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The Motherhood Mentor
Welcome to The Motherhood Mentor Podcast your go-to resource for moms seeking holistic healing and transformation. Hosted by mind-body somatic healing practitioner and holistic life coach Becca Dollard.
Join us as we explore the transformative power of somatic healing, offering practical tools and strategies to help you navigate overwhelm, burnout, and stress. Through insightful conversations, empowering stories, and expert guidance, you'll discover how to cultivate resilience, reclaim balance, and thrive in every aspect of your life while still feeling permission to be a human. Are you a woman who is building a business while raising babies who refuses to burnout? These are conversations and support for you.
We believe in the power of vulnerability, connection, and self-discovery, and our goal is to create a space where you feel seen, heard, and valued.
Whether you're juggling career, family, or personal growth, this podcast is your sanctuary for holistic healing and growth all while normalizing the ups and downs, the messy and the magic, and the wild ride of this season of motherhood.
Your host:
Becca is a mom of two, married for 14years to her husband Jay living in Colorado. She is a certified somatic healing practitioner and holistic life coach to high functioning moms. She works with women who are navigating raising babies, building businesses, and prioritizing their own wellbeing and healing. She understands the unique challenges of navigating being fully present in motherhood while also wanting to be wildly creative and ambitious in her work. The Motherhood Mentor serves and supports moms through 1:1 coaching, in person community, and weekend retreats.
Follow on IG: @themotherhoodmentor , send me a dm and let me know you found me through the podcast!
Website: https://www.the-motherhood-mentor.com/
Want to join the email fam for free workshops and more support: https://themotherhoodmentor.myflodesk.com/ujaud8t4x9
The Motherhood Mentor
Finding identity, people pleasing, and resentment in motherhood with Amanda Clark
Rediscovering identity and self amidst the chaos of motherhood is no small feat. Join me and out guest Amanda Clark as she shares her struggle with self-abandonment due to early life trauma and her journey towards reclaiming her dreams and ambitions.
We also dive deep into the intricacies of motherhood and self-awareness, exploring the societal conditioning that often leads women to suppress their desires for people pleasing, creating resentment and burnout in relationships. This episode invites you to reexamine the concept of "toxic femininity" and the courage it takes to communicate authentic needs and emotions. By addressing complex feelings like grief and vulnerability, we challenge traditional expectations of what it means to be a "good" woman or mother, emphasizing the necessity of embracing these emotions for genuine self-fulfillment.
Finally, we explore the transformative power of emotional healing and the normalcy of grief in the face of change. Amanda and I discuss how societal norms can stifle authentic emotional expression and the importance of resetting our nervous systems to trust our instincts. By balancing self-care with societal expectations, we uncover the profound power in nurturing our well-being. This episode is a heartfelt reminder of the beauty in embracing our full humanity and the strength found in honoring our emotional needs.
About Amanda:
Amanda is a Life Coach who teaches moms how to stop 'shoulding' all over themselves, become the authority of their lives + create one they're excited to wake up to from the inside out through breathwork and boundaries. She loves teaching you how to find that inner peace and regulate your nervous system so that you become the mom you want to be.
Where to find Amanda:
Website
Instagram
Chapter Markers:
- 0:02- Rediscovering Self in Motherhood Journey
- 13:30- Unveiling the Complexities of Motherhood
- 17:23- Navigating Grief and Loss Transformations
- 22:17- Embracing the Full Human Experience
- 31:11- Empowering Women Through Emotional Healing
Join us next time as we continue to explore the multifaceted journey of motherhood.
Thank you for tuning in to The Motherhood Mentor. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review us.
Stay connected with us on social media and share your thoughts and experiences tagging @themotherhoodmentor
Welcome to the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I'm Becca, a somatic healing practitioner and a holistic life coach for moms, and this podcast is for you. You can expect honest conversations and incredible guests that speak to health, healing and growth in every area of our lives. This isn't just strategy for what we do. It's support for who we are. I believe we can be wildly ambitious while still holding all of our soft and hard humanity as holy. I love combining deep inner healing with strategic systems and no-nonsense talk about what this season is really like. So grab whatever weird health beverage you're currently into and let's get into it.
