EP 28 | Mom Guilt Explained: Why You Feel It + How to Let It Go

In this week's episode of the The ROCKSTAR Mom, we name mom guilt as a normal part of motherhood and stop treating it like proof that we are failing. 

Megan shares a simple four-step FEEL framework to move through guilt quickly, shift the story behind it, and return to presence with more peace and less shame. 

We also talk about:

• why mom guilt feels unavoidable for high-achieving working moms 
• the faulty check engine light analogy for guilt 
• the reframe that guilt can mean you care 
• separating fact from story and questioning limiting beliefs 
• using self-compassion to regulate guilt faster 
• why holding on to guilt does not make you a better mom 

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a mom who maybe needs this reminder. 🧡

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🎸 Grab your FREE ticket at www.megancaldwellpdx.com/summit 🤘

----

The ROCKSTAR Mom Summit (Season 3) is now LIVE! 

25+ expert interviews on a variety of topics I know you are going to love, thousands of dollars of amazing gifts, extended listening time – all for FREE! You’re going to love it! 

🎸 Grab your FREE ticket at www.megancaldwellpdx.com/summit 🤘

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Transcript

Welcome To Rockstar Mom

SPEAKER_00 1:56

You are listening to the Rockstar Mom, a podcast for high achievers who are ready to get off of autopilot and live a life with more intention, peace of mind, and happiness. This is a space to expand, dig deep, get clear, and take action towards living your most authentic, aligned life. I'm Megan Caldwell. As a mom of three, two-time burnout survivor and empowerment coach and speaker, I've cracked the code on what it actually takes to thrive at work and home. Ditch perfectionism and people pleasing, get your schedule under control, and live with more ease. So you've got more time and energy to do the things you love without the mom guilt. It's time to get out of your head and into action. Now is the time to live your most rock star life. Let's go. Welcome back, my friend, to the Rockstar Mom. Today we are diving into a topic that I know plagues so many high-achieving working moms. And this is the concept of mom guilt. It's one of those things that is seems to like always be there. It pops up in so many different scenarios. And so today I'm going to be sharing with you why we must actually normalize mom guilt, how we can move through it. I'll be sharing my four-step process and how we can just kind of shift some of our perspective on this so it's not something that constantly plagues us and takes us down. So I want to start with a couple examples. You miss your kids' bedtime. You feel guilt. You choose to take an hour to yourself. You feel guilt. Maybe you either feel selfish or you feel guilty for making your partner be in charge of the kids. You work, guilt. You don't work, there's also guilt. No matter what you choose, sometimes it feels like guilt is just waiting there for you. Now, one thing that I will continue to preach time and again the goal is not to completely eliminate guilt and these feelings from who we are in our everyday life. But the goal is to stop living in it and to stop being stuck in guilt and letting guilt be something that then we ruminate on. And it does take us down and it decreases our energy. Rather, it's something that we can learn to move through. Now, before I kind of get into how we do this in terms of reframing as well as this four-step process I'm going to share with you, I want to share with you an analogy regarding guilt that I absolutely love. And it was really kind of a game changer for me in terms of how I view this. And it came from the book Real Self-Care by Dr. Pooja Lockman. And in her book, she shares this analogy where basically she compares guilt to a faulty check engine light. So think of a faulty check engine light. You know, it's that light on your dashboard that even when your car doesn't need maintenance, it either like stays on strong and no matter what they do, the service department can't seem to get it off, or maybe it just like there's a faulty wire and it continues to flash and it's there and it's constantly there. And you then get to, you get to choose. Is it something that you give your time, your energy, your attention to, and you complain about it and you think, oh my goodness, I just can't stand this faulty check engine light? And again, we kind of spiral and ruminate on it. Or is it something that we know exists there, but we make the choice to say, I'm not gonna let that bother me. I know that my car is not gonna break down right now. I know that it's just part of the way that my car operates. And that's how I invite you to go into this conversation today about guilt and about mom guilt is guilt is a natural human emotion. It is part of the human experience. And never will I say our goal is to completely omit it and live in the world of just rainbows and butterflies. But rather, it's how do we learn to identify it, actually feel it, and then allow ourselves to move through it so it doesn't take us down. So I actually want to start by just kind of again, as I've already shared, like