Mom Guilt & Overstimulated Moms: 3 Shifts to Break the Cycle

If you're a homeschool mom drowning in mom guilt — snapping at your kids, feeling touched out and overstimulated, then hating yourself for it — this episode is for you. 

I'm Whitney, a pediatric OT turned nervous system regulation coach for moms. And today I'm getting real about something I've lived through myself: those seasons where mom guilt isn't just a one-off feeling.

It's a cycle you can't seem to break.

In this episode I'm sharing: - What's really at the root of mom guilt for many overstimulated homeschool moms.

• The 3 mismatches that lead to disproportionate reactions with your kids 
• 3 practical tools you can use today — including co-regulation, the RAIN meditation, and micro doses of nervous system support.

Let's move through the guilt and find joy and connection with your kids on the other side with nervous system regulation support.

Waitlist & Free Coaching for Midday Refresh: https://subscribepage.io/FLNazu
(free coaching for first 2 moms-- you'll see info in your email inbox!)

Free Weekly Tips & Learn more about coaching: https://www.sensationalmoms.com

Tara Brach's RAIN meditation: https://www.tarabrach.com/rain/

This podcast is not meant as medical advice or a substitute for any medical advice. Please contact your health professional with any mental health or physical health questions or concerns.

Transcript

 As a mom, have you ever said or done something that you wish you hadn't said or done as soon as it happened and it really would give anything to go back and rewind? I'm sure that we have all felt that way sometimes as moms, but some of us feel like we are stuck in a cycle of mom guilt, and that is exactly what we are going to be talking about today here in the podcast.

Maybe you even had a moment like that today or this week, and it is so recent that hearing mom guilt makes you feel guilty. So this is not another venting session. I mean, we all need that sometimes for sure. But today we're gonna be talking a little bit more about what is at the root of mom guilt for a lot of us.

What are three things that you can do to help support yourself through those feelings and find joy and connection on the other side of it with your kids? But before we wade into the muck, that is mom guilt. Let me introduce myself. I'm Whitney. I'm a pediatric occupational therapist turned nervous system regulation coach for moms.

I love coming alongside moms who feel easily touched out and talked out by our kids, but long for the joy and connection that we dreamed of when we thought of motherhood in the first place. We get there through supporting your own self-regulation as a mom. We do that through the podcast here. Welcome, if it's your first time, and also through one-on-one coaching.

If you wanna learn more about Sensational Moms and what I do, just head to the website, sensational moms.com. So when I think about mom guilt, there are so many experiences. It is hard to even know where to start when it comes to sharing how I have struggled with mom guilt, mainly because of my reactivity with my kids and helping my kids deal with their own big emotions.

So we can narrow down the topic of mom guilt because it could go so many ways, right? We're gonna narrow it down today specifically to those moments when we feel like our reactions are disproportionate compared to the situation. Okay? So when I think about that, I think about a season in my life where it seemed like.

Everything was going wrong. I was dealing with health challenges with myself, with my family, and we had just moved and I had a kid who is, who was genuinely struggling with her own self-regulation skills and it showed up like this in our homeschool. This child really had a hard time settling conflicts with siblings and.

Really following most basic directions. And at the time I didn't really understand what things like, uh, pathological demand avoidance or PDA are or how certain kids perceive direction and all of this, even though I'm an occupational therapist, I'm telling you, it is a whole different ball game when it's your own kiddos and when you're living in it.

So. It was just a particularly difficult season. On top of that, I was sleep deprived. This kid was sleep deprived and um, our difficulties were just affecting the entire family. So, in particular, as it relates to our homeschool, this child was refusing to do schoolwork and. If you've been in this situation before, you understand that this is not necessarily a matter of you not disciplining your child.

Um, there are so many layers to these types of situations usually. I won't go into it too much today, but suffice to say any amount of schoolwork was very difficult with this child, which is a problem when you homeschool your kids. So, um. On top of that, you know, we would be in these situations, these power struggles and you know, the way I was working through the situation from my other children when they had difficulties was not cutting it for this kiddo.

