How to Deal With Mom Guilt Without Spiraling Into Shame

It can be a hard thing when we realize that we have repeated some pattern from our own childhood with our child, especially if you've had parents who were emotionally immature. The repetition of the patterns that caused you so much grief or disappointment or embarrassment: it's very painful to realize when we have acted that out with our own children.

But I'm here to tell you that it's almost impossible to never do that, because that early learning, that modeling that we observe about how people are supposed to treat other people, about what you do when there's a problem or how you're supposed to correct another person if they make a mistake: all these things go in at an unconscious behavioral level in our childhoods.

It isn't like we learn it consciously and then we can think about it and decide whether or not to apply that learning to our current adult life or to our relationship with our child. That's just not how it works.

But if you can understand that this is an automatic pattern that was downloaded into you through observation, through modeling, it becomes something that you can actually choose to do differently.

We can do things differently from our emotionally immature parents just by going back to our child and explaining to them that we feel bad about what we did, about how we reacted, and that we're very sorry for it. We didn't mean to come down that hard, and we think that was really an overreaction. You can be as frank as that: that we want to apologize to them and let them know that we're going to try not to do that anymore.

You're not losing authority when you do that. You're gaining respect. When the child feels respected by you, that you care enough to come back to them and work it out by being accountable and by apologizing, they respect you as a person exactly the same way that an adult would.

That's a great question, because many times, if we've done something to somebody that we love, especially if it's our child or our partner, someone that's really emotionally important to us, we do go into a shame spiral. That's because we are so sorry, so embarrassed that we have acted in a way that has brought distance and mistrust into our relationship temporarily. That's an awful feeling, and it's a really awful feeling when you feel like you were the cause of it.

The feeling of needing to repair something at least gives you some positive direction and action to take. The shame spiral goes something like this: "Oh my gosh, I did something hurtful. I did something wrong. They must hate me. Things will never be the same again. They'll never trust me again. This is going to last forever. We'll never get out of this one."

That's what I call the eternal now of trauma feelings. Little children, by the way, live in this eternal now because they have no sense of perspective about time and that things happen, then they get better, and then they're resolved. Little children don't live in that kind of time awareness.

When we do something that we're ashamed of, or something that upsets us, we go right back into that child mind. We don't see how things can ever resolve themselves or ever be better again, because the emotional mind lives in the present moment. It's a really bad feeling.

You do have to remind yourself that this will pass. This will get better. You're going to take the best steps you can, the most correct steps you can think of, to move you and your other person, whether it's a child or a friend or a partner, forward in a good relationship by apologizing, repairing, letting them know that you're horribly sorry, that you understand how they feel, asking them, "How did that make you feel? I want to know."

Secretly inside, you really don't want to hear it. But to mend the relationship, it really is important that you show interest in how it affected the other person. When we're hurt, we want to tell people what happened and how it affected us. That helps us resolve it and work it through.

They're not torturing you by telling you how much you hurt them. They are actively trying to repair with you when they do that. They're trying to get it out with you so that you actually can resolve it and go back to being close again.

It's important for us to not allow ourselves to get trapped in a shame spiral where we collapse in on ourselves. Then we're not able to do any good for anyone, least of all ourselves.

But there's a feeling that I have to be contrite to a degree that's almost self-demeaning. That's really not helpful to anybody, because if you go into a shame spiral and stay there, the other person then feels pulled into making you feel better. They can tell that you're miserable. They can tell that you're anguished over what happened.

Now the thing has gotten really complicated. Not only did you do something that may have caused them distress, but now they're seeing how terribly distraught you are, and now they're feeling pressure to comfort you.

The shame spiral is not your friend. It doesn't mean that you're a really good person because you're feeling so bad about it. It's very important to move quickly to that place of, "Okay, I did it. I can't take it back. It's over. I have to deal with it right now. What is the one thing I can do, some tiny little step that's going to take us a little bit closer to resolving this between us? How can I take the other person into account? How can I let them know how sorry I am without burdening them with my shame spiral?"