Speaker 1:Welcome to today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. Today I have Amanda with me and we were just talking before we started recording and I'm just I'm already in love with this connection of just the authenticity of hey, how are you? Oh, I'm good. Oh wait, actually no, like there's this other stuff going on. I mean we just I really appreciate getting to know you and I'm really excited for this conversation that we have of intuition and what it's like to lose touch with yourself and focusing on everyone else and even just talking about boundaries and how they can shift and change. So will you just take a minute and introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Yes, my name is Amanda Clark. For those of you that don't know me, I am a life coach and breathwork facilitator for moms and I help you stop shooting all over yourself and just really create a life that you are excited to wake up to. I feel like my journey, you know, as going through childhood and growing up. We don't realize the patterns that follow us, and so for me, going back to like my childhood having you know abuse in the home physical, emotional and being able to navigate through that and not even recognizing the patterns I was recreating in my life of that, especially the self-abandonment, putting everyone else's needs ahead of my own I ended up pregnant at 18. And I remember somebody very close to me was like you have a husband and a baby to take care of. Now, forget your dreams, forget what you wanted in life. You get to take care of them because this is the choice that you made, and so there was just really a lot of shame. And so, as we dove in, my partner and I got married in February, had our first in July and I jumped back into that same cycle, that survival pattern that I had created in childhood people pleasing self-abandonment, keep everybody else happy, be the good girl and that way we don't rock the boat, everything's good, everybody else is happy. And about five years into my marriage, I remembered I don't know, I feel like a lot of us learn this, but like most marriages fail around seven years. And so, for some reason, I thought at the seven year mark Skittles were going to fall from the rainbows in the sky. I don't know Like. I just suddenly thought that my marriage was going to be happy and life was going to be great.
Speaker 2:And I was still experiencing like that resentment toward my partner and just realizing like he gets to go to work and I am at home taking care of the bills, the house, laundry, cooking the meals, getting the kids to activities, just kind of all of this stuff. And he got to come home and be the fun dad and I was like, oh hell, no, this can't be it, this can't be all that life is. And I was just going through the motions, just doing what I should have and just taking care of everybody else. And then those dreams kind of started nagging at me and they were like no, no, we're still here. Like you wanted bigger things in life, you. You wanted to do more with your life. You had dreams and goals, and so I did it, probably in not the nicest way, but I remember like one day I just was like okay, babe, listen, this isn't working. And if you continue, I said, if you continue acting like your dad, I'm done, like I'm out, I can't keep doing this anymore.
Speaker 2:And he was raised in that generation where the wife takes care of everything, and so it's really interesting to see how our childhood patterns and how we were raised and the conditioning and all of that kind of starts to play out in childhood. And so I had really lost myself. I knew I wanted a bigger life, but I didn't really like know what I wanted anymore. I was just lost. I was going through the motions just trying to survive, but I knew that I just couldn't keep going on like that. I was like just this isn't the life that I wanted to live.
Speaker 2:And so I started to shift. I started to journal, I started to listen to podcasts and kind of go on that route and there's a lot more in between, but essentially just like having that awakening moment where I was like nope, and just deciding that I just wasn't available for that anymore and, come what may, I was going to turn it all around. Get where I am today as a breathwork facilitator and life coach for moms is everything that that journey took me on. I feel like I was getting really long-winded there, but essentially just yeah, I've learned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love when women are long-winded. It's one of my favorite things in the world. Like, no, I don't want long story short, I want short story long. I want the details. I want the tea.
Speaker 1:No, but it sounds like you had this time where you kind of looked around and you had the thing that you thought you wanted. You had this life. That was like, really, it sounds like it wasn't bad, but you looked around and said, like this isn't it, this isn't what I wanted, this isn't working for me. Like you had all of these contracts in motherhood or marriage that like weren't oh, I signed my name on the dotted line, but essentially you signed up for something and then you got there and you were like wait, this isn't of my own making. It's like you checked off all of the boxes on the list and then you looked around and you were like wait, are these the boxes I want and are they the way that I want?
