032: Top Strategy For Releasing Mom Guilt

Releasing your mom guilt is actually a lot easier than you think! 

Before we dive into my top strategy for this, it's important to know that there are two types of mom guilt:

1. The first type of mom guilt is valid guilt. This is informative & constructive as its signals to us that we're behaving in a way that is out of alignment with our values or intentions.

When we are experiencing valid guilt it's important to lean into this and listen to it.

So for example, if you value minimal TV watching you may experience valid guilt if your child has watched a lot of TV. The validity of this guilt is that watching excessive TV is out of alignment with your values so those two things are butting heads. At this point, the way to release the mom guilt would be at to act in a way that is aligned with your values, which means not letting your child watch as much TV again.

2. The second type of mom guilt is unfounded guilt. This guilt arises from perfectionism or any number of unrealistic measurements or standard we've internalized. These expectations lead us to feeling unfounded guilt about any number of things.

So using the TV example again, unfounded guilt would occur if your mom comments on how much your child watches TV and that makes you feel guilty because you feel like you are being a bad mom, even though watching TV doesn't go against your values.

Generally speaking, unfounded guilt comes from outside sources such as friends, family, social media, doctors, society and so forth. Even when we feel like the mom guilt has come from ourselves internally, when we look further at the root causes of the mom guilt it most likely is still coming from an outside source that we have masked as an internal source.

The great news is the majority of mom guilt is unfounded!

So, how do we release unfounded mom guilt? 

Get clear on what you value as a mom, as a woman, as a family and in your life as a whole.

When you're not clear on what you value & what's important to you, you end up living your life partially based on how you think you should be living it & partially based on how those around (friends, family, society, media) you think you should be living it.

When you are super clear on what's important to you, how you want your life to look like & what you value it is so much easier to quiet the noise around you and not internalize other people's opinions!