Guilt is good sometimes. Guilt teaches us. Guilt shows us the way to that right next step. If you can, hold on to your guilt because that's your motivator to fix things.

But please treat the little child part of yourself with care. That's the part that's going to feel the terrible, crushing shame. Tell yourself, as you would tell your child, "You are not a bad person. You made a mistake. You really wish you could take it back, and you can't. But that's the way it is. That's the way this life goes. Now we need to turn our attention toward what we can do to make things a little bit better."

Let's use the example of a parent who is trying to relax. Maybe they're at the beach and their child is playing nearby. In the parent's mind, they have created a perfect situation where they can read their summer novel, sit under the umbrella at the beach. They brought all the buckets and shovels, sifters and balls and spoons. They are envisioning that their five-year-old's going to have a ball building sandcastles while they read their book.

But that five-year-old woke up kind of cranky that morning. All he wants is to cling to or hang around Mommy. He's not really regulated inside or calm enough to get into the play mode where he would enjoy building a sandcastle.

She sets him up, shows him all the cool stuff he can do, and she plays with him a little bit. Then she goes and sits down in her chair under the umbrella. Five seconds later, he's back over there whining because the sand is too hot or the water is too cold, or he doesn't want to play with the little kid who came up and wanted to borrow his shovel. A million complaints.

Maybe the eighth time he comes up to her with some complaint or fussing about something, she snaps at him. He backs off and looks shocked. After all, she put up with it eight times, but now apparently he's really stepped in it. Then he goes back and starts half-heartedly poking around in the sand.

She realized that her mother was a very busy woman, trying to support a bunch of kids and taking work home, trying in many ways to run a household while being the only breadwinner. How annoyed and flustered her mother would get when the kids would bother her unnecessarily.

In her learning, it was okay for a harried, busy parent to snap at her child when it wasn't something essential, because there was only so much of Mom to go around.

This woman had a moment to do that kind of processing. She was able to go back and say, "I feel awful. I snapped at him. Oh, yeah. Where did this come from? This is what my mom used to do. But I'm not raising a bunch of kids by myself. I'm not at work right now. I'm reading a book on the beach, and my child is with me. This is not the way I want to be."

She had time to think that through and realize that, number one, this novel was not getting read at the beach. And number two, that she had repair work to do with her son.

She put the book down and went over to him and said, "Honey, I'm so sorry that I yelled at you. I really regret that. I didn't mean to be so sharp. I should not have done that. That was my fault, and I hope that you can forgive me for that. Do you want to do something else?"

That way, she's opening up and letting him know that she is concerned about how he feels and what he wants, that he is valuable to her as a person and that his inner experience is important to her, more important than reading the book.

With an approach like that, she's felt the feeling. She has realized where it came from in her own history. Now she's taking corrective action.

Let's take another example. Let's say there's another mother, and she's on the phone. She's trying to get information, and her three-year-old comes bouncing into the room. She's sitting on the bed on the phone, and he keeps doing flips on the bed and rolling off the bed and squealing and trying to play with her, as three-year-olds do as soon as you get on the phone.

Usually this mother was patient and all of that, but this time she couldn't hear the woman telling her this important information. She turned and spoke sharply to him. Because this little kid was so unaccustomed to that kind of response from his usually patient mother, he just had a meltdown. He wailed and ran away.

The mother knew that had to be dealt with first. At that moment, she had to instantly run in the next room after the child and scoop him up and say, "Honey, I'm so, so sorry." What that child needed in that instant was to know that there was somebody who could contain their huge, distressing emotion with them.

It's important to know that sometimes we don't have that period of being able to think things through, analyze where our mistaken behavior came from: what's the best way to go about it, what's the next right thing? You have to depend on gut instinct, depending on how upset your child is.