normalizing guilt and really reframing it. This whole concept of mom guilt is universal and is often driven by unrealistic expectations. A lot of this is again our upbringing, the way that we are raised, culture, societal expectations and norms. And then some of it is we actually can we choose to stay in it. It often comes from perfectionism, which again, perfectionism in my brain is another kind of coping mechanism as to how we learned to work through the world. And when these unreal expectations were set, we're like, well, I better perfect it so I can move through. And that allowed our bodies to stay safe. Oftentimes guilt can also come from comparison. So think about the digital world that we live in. When you take a look, I'm just coming off of Easter weekend here. And if I take a look at my Instagram and see all of these moms with these like Pinterest Easter baskets and egg hunts and coordinating outfits, I might feel guilty that I didn't give that to my kids. It's this comparison of again, the grass always looks greener somewhere else. That can lead to guilt. We also have, for many of us, have ingrained into us that being a quote, good mom equals self-sacrifice. And again, this is messaging that has kind of been pushed upon us and can we've been conditioned with for the last many, many decades. We saw our moms do this, where they completely self-sacrificed and put put themselves totally on the back burner. And now we're coming into an error, which is why the Rockstar Mom exists, the work I do exists, where we're saying, wait a second, this could look different. And so by starting to reframe guilt, we're starting to move away from this narrative that in order to be a quote, good mom, we have to self-sacrifice, we have to feel bad about it, we have to feel guilty. Rather, I invite you to think about this in that guilt isn't proof that you're failing. It's actually proof that you care, right? You can care so deeply, as we all do as mothers, about so many things, our kids, our own self, our passions. And you can also choose to release those feelings of guilt. It's almost like kind of the simple version of this, and again, I'll go a little bit more in depth here is acknowledge it, thank it, and then move on from it. All right. So I now want to actually share with you a simple framework that I came up with that can help you kind of again move through these different feelings that are associated with guilt. And I call it the feel framework, F-E-E-L. You've already heard me say once today that, and I say this about all emotions, not just guilt, but often whether it be anxiety or resentment or disappointment or sadness or anger, and this is how I coach my clients is again, our goal is not to suppress. We have suppressed them for so long. The goal is to actually feel the emotion and practice allowing it to move through our body. So here is what the feel the guilt framework looks like. So you can, in sense, the goal is to reset faster. So it's allow yourself to feel it. So then you can get back to feeling better again. So the first step F is for find it. And this really means to name it. I am feeling guilty because I missed my kids' bedtime for the second night in a row. I'm feeling guilty because I needed to ask my partner, my neighbor, my mother-in-law, whoever, to help pick up my kids from school tomorrow. First step, name it. Find it. What is the thing that is making you feel guilty? Guilt actually starts to lose its power when you bring it into the light. Again, if we're like, no, I shouldn't be feeling that way. I'm not gonna allow myself to feel it. Then we suppress, suppress, suppress. And I so many of whatever I talked to, it then pops up at inconvenient times or we then blow up. Again, guilt loses its power when you bring light to it. So in that first moment, again, so much of this comes back to one of the first practices as part of the Rockstar framework, which is the power of pause. Is we have to slow down enough to allow ourselves to actually identify that we're feeling guilty. And then you can ask yourself, what exactly am I feeling feeling guilty about? Again, find it and name it. That is your first step. The second step, E, stands for explore it. Really starting to identify what is fact or what is maybe an unrealistic expectation that either I've put on myself or someone else has put on myself. The second step as we explore it, is we get curious about it and we really start to think about what is the actual truth in this situation versus what is the story or what is the narrative or what is the limiting belief that I have when it comes to why I'm feeling guilty in that moment. We really want to kind of almost separate the feeling of guilt from the actual reality. I always like to give kind of the analogy of like, if you were gonna go ahead and like step out of your life and take a bird's eye view of your life and just take a very non-judgmental view on what's going on, oftentimes we can see more of the truth. Again, when we're in it, when we're in the thick of it, when we're living it, it can be really hard to separate ourselves from that reality. But one thing I know to be true is that the stories and the narratives are what guide our life. And