Speaker 1:Right, like I think that's very common in both motherhood and marriage, because there's these two kind of roles that I think women think they're signing up for and then they play this role as if it's a performance. And then they get there and they're like, but it doesn't, it falls flat, it doesn't feel like them. And what's so fascinating is, I think a lot of women come into this and then they have this reawakening where they remember themselves. They remember that, like, underneath all of these roles and contracts, whether that's relationship or motherhood, you start remembering like there's a person under that there, there's a person here, and you start feeling yourself and remembering so. For you, what was that? What was it like to start feeling yourself and remembering yourself again, like what was like that messy, the messy middle and what were some of the things that helped you come like, come back to the, to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me. I mean it's funny, because I remembered like I was literally sitting on the floor and I had a baby in my arms and I had a toddler in my lap. She was crying and I was just like, oh, like what is this? And I just remembered my Nana had given me a journal one year for Christmas and in it she had tucked a magazine article and it had talked about the benefits of journaling on the brain. And so I was like, okay, well, let's try it. And so that is honestly where I started was.
Speaker 2:I didn't know about anything else, like coaching probably was starting to come around. I mean, this was like way back. And so I just started journaling. I was like you know what, let me just write out my thoughts and my feelings every single day and see where this leads.
Speaker 2:And then it sort of kind of led one thing into another, as I was like then you have to learn, at least for me and my experience in childhood, oh, it's okay to have needs, because in childhood I couldn't really express my needs, couldn't have any, like I just I didn't know how the adults in my life were going to react, and so I hadn't realized until way later, as in like just the past year. Oh wait, it's okay to have needs, and then it's okay to ask for needs, and then we have to start to open ourselves up to allowing other people to step in and feel some of those needs right. We have to open ourselves up to receiving. I was not a good receiver and so I feel like it was like one baby step at a time coming back to me and just waking up and remembering what did I want when I was a little girl.
Speaker 1:Like when.
Speaker 2:I was a little girl. I had these dreams about this life. I was going to live, and a lot of it was what I saw on movies or whatever. But being able to awaken some of those parts and be like, oh yeah, okay, it is okay to have needs, we all have needs and then asking for needs so I would like a dip my toe.
Speaker 2:It started off very passive-aggressive for me because that's how I had to always do it right. So I would be like it comes out sideways right, oh yeah, like I'd love to see the day you ever vacuum the house or like that was a comment I remember making to my husband. That's also a comment I made to my husband. Like that was a comment I remember making to my husband. That's also a comment I made to my husband like probably two years ago, so it hasn't been like way long. But then I remember the other comment about him being like his dad. I was like I'm sorry, but if our relationship is like that, like I'm out. I am not, I'm just not available to like take care of everything anymore. Because I saw what it was doing to his mom and me.
Speaker 2:Being raised by a single mom, I very much learned the role of like solutions and I take care of everything.
Speaker 2:And he lived that life on the other end, but he just had a two parent home, so he saw his dad going to work and providing financially for the family and his mom did everything else and she worked a full-time job. And so, yeah, it's really interesting because I started to become more aware, even though I wasn't sure what it was. I just started to recognize what our relationship looked like and I was like wait a second, because I see where this leads in your 50s and 60s and I don't want that 60s and I don't want that. You see a lot of people walking around where the wife is haggard and tired and the husband doesn't know how to take care of himself, essentially, and I was like I just can't, I'm not available for that anymore. It's just not the way that I want to live. And I think one of the biggest things for me, too, was I didn't want my girls I have a boy now, but I didn't want my girls to think that was normal, and I think that that's something that we also don't recognize.