So I would start off, you know, in these situations initially with a pretty calm response, but over time. In the course of the day, some days faster than others, my responses would start to escalate and eventually we would be yelling. Not that either one of us wanted to get there, and if you know me personally, you're probably thinking Whitney would never yell.

Well, let me just tell you, that is not the case. You can never tell really what someone is struggling with on the outside, right? So. Within my home, you know, we would get to that point of yelling at one another, both of us. And it would affect the whole family, y'all, I mean the whole family, that they would be derailed really.

I would have another kid who by default would step into the situation and kind of help manage the other kids, and it was just this. Snowball. And at the end of it, um, even though the situation would appear to be resolved, I would just be hit with this huge wave of exhaustion, emotional, and just physical exhaustion from, you know, helping my kid regulate after being dysregulated myself and then feeling so guilty afterwards that we even got to that point.

I would just dwell on my kids' dysregulation, and then I would repeatedly say that this must be my fault because I'm so dysregulated. How could I expect my child to handle her dysregulation? Okay, so. Of course that led to mom guilt. And I'm talking, I'm not talking about like a one-off mom guilt here, right?

I'm talking about seasons of really dealing with it. So it's a problem, right? Mom, guilt is real and. There, you could have guilt for things that we say and do, but you might also have mom guilt for stuff that you don't do because sometimes when we live in this chronic state of dysregulation, we end up avoiding our kids.

You know, here we are trying to homeschool our kids for more quality time and connection together, but we are so burnt out and depleted that. We want to be away from our kids instead of with them, and then we feel guilty about it. We can kind of should ourselves to death, right? I should want to be with my kids, but I am yearning to be away from my child, and then we feel guilty for it.

You know, you could even make it simpler than that, right? Even if you're not in that situation where you are having difficulty in a relationship with your child, maybe you feel guilty for just wanting to be away from your kids at all. I have definitely talked with moms who feel that way, who feel like getting to the point where they can wrap their head around.

Having some time to themselves is a hard thing because we feel like we shouldn't want to be away from our family. Maybe your flavor of mom guilt looks like this. Instead, maybe you have a kid who loves you and is super affectionate and full of energy and is bouncing all over the place and talking all the time and wanting your attention, and maybe climbing on you.

And you are overwhelmed and overstimulated by that. Maybe you have a kid who seems to be a little bit more of a sensory seeker and that is not sitting well with how your nervous system is. It could go the other way as well. Maybe you want to have that physical connection with your child and you want that attention as well, but.

Your kid is more sensory avoidant and then you feel like, wow, my kid must not want to be with me. Maybe we don't have a good bond. You know, what have I done that this is happening. So mom guilt can look a lot of different ways, but really it comes down to a mismatch. And here's what I mean by that. We need to start viewing mom guilt as a data point, first of all, instead of jumping straight to self-judgment.

Now, how do we do that? We're gonna talk a little bit about that when we were talking about three things you can do to move past it, but first, realize that the mom guilt is a data point and not always a matter of self-judgment. Okay? What's really going on with that mismatch? Here's what I mean. There's often a mismatch between what we need versus what our kids need.

So the last flavor of mom guilt that I shared with you, that would be a classic example of that, where we're just kind of on two different wavelengths. We're not giving and receiving attention and care in the same way. And depending on the age of our kid and our relationship with our child, we may not be able to communicate that.

And instead we just end up feeling like it's all our fault that we either are struggling to enjoy time with our child. Or that our kid doesn't enjoy being around us because we're on edge all the time. So there could be a mismatch between just how your nervous system is predispositioned to process that sensory input for you and your child.

It could also be a mismatch between your self-regulation skills and the reality of motherhood. Okay. Let's just be realistic here and talk about the fact that. These, when it comes to regulating our own selves, these are skills that a lot of us just did not acquire earlier in life. Or maybe we didn't need them, frankly.

Um, if you're sensory sensitive like I am, then the. We, as we are adults in our adult lives, are able to kind of curate our environment and what's going on in our lives. You know, and you might even be doing that without realizing it, right? Maybe it's how you decorate your home, or you know, how you organize your schedule, what you like to do in your free time.