oftentimes we have these narratives, we have these limiting beliefs, we have these stories that are not serving us. So if we can take a moment to pause, really explore it and get curious with it, we can say, is this actually true? If you want to dive into this space way deeper, I recommend Byron Cady's work. She she wrote the book Loving What Is, and it really is a deep, deep dive in terms of really questioning our thoughts and our thinking. But again, in this explore step, it's asking questions such as like, is this actually harmful? Like, am I feeling guilty for a certain way, or am I holding myself to maybe an impossible expectation or standard? Again, that is just a practice. It is just conditioning, it is just habits that we have gotten stuck in over time. Cool thing is, we can actually shift those. So, for example, it's reframing the story. Again, I use the example of I feel so guilty because I missed my kids' bedtime two nights in a row. An example of kind of exploring this and allowing you to see that it's it's not necessarily truth, is missing one or two times doesn't make me a bad mom. That's just the story I've been telling myself. I'm not a bad mom. I still love my kids so much, right? Ooh, this third step I absolutely love, and I know that it's one that I am still in practice with myself, and I really invite you to explore and practice, which is the second E in our F-E-E-L feel framework, is to extend compassion to yourself. Talk to yourself like you would a friend. What would it look like to flip the script? We know that our thoughts influence how we feel, influence our actions. And so if we can start to again speak to ourselves more kindly, building self-compassion, practicing self-compassion is one of the fastest ways to actually help ourselves regulate guilt. Compassion and guilt are kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum of that, the feeling spectrum, if you will. And so if we're extending compassion and feeling gratitude and appreciation, even, it makes it almost impossible to feel that guilt in the moment. And so again, we've already identified it, we've got it curious about it, explored it, and now we're giving ourselves compassion for it. Again, a good great question that you could ask yourself here is like, what would I say to another mom who's sharing this or to my best friend? For an example, you might say, I tell her she's doing her best and her kids are loved. Again, that is really flipping the script and extending compassion to yourself. Sometimes, again, we have to take ourselves out of our own life, out of our own body, out of our own stories to extend ourselves that compassion. The fourth step, the L stands for let it move through. And this is all tied to a continued practice of release and also being able to re-anchor yourself. So I always like to say, you know, the first step is really awareness of anything. We also have to continue to practice, whether it be with guilt or anything else that we're looking to shift, this practice of releasing. So again, this is letting it move. First we feel it, then we release it, and then we can choose again how we want to respond, how we want to move through. Guilt can actually be useful if it leads to alignment and not shame. So again, oftentimes we get caught in the stuck in this cycle of feeling guilty and then feeling shameful and then beating ourselves up and self-sabotaging, and it just kind of keeps spinning and spiraling. Versus what if we reframe and look at guilt as again, something that can cue us to allow us to move towards more alignment and living more authentically. We can then start to ask ourselves, well, what's working? And what actually matters most right now? For example, I am a mom who has passions and friends outside of my kids' home, my my home and my kids' bedtime. And both of those things matter. I am able to be a present for my kids, and I am also to able to do things that fill my cup. Again, as we kind of work through this framework in terms of feel it, really explore it, extend some compassion for yourself, and then let it move through. It allows you to use guilt as a tool to again reset, recalibrate, so then you can continue to show up as your best self. And that is exactly what we're about. So before we wrap up, I just want to walk you through a couple examples that might be relatable to you. And the first one is working mom guilt. All right. Speaking to all of those working moms out there, whether you have a career outside of the home, whether you work for yourself in home, whether you're remote, whether you work part-time, whether you consider your work maybe volunteer obligations, whatever it might be. Starting with the F, which again is to find it. I feel guilty for working late. That is identifying maybe why you're feeling guilty. I'm feeling guilty that I had to work till six today, or maybe it's later than that. Then you want to go ahead and you want to explore it. Is this harmful or is this just uncomfortable? Right? Oftentimes the expectation is again, I'm a bad mom because I'm working late. When in reality, your kids are probably happy and safe wherever you've provided them to be during that time. Third, extend compassion. What would