When this mother was able to do that, the three-year-old was able to calm down, and then the mother felt good about that. They came back together. He doesn't understand all her words about apology and "so sorry," but I'm sure that kid felt it, because the mother moved on her gut instinct, which was to repair the bond immediately.

This is a great time to talk about the difference between a parent's emotionally mature response and a parent's emotionally immature response. As you can imagine from your own experience as an adult, when somebody has hurt us, it can take us a while to recover from the experience, or to withdraw into ourselves, or maybe seek help from other people so that we can feel better.

We're not ready to turn around and go back into the relationship all the time, and children are no different. They can feel like they don't want to have anything to do with that parent after something has scared them, or they have felt like the parent has acted like they were a bad child. That is not the experience that makes you want to be close to someone, is it?

The emotionally immature parent would find it very difficult to tolerate the child's rejection or their anger, to give that child enough time to feel all of that, which is a very normal reaction. Instead, they want to be reassured, so they come in, or they get angry back and start to justify their own behavior and maybe criticize or shame the child for their angry or rejecting behavior. Anything to stop this discomfort and put the center of attention back on the parent's needs instead.

The parent who's trying to be emotionally mature is going to give room to the child to have their feelings. But the parent is also going to try to do the next right thing, which might be to approach the child and say, "I'm so sorry. I made a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that to you. Can you tell me how you're doing? Can you tell me what that was like for you? Because I think that really hurt you."

As expected, you might have your child express anger or just reject you. They're going to have their own reactions, of course. You can't make them be ready to work it out with you, but you can take the first step.

You can be the one who expresses regret, who apologizes, who lets the child know, "I think you felt pretty upset about that, right? You look like you're quite angry at me. I understand that. I want to hear all about it when you're ready. But I understand that you don't want to talk to me right now. That's okay. We're going to talk about it later."

You're still holding the situation as unfinished, which it is, and you're letting them know that you want to move in a direction toward reconciliation and responsibility for your behavior.

But the child may not let you do that, and that's fine, because we all need time and room to work our way through things. When we give that to our child, it is a very emotionally validating thing to do.

We catch it quickly when we allow ourselves to become conscious of our immediate feeling. That's how we catch it quickly: through emotional awareness.

If you're the child of emotionally immature parents, of course this may have been conditioned out of you, where you're not supposed to know how you feel. You certainly aren't supposed to express it to the authority figures. It's a case of the very tool that you need, your own emotional reaction, having been conditioned out of you by people who were threatened in your childhood by your emotional reactions.

That's what we have to reverse. We want to allow ourselves as much as possible to feel our feelings with our child. Not act them out, not tell the child about them, but to stay on top of how we are feeling moment to moment. That's going to allow us to know what has happened at an emotional level, which is what it's all about with little kids, and then what needs to happen next, with that gut feeling of, "I need to step in. I need to help my child. I need to repair this."

All of those things will happen on their own, almost simultaneously to the problem situation. All we have to do is to be conscious of what is happening inside us emotionally. It doesn't get faster than that.

What slows it down is all the rationalizing and defensiveness that can go on in the parent's mind when they think, "I can't go in there and apologize right now because he won't respect authority figures," or, "Dad and I have to maintain a united front."

But when it comes to repairing things with your own child, you will have that healing impulse, that impulse to rectify the situation, if you allow yourself to feel your love for your child.

This thing about authority being something that you don't want to threaten by apologizing could not be more wrong. Think about yourself: if you were in a situation where another adult just played it out without apologizing, without acknowledging their behavior, and just kept cool and acted like an authority, what would that do to your trust of the relationship with that person?

It's the same thing with children. We have to not be cool and not play the authority, but repair the breach and get back on a solid footing with them in terms of our bond with them.

Are we going to make mistakes by repeating the old patterns? Absolutely. But we do have a mechanism. We do have a path to follow when that happens, and we'll have the benefit of coming out of that with a stronger, more trusting relationship with our child or anyone else that we have a valued relationship with.