Ep #49: Name It to Tame It Series – Part 2

Welcome back to the Co-Parenting with Confidence podcast. I'm your host, Mikki Gardner, and this is episode number 49. Name It to Tame It Series, Part 2. [music] Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name is Mikki Gardner, I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well, get ready and let's dive into today's episode. Let me ask you, do you feel like since you've separated, gotten divorced and are now co-parenting that you're living on a roller coaster of feelings? Does it feel like you're moving and turning and flipping all over the place? Right, it feels like you're on a ride that you have no control over, and you might desperately wanna get off, but you're strapped in. Listen, after working with so many moms and some dads who are on this co-parenting journey and having lived it myself, I definitely have witnessed a lot of feelings. And listen, rightly so. Divorce is not easy. It's not fun and it's not a process that we wanna go through. Nobody gets married and has children with the hope of getting divorced, Right? But you're having all these feelings and it can make you feel crazy, right? Alone, alienated, feeling unhinged and out of control, the list goes on and on. So that's why I wanted to do a series of podcasts devoted just to the common feelings that we all experience, right? Because we experience them, but why? And how can we identify it? And importantly, what can we do about them? If you've listened to this podcast you know that the process is really about becoming aware; Aware of what you're thinking and feeling, so that you can learn to accept it. Acceptance really is just not resisting, avoiding or running away, because when we accept, then we can take the aligned action to create what we want instead of just living from what we don't want. It's all about taking a 100% ownership over your 50% of the relationship, but the only way that that works is when we're able to understand what we're thinking and feeling and take the ownership over it. But to know what we're feeling we have to have a vocabulary to be able to understand them. That's why I'm using Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart as a guide in this series, because there is no better resource than she. Brené has done so much research and has really created a dictionary for us with this book. If you don't have it I highly recommend getting it. But today we're gonna look at some of the feelings that we feel when we fall short, or when things don't go as planned and specifically shame, guilt, regret and disappointment, because those are four of the emotions that I work with on a daily basis with my clients. I think we all know that as moms and women we just have a tendency to live on a diet of guilt and shame with a whole dose of inadequacy thrown in there, right? Whether it's universal or cultural or gender, we've taken on roles. We've taken on these personas and we live with this. We compare ourselves constantly to the picture perfect lives on social media or in the media or what society tells us that we should be. How we should look, what's attainable, what's normal, all of it. We tell ourselves that there's never enough time that we're not doing good enough. We're not accomplishing enough. That we're not enough. Right, this guilt and shame, inadequacy is a toxic cocktail that we just drink over and over every day, and it's a theme that pervasively infiltrates our life in so many different areas. So when we have this little cocktail that we're drinking over and over, what happens for us? Well, we end up holding ourselves to standards, ideas that aren't just attainable but really beat us up, or we end up over-compensating for the guilt. We start indulging people and things and feelings that just don't serve us. We live with shame so much that we can't move forward because we're chained to our own suffering, and this is really common for a lot of women. But when we have divorce and co-parenting thrown in there's kind of like another level that we experience, and that's what I wanna talk about. Because it's important to understand the differences between these feelings so that we're able to identify them, what we're dealing with and how to process it. So I'm gonna start with shame. Brené Brown defined shame as, "shame is an intensely painful feeling or experience, a believing that you are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging and connection." Shame is really... When we think about shame, you know there's a few things to understand. One is that we all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primary emotions that we all experience. Really, the only people that don't experience it are the ones who have a lack of capacity for empathy or human connection, sociopaths or things like that. But for the average person, for you and me and who you're co-parenting with, most likely, we all have this because shame is universal. The other thing about shame is that we are afraid to talk about it. We don't even like to mention the word shame because for so long it's run so much of our lives, but it's been a thing that we won't talk about. It literally lives in the shadows in the dark places. And the less we talk about it, the more control it has. Shame hates being spoken. It wants to live in those dark shadows. It does not want to come out into the light, because as soon as you bring the light onto it, as soon as you find self-compassion and love for it, shame can't survive in that environment. So it's really important to understand that shame lives and thrives on secrecy and silence and judgment, and so when we understand that we can start to know what to do with it. Right, when so many of us hear the word shame we either think that we have no idea what it means, and that frankly, we don't wanna know. Or we know exactly what it is, but we do not want to talk about it. So what does shame sound like? Right? Shame sounds like your husband leaving you for another woman. Shame sounds like your partner asking you for a divorce because he