Speaker 1:I feel, like I'm getting way off on a tangent from your question. No, I'm following you because it sounds like it started with this place of you know we were talking about like the this, this isn't working for me. And then you were talking about how you were starting to recognize what you wanted and needed in life, which, like it, sounds so crazy to people unless you've experienced. But it's this whole like self-care isn't selfish, but like I don't think people understand that they're like genuinely grown adult, very healthy, smart, successful women are still walking around fundamentally feeling like their needs are an inconvenience and a conflict issue between the people that they love. And a lot of women learn this in their families. Right, they were parentified kids who they were never allowed to have needs. The adults or the other person's needs always were more important Like that's a lot of times the homes that some people's experience growing up is that they had to take on this role of I have no needs and that's not like a logical like oh, I don't think I have to eat. And yet there is this very real I'm only the person responsible for what I want and need and it's actually not okay for me to tell other people because telling them is a risk and that's not a logical thing. That happens right, like it's this felt, unconscious, somatic thing that's happening for so many women and your experience is very common Like I've seen this with a lot of women where it's like this you had this limb that was numb for so long and it starts coming back online and it starts coming alive again and you don't, you can't like, use it very well, and it's like that awareness. A lot of people are like oh, I want to be more self-aware. And it's like well, just so, you know, when you become more self-aware, it almost always comes out sideways first, because you don't know how to use this limb yet, and so it's like this grief or this anger, this resentment or this envy of like.
Speaker 1:You know, a lot of times women will make it someone else's fault, because there's this weird thing that happens when we're victims, which is we take under and over responsibility for ourselves, which is I can't take responsibility for my wants and needs. I'm going to make it your fault, I'm going to make it your problem. So I actually followed you perfectly of like. No, this makes perfect sense of like, when you start witnessing oh, I have wants and needs, but it doesn't usually come out pretty and well well communicated, because you've never learned how to communicate these needs before.
Speaker 1:As a woman, you've been taught to look at everyone else and say what do you want and need and expect from me? I'll do that. And then all of a sudden, something comes alive in you and it's like I don't want to do this anymore. I want to be the fun parent, but I don't feel like the fun parent and I you, get to be the fun parent and so it makes so much. It's just human nature. I mean, this is such a common pattern in us of and it's it's truly.
Speaker 1:I don't love using the term toxic femininity, but I think you know our culture loves toxic, talking about toxic masculinity, but no one's talking about like unhealthy, unhealed feminine, of like being so disconnected from what you want and need that you make it someone else's fault, versus it sounds like you're starting to learn to take responsibility and ask for help and communicate that.
Speaker 1:But that is terrifying when it first happens, because your animal body learned I'm not supposed to, I'm not supposed to have this, let alone communicate it, let alone ask for it.
Speaker 1:So I was totally following that and I think it's so powerful to share that experience because I think we have this weird culture in motherhood where we have women who will talk about that, but they do it in it because it doesn't match the good girl, it doesn't match the whole. You're supposed to be grateful and good and happy, which can also be simultaneously true, and it disrupts this whole persona we've created of good versus bad. And this I want to kind of lean into the grief piece here because I think it's actually really important of, I think, for so many of us, or not, the grief piece. But before we had started recording our podcast, me and you were talking about the way that we're perceived by others and how we have this like persona that we have to dive into, and it's like that. It's not that it's inauthentic to us to have these parts of us that are like messy, vulnerable, angry, resentful, like that's. It doesn't feel cute, right, like it feels a little cringy, it doesn't feel great, and yet hiding those things also doesn't feel good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's yeah, especially the grief piece.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think too, like even just looking at life, I think that a lot of people don't realize, because we could talk about grief, like the grief that I'm going through right, my mother-in-law has cancer.
Speaker 2:My mom and I have always had a toxic relationship that now I'm like navigating different parts of and, but we also have the grief of change. Anytime we change, we are losing. Whether it served us or not, we're losing a part of us, we're losing, maybe toxic relationships, we're losing, and so I think we forget to take a moment and be like well, this is a good thing, but why am I so sad? And it's like you can't have change without grief, you can't have change without loss, because we're losing something, whether it's like a good loss, a bad loss, like it's still a loss nonetheless, and I do think that we forget that piece. And so, like right now, I mean, and if we just like dive in, like with my mother-in-law having cancer, right, it's like, well, she hasn't passed away, but she's lost her health, and so we get to grieve that because, moving forward from that moment, our lives will never look the same.
