Is 'Martyr Mentality' Hurting YOUR Kids?

There’s a brewing epidemic of martyr mentality among moms these days where well-intentioned mothers continually sacrifice their own needs and desires in the name of being a “good” mom, yet actually end up harming their family in the process.

In this powerful episode, I unpack what martyr mentality is, how it can show up in moms’ daily lives, why it’s so problematic, where it comes from, and how to start being less of a martyr if this is you.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

●      How beautiful self-sacrifice can so deviously slip into self-neglect

●      The chicken-and-egg problem that arises when moms work their tail off to make their family happy at the expense of their own wellbeing

●      What parenting experts and psychologists say martyr mentality in moms actually does to their kids

●      The ways that culture, biology, faith, and childhood experience compound to make women think martyr mentality is normal or even good

●      Why martyr mentality only breeds resentment and discord in your marriage and home

HOMEWORK:

Reflect on any ways you tend to overly sacrifice for your kids. Where do you think this compulsion comes from? Are there simple things you can stop doing or get help with in order to prioritize yourself more? If not, why? I’d love to hear your thoughts via email or DM! 

COMING UP NEXT:

In the next episode, I’m getting really vulnerable about how martyr mentality (among other things) took a scary toll on me. I hope that sharing my story helps ensure that no other mom ever feels as hopeless as I once did.