And if you do have insight into your own sensory preferences and how you are wired, then if you are married. The adult can probably understand your ability to communicate your needs and accommodate accordingly. That's totally different than a young child. So yes, we are overwhelmed because we're not able to make those accommodations that we've been making.

We are living with multiple nervous systems under one roof, and there are just all simply. Statistically speaking, there are more opportunities for something to go wrong. Okay. So developing your own self-regulation skills is something that, yes, you can still do that. You can still do that later in life, but.

It requires intentionality and insight, and that's something that we work on together in coaching is working through those moments where you do feel overwhelmed and overstimulated. What are ways that you can support yourself? A, to keep yourself from getting there as often, and B, how you can. Handle those moments of overstimulation and overwhelm that are gonna come anyway.

Right? And see how you can communicate those needs to other people in ways that they understand. Okay, so that's the second one. Just there's a mismatch between your skills and the demands that are being placed on you as a busy mom. Last and probably one of the hardest ones to wrap our heads around is the fact that there's a mismatch between what you thought motherhood would be your, your ideal versus the reality of, of what it is.

Okay? So. Your kid is their own nervous system. You are your own. And sometimes getting on the same wa, same wavelength and figuring out how to make all of these things work underneath the same roof is really hard. How can I show that I love you and I want to listen to you, but also I really at the end of our school day, can't sit and listen to 15 minutes of you talking about your favorite TV show or whatever it is.

Um. There are so many ways that those differences can show up. I love you and I love your creativity, but also I find it really hard to wake up in the morning and come into the living room and see all of yesterday's art projects out, because that's really overwhelming to my visual system. Okay, so that.

Mismatch between what we thought motherhood would be like. We thought that we wouldn't have to navigate all these barriers. We didn't even know they all existed. Right? And then the reality is that there is conflict involved in growth, and that growth is uncomfortable.

So now that we've talked about mom guilt and set the foundation for what is going on and a little bit of a reframe for you to think about mom guilt, let's talk about three things that you can do to move through it instead of getting stuck in it. Okay, because let's just, let's not lie and say that we'll never have mom guilt.

Totally not true. That's just part of existence, right? But we don't wanna get stuck there. We don't wanna stay dysregulated. We want to accept it and move through it. Let's start off with one of the simplest things that won't require you to click a link on a resource or anything. And that simple thing is.

Using co-regulation for yourself, and here's what that can look like. If you want more connection with your kid, those happy moments, those glimmers, as I've heard them called, can really set the foundation for a stronger relationship so that you can be encouraged that there is something on the other side of moving through the guilt.

So an easy way to do that is. Taking some time to do something to connect with your child. I'm talking 10 minutes or less, and my favorite thing to do is parallel play. So that's kind of therapy speak. Maybe you know what that means, but if you don't, what that means is we're going to do something we both enjoy and we're gonna do it together, like side by side, but we don't necessarily have to interact with one another.

So I love to sit at the table and do some art of my own while my kid is doing some free painting or something on their own as well. That would be an example of that. Let's do something we both like, but let's just do it together. We're together. But apart we're together, but apart, if that makes sense. So you can give your child feedback or praise or just enjoy being with one another.

Sit shoulder to shoulder interaction doesn't always be, have to be face to face. And that co-regulation is helpful for us as adults. So we hear so often that we have to help kids co-regulate. And that's true. We have to share our nervous systems, which is exhausting, but we need co-regulation as well. And laying the foundation for that connection in a low stakes way like this can really help you build momentum, especially if you have that flavor of mom guilt that I talked about earlier, which was feeling bad about not liking being with your kid.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who's felt that way before.

Okay. So yeah, step one, that was picking something to do to connect with your kid and doing it side by side. You don't even have to necessarily be doing something like playing a game together, although that's great and you definitely don't have to make a point to go out and do something special together.

Although, again, that's great. Keep it simple. Even to make something side by side is super helpful. Just be together. The second resource that I would like to share with you is the concept of a rain meditation. That's rain. Like rain that falls from the sky. RAIN. This is a concept that Tara Brock shares years and.

The reason this is helpful for you if you are stuck in a cycle of mom guilt is that it helps you show actual self-compassion or radical self-compassion, as she would say, to be able to accept your reality as it is because you can't really fix something or move through something that you don't acknowledge exists.