Speaker 1:Well, and you're grieving a life before the rug got pulled out of under you. Yeah, which I think is sometimes for some people. The most ambiguous untalked about grief is this you've lost either an illusion or a reality of what was, and what was isn't anymore. And you're in this messy, weird middle place and it sounds like you're in this grief with her, even where you can't grieve her yet, and yet you're already grieving her. So you're in this weird, messy place where everything you knew has changed, but you're also not done. So you're in this weird, messy place where everything you knew has changed, but you're also not done yet. You're not on the other side of it. There's no happy.
Speaker 1:I always call it. My clients love it. I always say I don't have any pretty happy bows for you today and I'm so sorry because we want to have a pretty bow to tie on it. We want to have the like oh, and this is the miracle that happened, or this is the good of it, that came from it.
Speaker 1:And sometimes you're just, you're just standing there with this box with no pretty bow and you like what is it like to just hold that and be with it and be with your humanity? And I think that's the experience. I mean, people have this experience all the time but it's especially when you're losing someone and you're in the middle of a loss where I don't think we see it anymore. We don't see grief, we don't see loss. We don't talk about grief as an emotion, but also just grief as an experience which, like it's a whole human experience that completely transforms everything about a person. Like I don't know a single person who's walked through grief, who in the middle and then on the other side, like what does on the other side even mean? Like it just changes everything?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it hits in the most unexpected moments. That's the funny thing about grief is like even before hopping on here like the tears, right, I mean they're back a little bit, but yeah, like I remember when my dad passed away a few years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This was like I don't know. Six months after his passing I went to the doctor just for my regular yearly checkup and she was, like do you want to fill out your advanced directives? And I was like what? Like am I going to die in this appointment? Like this is just a yearly checkup, you know. But I remember just like bursting into tears and she was just looking at me like what is happening? And I was like my dad died like six months ago. I was the one who made all of his medical decisions. Going through that. So now being handed this form, it's like it's just so funny to see how grief pops up and how it affects us and changes our lives.
Speaker 1:I think that's actually a very healthy, normal response. But I think in our culture we have done such a good job of repressing. Our culture is phenomenal at repressing and distracting and dissociating. And distracting and dissociating, I mean our culture is so phenomenally disassociated, like as a whole, where, like, that's actually a normal, healthy, human response to grief of losing someone. I mean, if you and the best example of this is if you watch a kid go through grief who hasn't learned that it's wrong, who hasn't learned how to repress their tears or how to buckle themselves up and tighten their laces and wind themselves up to disassociate.
Speaker 1:But that's one of those things about becoming self-aware. When you truly are aware of yourself, you're not just aware of your, like, happiness and joy and freedom. You're also aware of, like that grief that's sitting right behind your eyes and the weight that's on your chest and the like deep loss that's in your belly, like there's all of these different things that you're experiencing as a human. And I think it's actually very vulnerable to walk around life being someone who's actually feeling those things, who's actually in it and isn't trying to pretend anymore, who isn't trying to always be one thing, who's multidimensional and is experiencing the full dimension, like the highs and the lows and the mid and the like, all of the stuff that happens in those messy middles. Like that's all part of it, like that's what we're here for.
Speaker 1:But I think our culture has done a massive disservice of selling us on a version of life that doesn't have that in it. Like there's some, there's some amount of therapy you could do, or there's an amount you could make in your business as an entrepreneur, or a house that you could have clean enough, or a marriage that you could have perfect enough. That takes you out of that human experience. I mean that's what people are trying to buy. They don't know that. They're trying to buy happiness, but I mean happiness is not the whole of the human experience, but I mean happiness is not the whole of the human experience.