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Transcript

0:00

Have you ever wanted to punch somebody when they say you have to put your own oxygen mask on first? Ugh, as a busy mom, that feels so hard and impractical, doesn't it? I know it does for me and all the women I work with. And yet, not putting your own mask on first can quickly become a slippery slope that leads to ignoring or neglecting your own needs in really unhealthy, unhelpful ways. In this episode, you are about to be confronted with some real hard truths about the dangers of martyr mentality, which far too many moms wrestle with. If you are someone who's ever put herself on the back burner, get ready to be both called out and lovingly uplifted. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. Why is it so hard to put yourself first? Let's just acknowledge that it is. Telling moms they need to put themselves first is like telling kids they need to eat their broccoli or Brussels sprouts. It may be objectively true and good, but it is practically impossible. And yet, even when you can't put yourself first, you still need to put yourself somewhere. The tragic reality is that a huge percentage of moms end up putting themselves dead last. After the kids, after their husband, after the house, after their job, After the parent-teacher organization. After their to-do list. Sound familiar? Alright, so let's dig into this thing called martyr mentality, which is sometimes called a martyr complex. I will be so curious to know if you have heard of this or ever considered it in this way. But Google defines martyr mentality as a psychological tendency where individuals repeatedly sacrifice their own well-being and needs for the sake of others, often feeling trapped and victimized in the process. This behavior is distinct from genuine altruism and can be associated with a victim complex or codependency. people with a martyr mentality may seek out suffering or persecution, even when it's not necessary, and may use their sacrifices to gain attention or manipulate others. Now, okay, that's what Google defines martyr mentality as, but I truly think that for moms, It's a lot more benign and well-intentioned than that. I don't think that the typical mom is trying to have a victim complex or use, you know, her self-sacrifice as a way of gaining attention and manipulating others. I think that it really comes from a more beautiful place where you are naturally giving of yourself because you love your family and would give anything to take care of them. But at the end of the day, there is ultimately an element of self-neglect going on. It's really the classic putting yourself on the back burner situation where You might even consciously realize that you're not taking good care of yourself, but you keep pushing and ignoring your own needs because there is simply so much else to do in front of you. And if you don't do it, who will, right? Add onto that the fact that mothers still bear the overwhelming brunt of the mental load, along with the bulk of household responsibilities, even if they also work outside the home, and it just seems like a given that mothers would end up having to be martyrs sacrificing themselves for the good of their loved ones. And for the record, all of this can show up outside the home too, as well as even if you don't have kids. For instance, research shows that at work, women tend to take on more tasks than men. They're often assigned especially more non-promotable tasks than men. And so there is just this underlying phenomenon of women doing so much. I, of course, want to clarify that the point of this episode is not to complain or to say that men aren't doing enough. We'll get into some of those things in other episodes, not to complain, but to just underscore why it can feel so stressful for moms. Today is really about the toll that constantly sacrificing yourself takes on you. Let me give you some examples of how martyr mentality showed up for me without me even really realizing it. So these may or may not resonate with you. There are plenty of other ways that martyr mentality can show up, but here's what it looked like for me. It obviously started with the basic pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding process because moms have to do so much to bring their children into the world. It's supposed to be so beautiful and it truly is a gift. But it also inevitably changes your body and adds a lot of pressure because of the very fact that you are now responsible for this sweet new little life. So then I found myself always sacrificing my sleep to get up with the baby, whether that was not wanting to inconvenience my husband since he had to get up and go to work, even though I also did. I was so afraid to ask my husband to help around the house because before we had kids, there was sort of this unspoken division of labor where he did all the outside stuff and I did the inside stuff. I used to get up at 5.30 in the morning to make him breakfast and help warm up his car in the winter and kiss him goodbye as he was leaving out the door. And then after having kids, I didn't want to burden him. It took us a lot of years to be able to talk about these things and work through a new arrangement of how we were going to work together. And I can now truly say that my husband does so much. He's really, really amazing. But our road to get to this point and my ability to even recognize that I needed and wanted his help was a long time coming. So that's on me, not on him. I pretty instantly gave up my own hobbies because I had only time, and not even enough of it, to do what I needed to do for my demanding job, and then felt like I needed to be with my kids all the rest of the time. One example of this is that my husband has always been so great at prioritizing his health, where he would go to the gym immediately before or after work, and I never felt like I could ask to do that, let alone just get up and go do that. which really then brewed into a bunch of resentment for me because it felt like the only time I got to myself was the occasional solo trip to the grocery store or a car ride where the babies had fallen asleep and I suddenly had a few minutes of complete peace and quiet. Even to this day, I am still always the first one up and the last one to bed. I find myself always making and serving everyone else's food before I ever even sit down to eat. Not to mention the number of interruptions during a meal where I constantly get up to get what a kid needs or clean up after a mess. or take someone to the bathroom. I don't even want to count the number of times I have showed up somewhere, whether it was school drop-off or even church, looking like a hobo because I ran out of time to get myself ready after making sure my kids were nicely dressed and had all the things they needed. But some other common ways that you might experience martyr mentality could be dropping everything to take your kids somewhere they want to go, even if you had other plans, or feeling pressure to work more than you want to just to cover the financial expenses of your kids' activities. It could be sitting down to watch a family movie, but then noticing that there are dishes on the counter and something dirty on the floor. And so instead of being able to sit and enjoy the time with the family, you know that someone is going to need to clean up the mess and you get up to do it. At this point, you might be rolling your eyes, wondering if these are really examples of a martyr mentality at all, because aren't they just things that go along with motherhood? Aren't they just part of a mom's normal responsibilities? That may be very up for debate. I am in no way saying that moms shouldn't give of themselves tremendously to love and serve their families. That is part of the calling and the gift of motherhood. It is so hard, but it's so worth it. So why is this a problem? In case it's not obvious, it really, really is. It's less a matter of what you may be doing and more a matter of how often and to what extreme you do it. It can manifest in low self-esteem, lack of boundaries, you start to harbor bitterness and resentment, which can then