually self regulating, and my guess is that you

probably weren't coregulating. You probably weren't making

attempts at attunement with your child. Maybe

you were and they weren't like, your child wasn't accepting

your attempts, and that's fine. That happens. But then in

that process, what did you do to reset your nervous system? How aware were you

that you were starting to lose it? That's all I'm wanting to build

for you is awareness of yourself, and part of

that is through this practice of self forgiveness. Looking

back, reflecting on your behavior.

In the call mama course, I have this

exercise called what the fuck just happened. And it really is a

step by step, like journal prompt to help you

go back and figure out what was that all about. How did I

act? Why did I act that way? What did I need? Asking yourself these

questions. So when you do this practice

of self forgiveness, it really is self reflecting.

That way that you can prevent

future ruptures. If you

forgive yourself for today's rupture and you make a little plan and you go

through a process to figure out like, get get curious and find out the

wisdom of that moment, like, what what did you need

or what could have helped you in getting curious instead

of having condemnation for yourself, having curiosity, having

compassion. When you are able to find

the wisdom in the past moments, then

you can prevent future ruptures.

But you won't get there if you are in a cycle of judgment

and condemnation and meanness.

Right? Okay.

So hopefully, you feel clear of, like, yeah, I need to do the

self forgiveness thing. I understand why. And,

I'll revisit it again next episode a little bit more,

you know, just to remind you of what we talked about. So how do you

actually forgive yourself? I love

the practical steps. Like, I'm such a step person. I

want you to tell me, like, first I do this, then I do that, and

then I do this. And I think those of you who listen to this podcast

are probably a lot like me and want that too.

Right? You kind of like, I get it. I like it, darling. I

like that you're telling me self for forgiveness, but I don't know

how. Okay? It's actually not that complicated, but

I'm gonna give you a how. So the first thing I want

you to do when you see that you are

having a that you had a hard moment, that

you didn't act in the way that you wanted to act, that you showed up

in a way that hurt your child or your teen.

Do you guys hear my dog barking? I want you to

start with this sentence. I am worthy of

love and forgiveness. That's it.

I really want you to put your hand on your heart. I'm doing it right

now. And taking a deep breath

and then exhaling

and then saying, I am worthy of love and forgiveness.

If you saw my hands, one of my hands is on my heart and the

other is on my belly because I feel that

pain when I hurt my kids. I feel it in my stomach. I

feel it in my gut, in my core.

So putting your hand on your heart, putting your hand on your

belly, putting a little bit of pressure and

saying, I am worthy of love and forgiveness.

You have to tell yourself that you're you get to be forgiven.

You get to let yourself off the hook. I was just thinking of,

like, one of the obstacles to forgiveness, self forgiveness

might be that if we forgive ourselves, we might be afraid

that we won't change our behavior. And that's just not

true. The only way you will change your behavior is through this act of self

forgiveness. So giving yourself a moment,

I am worthy of love and forgiveness. That's

the foundation from which we're gonna move through the next few

steps. So the first step in self

forgiveness is acknowledge. Acknowledge

being honest about your part in the rupture,

your wrongdoing, really saying,

yep. I yelled fuck you really loudly to

my child, or I said you're a

goddamn moron or what you know, like, write it out

and write what you said. Like, look at it. Like, actually

kind of acknowledge what happened.

I love to also acknowledge what

happened to the kid, Like, acknowledge your behavior

and then their face, their reaction, what you saw in

them, what they said. Just kind of being honest about the

scenario, kinda laying out the facts

without going into a lot of judgment. Just what were the facts?

What happened? What did you say? What did you do?

I this helps us externalize what was going on there.

Then allow yourself to feel the

pain of remorse and regret. You might feel

shame. You might feel anger. You might feel a sense of betrayal. You might

feel confusion. You might feel self doubt. All those things

are temporary emotional states, and they will

pass. When people say feel your feelings, this is what they're talking

about, allowing your emotions that come

up when you look at what you did.

I'm embarrassed. I'm really sad.

I've I, you know, feel I feel angry,

feel resentful that I'm, had to do that by myself.

Whatever comes up, I want you to allow some room for you to

experience your emotions. You can

also get curious about the emotions. Like,

what are they teaching you? Right? Acknowledging you have

you have some shame about what happened. You also maybe wanna acknowledge,

and allow for sort of some of that resentment

towards your kids, freeing yourself from that

feeling. There's a lot of

wisdom in how you acted.

And so when you are bringing up all those feelings that come

from, like, your shame or your guilt, your remorse,

and your regret, You can also start to allow

for a little bit of curiosity of, like, you

know, what is this behavior showing me?

Instead of just criticizing yourself for the feelings that you

had, you can get curious about what happened.

I'm always like, hey, darling. What the heck is going on?

I actually talk to myself, like, hey, girl. What do you need

right now? So in that

feeling your feelings, you might need to be like, what do you need

right now to process this emotion? Do you need to go outside? Do you

need to drink some water? Do we need to make a cup of tea? You

know, if it's really that pain. So we're gonna sit in it for a

little bit being very kind, very gentle with yourself,

validating your feelings, and then the next part

is accepting. So real quick before I go on

to accepting, I wanna say that I have done an episode. Episode

9 is all about processing negative emotion.

How to feel your feelings, resetting your emotions.

So that's episode 9. So we'll link that in the show notes or go back

and listen to it. It is called, let me look it up, pause and

reset your emotions. So acknowledge what happened. We

allow our feelings about what happened, then we accept

accept that that happened. That was in the past.