Speaker 2:No, it's 50-50, right, like you can't have the good without the bad, because you wouldn't know. You have to have the contrast in life, and I think one thing that I have really learned is to stop apologizing, stop apologizing for experiencing your emotions. That that was probably one of the first things that I learned in my breathwork program is we don't apologize for tears, we do not apologize for crying, we do not apologize for tears. We would get called out every time we did it, because I think that, like you said, that's what we're buying, right, we're buying, like, pure happiness and joy in whatever thing we're investing in. And it's not that because you can't experience one without the other, you have to have both.
Speaker 2:But if we're constantly apologizing for the one, like it's bad, then we don't allow ourselves to have that full experience. We're just constantly. We cry, we apologize, we feel bad, like, oh my gosh, I shouldn't, I shouldn't be crying. I shouldn't be crying right now, like I shouldn't be putting this person through this experience or whatever. This is mine, it should be dealt with in private or whatever it is, and it's like but no, no, that's not how life should be.
Speaker 1:I just keep getting this picture of like a corset with these little like hooks that like we just keep hooking them up and like like just it. And I think that's what so many women feel in their lives as they feel this trappedness of like they don't feel free to express themselves. And a lot of that is going to come through our emotions, because our emotions are our sensitivity, it's our sensation to life, it's where we are sensing and feeling and experiencing life. And you know, it's a common, common thing for here for mothers to say like I don't feel like myself anymore or I don't feel like me, and they literally mean I don't feel me like I because I'm so laced and tightened up in this apology of who I am and what I need and what I want and what I want to express. And it's like it's not that they want to burn everything down and cut everyone off. It's it's that there's something in them, there's this being there's their soul is trying to say like I can't breathe because you're I'm living as an apology, as if there's something wrong for me. And it's like motherhood has been so beautiful and brutal like brutal, beautiful, brutally beautiful, brutal, like bruti, beautiful, brutally beautiful, brutiful. Yeah, yeah, watch to watch and see my own daughter have, or even my son have, moments where I see it. I see it in them and it breaks my heart and then I go. I know that, I know, I know that of like. But when we can learn that and I think so much of this is relational, right Of.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, so many of us learned to be in systems where it wasn't okay to cry, it wasn't okay to be dissatisfied or disappointed or to want more or to be sad or grieving, especially when it's the wrong moment, especially when it's a moment where you're supposed to be happy, where you're supposed to want this. It's like we've taken all of the color out of our humanity, and especially in relationship, and I'm just so grateful. Like we started our call with like having that human moment where, like, we got to really see each other and hold space for that and instead of like buttoning it up, we were able to just like, can we just be human for a minute? Like I know we're both here, like being professionals and doing a podcast, but I don't know about you. But I don't want to erase humanity and in fact, I want to build a business on that.
Speaker 1:But I want to come back to this piece of not apologizing. What did that feel like in your body? Like was. That was I can only imagine. I know in my experience. It's massively uncomfortable, oh yeah to not apologize, yeah, it was so uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was so uncomfortable and I noticed a big pattern, so I mean it started with okay, we don't apologize when we cry, and it was like you find yourself, you find it slipping right, and then you like catch yourself, so it kind of like starts-.
Speaker 1:It's like a reflex right.
Speaker 2:It's like a, it's a reflex for us. It's a reflex for us, yeah, and so it kind of started as this uncomfortableness with crying, and then you start to gain this awareness, at least for me. I started to gain this awareness where, as I was learning to express my needs in a healthier way, as I this one time where, um, I had forgotten to put dump all the ingredients I needed to in the crock pot for dinner that night and I was like scared to ask my husband and which is funny because, like he's never done anything to like make me feel like I needed to be scared to ask him anything he's never done that.
Speaker 1:You played that role on your own. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I remember this one time being like I'm so sorry, like I forgot to put this in the crock pot. All the ingredients are on the counter, can you just like dump them in. And I just remember feeling so much guilt and apologizing to him and he was like, babe, no problem, like it's totally fine, I'm a big boy, like I can handle this, I can you know. And I just remembered being like, oh, that was weird, like you know, that was a little strange.
Speaker 2:And so it started to evolve into recognizing all the other areas of my life that I was apologizing for, where I felt inadequate, for where I felt like I was being a burden on other people, and I think that that's a huge thing, especially for me.