I say to a friend about this? Right? And then lastly, letting it move through is my kids are loved and provided for. The reset with this is to then, when you are with your kiddos, to really aim to be fully present with them. Again, two things can be true. This concept of duality is I can be a kick-ass working mom and I can also be present for my kids. And this is exactly what I support women with inside our coaching programs within your rock star life. Here's another example you might be able to relate to is taking time for yourself. So here's the scenario. You decide to either go to a workout or maybe go to have coffee or tea with a friend. It's really thinking about, again, if we first find it, we've named it, I am feeling guilty because I am taking time to go have coffee with a friend. Exploring the truth. Again, self-care in my mind, which could be coffee with a friend or going to the gym, is actually necessary. It's not selfish. So allowing yourself to kind of reframe it, all right, and remind ourselves you can't keep withdrawing from that empty tank. That's why we must actually do these things that fill our cup. And over time, I'm just thinking back to a client I had a call with last week. It feels uncomfortable those first couple times when we actually give ourselves grace and give ourselves compassion and try to move through it and try not to get so wrapped up in this guilt and feeling bad about it. Is over time it can become more of the norm. And you're resetting expectations. The expectation now being, you know what? Mom takes care of herself. One last example I want to share with you. Oh man, especially when my kids were younger and before I really dove into my own personal development was the guilt of when I've lost my patience. So for example, I might identify that, man, I yelled at my kids this morning. I know I don't want to act that way. And I just feel so guilty about it. Again, I've named it. All right, then is to really explore it. And again, identify like, okay, I've now brought it to the light. That's already decreased some of the power that the guilt has over me. And I might explore it and recognize, you know what, that's actually not how I want to show up. This is where the misalignment is. I then get to extend myself compassion and sense of shame, reminding myself, and this is something, my friends, full transparency, I continue to practice every single day is reminding myself I am human. I make mistakes. I can't get it right 100% of the time. Once in a while, I'm going to probably still blow up. And that's okay. I'm cognizant of it and I'm working through it. And then again, in terms of the let it move through, after you've given yourself compassion, is then you can think about how do I move on? Maybe it is repairing and actually apologizing and letting my kids know, you know, I'm sorry. I feel terrible that I raised my voice at you. And I'm I'm doing the best I can. I'm human. So, my friends, there are the four steps in terms of how to help you move through guilt with a couple examples. Before we head off today, I just want to quickly name kind of one more time why we actually sometimes stay stuck in guilt. And the first is because we just don't take the time to process it. So I hope that my feel framework, feel it, explore it, extend compassion, and then let it move through helps you move through versus looping in it and staying stuck in it. And one last reframe I'd like to kind of leave you with before we sign off here is holding on to guilt does not make you a better mom. Being present, allowing these challenging emotions to move through, showing your kids that you are real and you make mistakes, that's what makes you a better mom. That's what makes you feel better as a human. So, my friends, I invite you as we close out this episode today to start to become aware of the types of situations where you feel that sense of guilt. Walk yourself through our four steps, feel it, explore it, extend compassion, and then let it move through. And I'm hoping that you were able to again recognize nothing is wrong with you. You are doing the best you can. Guilt is part of the motherhood experience and journey. And you've got this. You have got this. I invite you to, if this episode resonated with you, share it with a mom who maybe needs this reminder. As well, if you have a comment to like and review this episode, I greatly appreciate it. That's how more moms find our podcasts. Until next time, my friends, give yourself lots of compassion. Know that you are doing an awesome, awesome job, and I am cheering you on always. Thank you so much for tuning into the Rockstar Mom Podcast. If today's episode resonated with you, here's how we can keep this momentum going. First, be sure to subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode. Next, I'd be so grateful if you took a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps us reach even more women who are ready to live more intentional, fun-filled lives. Lastly, please share your insights on social media and be sure to tag me at Megan Caldwell PDX so we can connect and inspire other rock stars to live their best lives too. Again, I am so glad that you are here, and I'll see you next time.