fester and sabotage your relationships. Holding all that anger and frustration in can lead to chronic health problems and even autoimmune conditions in women, and we're seeing a growing epidemic of this. You might develop codependency, where you're outsourcing your happiness and self-worth to others. craving their recognition and feeling like a failure if you don't get that external validation. And then you just work harder and harder and sacrifice yourself more and more on that hamster wheel, which is exhausting. So you lose your own identity. And you always feel like you can't take any time for yourself. You can't ask for help or put your needs ahead of anyone else's. But truly, there has to be a happy medium, because as I just covered in episode 5, there are all kinds of scary statistics about what happens when moms aren't making time for self-care, let alone the other things that make them happy. And then parenting values and styles clearly differ, but a lot of child development experts and psychologists argue that martyr mentality is really bad for the kids, not only because of the toll it takes on the mom's physical and mental health, but because if you, the mom, are doing everything for your kids, then they are not learning how to do a lot for themselves. which can lead the kids to have unrealistic expectations about their future life, and it sets an unhealthy example that they could end up emulating instead of properly caring for themselves when they grow up. So where does smarter mentality come from? There are so many layers here, but it's often from what was modeled to us. Maybe you had a mother that was always busy and always cleaning up and kept an immaculate house. Maybe you had a grandmother or teachers, coaches, other women you admire that seemed to just naturally be able to do it all. And so the culture has embedded within you this pressure to be supermom. In terms of genetics and biology, we know that women on average tend to be so much more caring, more emotionally aware, more sensitive. They tend to be natural people pleasers and have very agreeable personalities. They often have trouble saying no. And their brains are more able to multitask. That doesn't mean you should, but we would all probably agree that women can juggle a lot at once. There's also really fascinating cutting-edge research showing that women are more motivated by oxytocin than dopamine. So we're going to get a lot more into hormones in future episodes, but dopamine is what's typically referred to as the pleasure or reward hormone. You get a little dopamine hit for a job well done. But again, this new research is showing that women are more motivated by oxytocin, which is the love hormone, that feeling of connection that you have, the bond you feel to someone. So women might naturally have a more natural underlying fear about what could happen if they don't please others and what that might mean for their connection and sense of safety. There's also incredible research underscoring that moms and babies' DNA crosses over and stays with them long after the pregnancy and birth process. So this means that mothers can literally feel their kids' pain and emotion in their own bodies. If this has ever happened to you, for instance, if your kid is ever really hurt and sad about something, you might feel their emotions in your brain. you might feel so personally affected as well. Or if your kid falls off their bike and scrapes their knee and is crying, you can feel a little twinge of pain in your own body. So you automatically just jump to their rescue when you see they need help. This is so beautiful at its most basic level, but you can see how it might lend itself to developing a martyr mentality. The next source of martyr mentality might hit a little deep, but it can be something that comes from the messages you have received in your faith life. For instance, you have probably heard that the definition of love is sacrifice, right? To lay down one's life for a friend. You've probably heard the acronym JOY, which stands for Jesus Others Yourself, in which you are literally encouraged to put yourself last. We have incredible examples like Mother Teresa, who said that the best thing you can do is to love your family and to love until it hurts. And there are so many saints who were martyrs, right? Who died exemplifying that tremendous love and self-sacrifice in such admirable ways. Now, I am an incredibly faith-filled person, so I am in no way saying that you should not believe these things. I am just trying to raise awareness of how some of these messages might play into the tendency of neglecting yourself and ignoring your own needs to the point that it actually backfires and causes harm to the people you love and are trying to sacrifice for. And then finally, at its deepest level, Martyr mentality is often rooted in early life experiences that led you to need external validation or to have a fear of abandonment, where you developed a people-pleasing tendency in hopes of getting attention or avoiding physical or emotional outbursts from an upset caregiver. Basically, you might have just been trying to keep your parents happy by sacrificing yourself until they were. Maybe as a child, you were made to feel like your emotions and suffering don't matter. But sweet mama, they do. And not just for you, but for your family, as we just talked about in the last episode. Okay, so how do you fix smarter mentality? We're certainly not saying that it's an overnight solution. It's obviously not as simple as just flipping a switch and no longer having those tendencies. But the first step is truly just a curiosity about whether you could be sacrificing too much of yourself to the point that it's going to have a harmful long-term impact. And then just having awareness along with gentle compassion and self-love. That goes so far because I'm more than willing to bet that you have the best of intentions and are coming from such a loving place when you sacrifice yourself. There is really truth to the saying, if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. But I know that as a mom, you pride yourself on your family's happiness and you look to their happiness to fulfill your own. So it is this cart before the horse problem where you're trying to forgo your happiness in the short term by making your family happy now so that you can be happy long term, except it doesn't always work that way. So, you want to slowly start to work on inserting a pause between when someone asks you to do something or you see something that needs to be done and when you actually act on it, and then it is crucial to have a safe space where you can talk about your frustrations and acknowledge the places where you feel unseen and unappreciated for how hard you are working and all that you are doing, as well as explore the reasons that lead you to feel so compelled to sacrifice yourself in the first place. Your homework for today is to reflect on any ways you tend to overly sacrifice yourself for your kids. You are still the parent. They still need you. But of course, you want to find that happy medium. Are there any simple things that you can stop doing or do less? Maybe other people you can ask to share the load with you? If not, why? Remember, I am always here as a sounding board and you are so, so invited to book a free call with me to learn more about what it's like to work together one-on-one because these are exactly the kinds of big, deep, underlying tendencies that I love. helping women break free from. Now, before you think you're the only one who struggles with feeling like you can't put your own needs first, you've got to hear the next episode, where I'm sharing my own super vulnerable story of how motherhood changed everything for me, how quickly I lost myself after having my first baby, how dark a place I fell into, and the surprisingly simple, free things that helped pull me out. I always hope that no other mama ever feels as hopeless as I once did. But in the next episode, I am pulling back the curtain on my own experience so you can see how deviously martyr mentality can take hold. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day.