Speaker 2:I was abandoning myself over and over and over again. But now I'm apologizing because I feel like I'm asking too much, like come on, like ingredients, too much space. Yeah, I was like ingredients are on the counter, the recipe's right next to it, like all you got to do is open some cans, dump it in, like the meats and the fruit, you know, and it wasn't took him five minutes, yeah, but I felt like that was asking too much and I was apologizing for that and it spills over into so many areas of our life. And so just being able to like navigate through that and allow ourselves to sit with the discomfort something that I actually have noticed I don't do as often, but I used to like wake up the next day and I'd be like but did I die? I'd be like, okay, like I didn't die. Maybe I can try that again, you know. So it'd be like one thing a week, to like one thing a day and then just being like I didn't die, okay, we can do this again.
Speaker 1:I mean what you just shared. I think you know it's really common online right now to see people who are creating content. That's like reset your nervous system. And what people don't understand is like resetting your nervous system is literally day after day updating your nervous system. That it's like you won't die when this happens, because our bodies are set on this relational pattern, right Like our animal bodies are very smart and intuitive and intelligent, and so if your body your like little kid body learned if I ask mom for things, she yells at me. If I spill the milk, I get yelled at your body and that, okay, that example is going to bring so many moms so much shame about them. And this isn't about shame. It's about accountability of how we act as parents, but also how you're acting as a parent actually comes a lot of times from you as a child, right? So your body learns this isn't okay, this isn't safe. Something bad happens when I make mistakes. Something bad happens when I ask for what I need. Or you just learned by what was rewarded, right? So many women got gold stars and gold stickers most women from not needing anything. I mean, even just look at diet.
Speaker 1:Culture is a perfect example of like where women can see it. A lot of adult women who are very, very, very smart and intelligent don't trust themselves to know what, how, when and how much to eat. We literally don't trust one of our most basic human instincts, or even going to the bathroom, going pee when you have to go pee, stopping eating when you're full, eating when you're hungry, like the most basic instincts. Women didn't learn to trust their own bodies. Women learned someone out there is going to tell me what is good to eat, what is not good to eat. Someone's going to tell me the healthiest trend of what is and isn't good for me. I'm not going to listen to the symptoms and how my body feels and what it's telling me. And it creates this culture of you know the new motto like self-care isn't selfish, but like women aren't sitting around logically thinking, oh, I can't ask my husband for dinner.
Speaker 1:It's this physical sensation of I can't, I'm frozen. It's like your body feels paralyzed or overwhelmed or overstimulated. You're having this physical, emotional response to something that, like logically, your brain is like just ask for help, yeah, but it's not logical. Right, like me and you had been talking about you can't mindset your way to something and it's like it's not all happening in your mind. It's happening in your body, in your soma. It's happening in you've stopped breathing. It's like you're holding your breath and that's man. I'm like. There's so many different ways. I want to take this conversation. I'm having a hard time like bringing it back in, because you've just said so many good things and I really appreciate the way you've shared your experience, because I think there's going to be so many women who are like they didn't have that language of what they felt like is something you're doing right now in your life, with that grief or where you're at emotionally, that that feels different. Um, the way that you show up for yourself yeah, I think, just allowing it.
Speaker 2:You know like, when we started this conversation, you let me have all my tears that felt like they were just like raining down and then checking in and I was like you know what? Like she just needed a moment, that grief just needed a moment to be seen and heard. Yeah, and now I feel like I could have a good conversation, yeah, and being able to check in and knowing like I fully knew that I had a choice right, like fully knew that we could like reschedule, but I feel like it's the same thing is I feel like, as women for me, I'd be like okay, this is probably all I will do today in my business and I will now take time and space for myself. For the rest of the day I'm like maybe I'll take a nap, I don't know. But I, where I used to be like no, I've got shit to do. Oh, can I say shit on here? Absolutely, I used to put a lot of pressure on myself of like, oh, that was a whole day wasted. I just wasted it. I did nothing. I vegged out. I allow myself sometimes.