That happened. I feel badly about it, and

I, see that it was one event in the

history of my parenting. It doesn't define me.

It doesn't define my family. It doesn't find my children.

It just is what happened, and we accept it as

a situation that happened in the past.

We've acknowledged it. We felt all our feelings about it, and now it's time

to let it go. To be okay

with what happened. So some phrases that you can

use to help yourself with this is I

release my past and forgive my imperfections.

So just writing that out. I

release my past, and I forgive my imperfections.

So that's accepting. Yep. I did this thing.

I felt my feelings about it, and now I'm ready to

move on. The next phrase you could use

is I choose to release guilt and embrace

self compassion. I'm actually choosing to no

longer dwell on this. I'm actually choosing to not

beat myself up about this anymore. I'm choosing to not

define myself by this moment. That happened. I

had big feelings. I didn't take good care of myself, and I'm

learning from it. So that's the last sentence you can say. I

am learning to let go of my mistakes and forgive

myself. Just claim

it. Just say that happened and it's

over and releasing

yourself to no longer

feeling all the shitty feelings that you had about

them. You let yourself feel like shit. Now it's time to

let it go and forgive. This is the most important part

and all it really is is by saying I forgive you.

I forgive you, darling, for saying

that. I forgive you for not showing up for your kids.

You're worthy of forgiveness. That's it. It's not

that hard, but it feels so weird. Feels like it should be

more magical or more difficult or, like, we should, like, have

to walk through fire in order to get forgiveness or we should have to, I

don't know, like, beat ourselves up or deprive ourselves of privileges

and, like, get consequences and punishments like an old traditional

model of parenting. Like you need to feel pain. And

it's like, no, you don't. You just forgiveness

is there ready for you. You just have to

acknowledge what you did feel badly about it and

then let it go, Then make amends.

So I tried to make these easy to remember by making them all

start with the letter a. So acknowledge,

allow, accept, amends.

Amends is what I'm gonna talk about next week is having that

repair conversation with your child and

saying to them what happened and giving them that narrative

so that they don't feel like they're a bad kid, that they don't feel like

something's wrong with them, that they don't have to walk around worrying about, is my

mommy gonna blow up at any time? Is am I safe here?

Am I loved? We don't want our kids to internalize

our moments of dysregulation as

permanent states of being. We don't want them to be

afraid. We want them to feel safe and secure. You

are going to mess up. You are gonna your child is

gonna have moments where they don't feel safe and secure,

where they feel worried, where they feel fear. That's normal.

And your role is to let them know

that that happened. It really did. I really did yell

at you and you really did feel scared and

you that's a normal feeling and you get to feel scared. You get to

feel mad at me. You get to feel hurt. You get

to feel worried. And I get

to to let you know that I'm sorry and

that I'm working on it. And that when I have a big feeling,

I'm gonna take care of it and I'm gonna grow from

this. So please forgive me. That's it.

So you forgive yourself so that your child can forgive you.

So your child can forgive themselves. When your child

makes a mistake and they come to you and they say, I'm so sorry.

I stole the cookies or they get caught with, you know,

their friends, like, necklace from their house or

whatever it is. We wanna be able to model to them

forgiveness, self forgiveness, and forgiveness. Yep.

You made a mistake. That's normal. There's

no problem. Now your job is to make it

right. Return the necklace or

buy new cookies or pay for the damage for the

broken, whatever it is. So we want amends

our words and actions. So you are having

this repair conversation with your child, and I'm gonna teach you that next week, and

you're making a commitment to change. So I love this

phrase that I wanna leave you with today is every

day, I am becoming a more compassionate version of

myself. When you make your

amends, I want you to be committing to

growth. You do not need to beat yourself

up in order to grow or change. You just need to

commit to become a calm mama. That's

it. That's why this podcast is called become a calm mama because we're

all becoming calm mamas. Right? It's not called I am a I am

a calm mama. I'm also becoming a calm

person, becoming a calm woman, becoming a calm human.

All the time deeper and deeper levels of equanimity and peace

and, you know, healing inside of my soul and,

you know, I have, of course, moments of dysregulation and

then moments of co regulation or self regulation, and then I

go have to go back and have to make repair. This happens.

It happens less and less, to be honest, as I,

go deeper into the work and I do better at forgiveness and better

at, taking care of myself and better at boundary work and

better at, you know, making my life what

I want it to be and, creating lots and

lots of pockets of peace. I don't have as much dysregulation.

It's pretty cool. But it is

challenging, especially when you have other humans

that are around all the time that are extremely needy of

you. So every day, I am becoming a

more compassionate version of myself.

Every day, I am becoming a calm mama.

Alright. If you wanna be a calm mama in the calm

mama club, join us. It's $30 a month. You can sign

up on the website, calm mama coaching.com. You can talk to me about

it. Book a complimentary consultation with me about 30 minutes,

40 minutes. We chitchat about you, your life, see if it's a good fit.

If you like me, Zoom, you get to meet me, which is fun. I

get to meet you, which is especially fun for me.

And, yeah, mamas, you're gonna blow

it. You just are, and there's nothing wrong with you. And I

love you and you are worthy of love and forgiveness.

And I forgive you even though you've done

no harm to me. You are forgiven and

you can forgive yourself. That is

what is necessary before you can ask forgiveness from your

kids. And next week, I'll help you figure out how to

do that, which is so cool. Alright. I hope you have

a great week, and I will talk to you next time.