So I'll put a link down in the show notes about rain meditation, but I'm gonna briefly walk you through what that means. Rain is an acronym just to help you remember. Okay. The R is for recognizing what is happening. The A is for allowing the experience to be there just as it is. Which is easier said than done, right?

That self-judgment can be so strong for us because we genuinely care about our kids. The I is for investigating with interest and care. So once you allow it just to be there, be curious in a non-judgmental way, what is going on underneath the surface to start with. I wonder why do and just sit with it for a little while?

And the N is for nurturing yourself with self-compassion because I can tell you that you probably say a lot of things to yourself that you would not say to someone that you really care about. You probably speak to yourself. In a way that you wouldn't speak to a friend and you probably wouldn't wanna say those things to your kiddos.

And we say those to ourselves, right? So that's R for recognize, A for allow I for investigate, and N for Nurture. Again, I'll put a link down to that in the show notes and bonus if you get my weekly email, the sensational moment, get it. Moment moment. Anyway, if you get that email, I'll also be putting it in there as well for easy access for you to get and save.

If you haven't signed up for that, be sure to check it out@sensationalmoms.com. I'll put it down in the show notes as well. So last, a powerful way that you can support yourself is by using micro doses of nervous system nourishment, okay? Here's what I mean by that. When we think of self-care as moms, we often way overcomplicate self-care.

And the reality is that in the most basic levels, a lot of us are really depleted. I'm talking about basic needs, like when is the last time you ate lunch on your own instead of eating off of your kids' plate? When is the last time you got enough water? Those things that are more within our control, those basic needs, but take it a step beyond that, you know, what are our senses that help us feel grounded and connected to ourselves and the world around us?

Those senses are largely understimulated as moms. So nourishing those senses in small ways throughout the day instead of making it a whole thing That is really powerful when it comes to feeling more regulated and being able to handle those moments of overwhelm that are gonna come from our kids, regardless.

You know what else she'll be able to handle a lot better. If you are coming from a more regulated space, you'll be able to handle that mom guilt when it comes, instead of making it a huge mountain to climb, you'll be able to approach it. You'll be able to use tools to support yourself through it without it becoming this cycle over and over again.

So what does that actually look like to have those micro doses of nervous system support? That's exactly why I created the midday Refresh for homeschool moms, so that you can deal with that dysregulation and overwhelm before it builds up and lead you to do things that you might regret later. The Midday Refresh is going to be coming out in March of this year, but I'm still looking for two moms to help me beta test the midday refresh.

It's super simple. It is four audios for you to listen to. That way it's. Easy for you to access. It does not require you sitting down at your computer and pulling it out and watching a presentation. It's just like this podcast. I'm talking you through ways that you can overcome the difficulties that stop you from having that time to yourself to start with.

And how do you craft a time for yourself that will nourish those senses that's simple and doable so that you can have the rest of the afternoon energy that you need for being on the go. Like I am taking my kids to soccer practice, going to piano lessons, and. All that stuff. You can do it at home. You can do it on the go as well.

And bonus, if you are interested in being one of my beta testers, you'll also get a one-on-one session with me to tailor that time specifically for your nervous system and your needs and the difficulties in your household. So if you're interested in the midday refresh. Then I will put a link down in the show notes for you to sign up for that and get your free coaching session along with it.

You get to access that material before it's available to everyone else, and I would love your feedback. That's exactly why I'm opening it up to two more moms so I can have an idea. Is this a resource that is providing the max benefit to busy homeschool moms? So there we go. There's mom guilt in a nutshell.

25 minutes. Who knew? I really do hope that you have found this information valuable, that you've been able to press pause for a little while and look at your situation and see what's really going on beneath the mom guilt, and what are some ways that you can support yourself to move through that to find joy and connection in motherhood.

Thank you so much for listening today. Would you do me a favor? It takes a quick minute to rate and review the podcast, but it makes it so much easier for other moms who are dealing with mom guilt to find the support and help that they need. Thank you so much for doing that. Until next time, may you find joy and connection even in the chaos.