Speaker 2:Actually, my therapist recommended it in the beginning is she's like you actually probably need like to play Candy Crush a little more often, like, allow yourself to dissociate sometimes, yeah, so it's like I feel like when we sway the other way, right, it's like, oh, we've got to like sit in it and we've got to feel it and we've got to like be in it, and oh, yeah. And then we've got to sit in it and we've got to feel it and we've got to be in it, oh, yeah. And then we've got to push through, and it's like you actually get to have it all and you get to find what works. And so that's kind of where I feel like I've gotten myself to now. It's just being able to listen and just be like.
Speaker 2:The thought of playing Candy Crush has actually made me want to vomit for the past like month and a half. I'm like I don't want to play Candy Crush, but then, like watching a show with my husband on the couch, just snuggled up, and being able to just like disconnect for an hour or two Sometimes, that just like feels so good, and I think that's what I needed last night because I just I didn't want to let it all out right in that moment, you know, and then I crawled into bed and I allowed myself to like let it all out, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think just like knowing what I need in that moment and giving that to myself.
Speaker 1:Which is really profoundly powerful myself, which is really profoundly powerful being able to feel and know what you need and then acting on it, Actually moving your body and what you're doing behaviorally, based off of you and what you want and need. And I think this is a big misconception, especially around emotional healing work. A lot of women are really afraid to do like the deeper healing work because they think, oh, I'm just going to like swirl and spiral in it. But a lot of times the reason that's happening is because you're repressing, repressing, repressing, repressing. And then all of a sudden, everything that you're repressing, it has to go somewhere. It is going somewhere. It's not metabolizing, You're not moving through it. But also, this also doesn't mean that you have to like be at the checkout at Target and be like, oh, I am feeling deep grief and I want to cry. It doesn't mean you have to cry.
Speaker 1:Then I have this emotion that's rising up in me. It's not the appropriate time to necessarily. It doesn't feel appropriate or safe or supportive for me to let this out right now. I'm gonna I like to call it tuck it in right, Because I think so many women grew up in families where we just swept shit under the rug. We're like, let's just like we're gonna sweep this under the rug and no one's ever going to look under the rug ever. So I like to call it like okay, this emotion, can we go tuck it in. Can we go like, okay, you need to take a nap. You're like a little too intense right now or I don't have space and capacity to deal with this in the way that it deserves. I'm going to tuck it in and I'm going to come back to it later. I'm going to journal about it. I'm going to purposely come back and check on this part of me that is feeling something big.
Speaker 1:That's just healthy emotional boundaries. It's emotional immaturity. To every single moment that an emotion comes up to just sit in it and swirl in it and spiral in it. There has to be this willingness and ability to say like I have authority here and just because I'm caring for my emotions doesn't mean that my emotions are in charge of me. I'm, I'm still here, I'm still capable of making those decisions. That is I just. I love that you shared that, because I think that is. It's actually so simple Not easy, but simple and it doesn't take a lot of time or energy because you care for it in the moments when it comes up, but then you also just you don't have to live there, you also just move on and do other things too. Thank you, this was such a beautiful conversation. I loved it so much. Thank you for being on the podcast today, Amanda. Yes, Thank you. Yes, Is there any? Is there any like closed loops or anything that you would want to finish on, or?
Speaker 2:I think so. Yeah, I think we hit a full gamut of I love it.
Speaker 1:A full spectrum. We did. I love it. Thank you so much. Yes, thank you. Thanks for joining me on today's episode of the motherhood mentor podcast. Make sure you have subscribed below so that you see all of the upcoming podcasts that are coming soon. I hope you take today's episode and you take one aha moment, one small, tangible piece of work that you can bring into your life, to get your hands a little dirty, to get your skin in the game. Don't forget to take up audacious space in your life. If this podcast moved you, if it inspired you, if it encouraged you, please do me a favor and leave a review, send an episode to a friend. This helps the show gain more traction. It helps us to support more moms, more women, and that's what we're doing here. So I hope you have an awesome day, take really good care of yourself and I'll see you next time. Thank you.