doesn't wanna be married to you anymore. Shame sounds like telling your friends that you're totally okay with the divorce when you're really not. Shame is raging at our kids. Shame is lashing out at our co-parent. Shame is living in a house where we're being screamed at or diminished on a regular basis, and wondering if we're the only one that lives like this. Shame is hiding the fact that you're struggling. Shame is not being able to pay the bills. Shame is ending another relationship, right? Having another failed relationship. There's many, many things that shame looks and sounds like, but we wanna start to understand what shame is and know that we can start to process it once we start to bring it out of the shadows. So I'm gonna talk about the difference between shame and guilt here because this is important because we've all feel both of these emotions universally. Guilt is an emotion that we experience when we fall short of our own expectations or standards, but the difference is the guilt. Our focus is having done something wrong, or it's on doing something to set things right. Remorse is a subset of guilt, and that when we can acknowledge, when we feel the guilt and that we can acknowledge that we've done something or hurt another person that we feel bad about, we want to change it. We wanna atone for it, and this is the difference. Shame is highly correlated. Brené Brown found out from her work with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, bullying, where empathy and guilt really work together to create a force for change, it's powerful. When we apologize, when we make amends, when we change the behavior that isn't aligned with our values towards what is. So guilt can be absolutely useful. It can be a driver of positive change, and you feel that with guilt. You can feel that it has more of an opening to it, where shame is very much curled in tight in the shadows. So that's really guilt and shame, and the difference there, right? There's a huge difference, but often times when we talk about them we interchange them. Two other feelings that commonly get interchanged with shame and guilt are disappointment and humiliation, and it's important again to separate what exactly these are because once we know the differences between them, then we can start to process them in a way that's beneficial. Disappointment is really, as Brené defines it, is an unmet expectation. The more significant the expectation, the more significant the disappointment. This is why with divorce we so commonly feel disappointment because we had the expectation that everything was gonna work out. We had the expectation that if we got all the things the house, the kids, the husband, that everything would work out. And then when it doesn't, our disappointment is vast. Both disappointment and regret arise from when the outcome in our life, the result is not what we wanted. It's not what we counted on or and it's not what we thought would happen. With disappointment, we often believe that the outcome was out of our control, but with regret we think that it was caused by our decisions and our actions. And this is where I see so many people get stuck. They're stuck in regret, feeling like they just can't get out because it was caused by them, by their decisions, and that is a heavy weight that leads directly into a shame spiral. You know what we regret often times is so much of when we fail to be courageous, when we fail to be kinder, when we fail to show up, when we fail to say how we feel, when we fail to set boundaries or to be good to ourselves or to say yes to things that were scary, right? This is so much when we regret. When we regret all of those things when we didn't show up the way we wanted to, and we start to make that mean something about us, something negative, and we add to the pile of shame that we're feeling. You know often we get stuck in regret because it's also accompanied with self blame. We don't like to be accountable for that. It's so much easier to say it was someone else's fault than to admit the part that we had to play in it. So when we look at the difference between disappointment and regret being disappointed is that it didn't work out how I wanted, and I believe that the outcome was out of my control; This is disappointment, right? But regret is it didn't work out how I wanted, and the outcome was somehow caused by my decisions, my actions or a failure to act, and this is really goes directly into shame. So we can see that both disappointment and guilt while they're very uncomfortable can lead us into a direction of positive change. Really, but regret and shame spiral inward. They keep us in the shadows. They keep us in the dark. And we need to understand these differences because it's all about how we're gonna act moving forward. So really the thing that leads us through shame and regret is self-compassion. Self-compassion is the first step to healing shame because we need to be kind to ourselves. We cannot beat ourselves out of feeling shame. It only adds to it. So self-compassion is key, and there is no better researcher than Kristin Neff on self-compassion. She runs the Center for Mindfulness and Self-Compassion at University of Texas and has amazing research if you're interested. But she breaks it into three different parts for self-compassion, right? Self-kindness versus self-judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification. And so I wanna just break down some of her findings. You know, she says that self-compassion entails being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail and feel inadequate rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Self-compassionate people recognize that being imperfect, failing and experiencing these life's difficulties are inevitable. So they tend to be gentle with themselves when confronted with painful experiences rather than getting angry when life falls short or knock them down. This is huge. Again, when shame and regret spiral into the shadows, it is self-compassion, it's kindness that brings us out, not judgment, not beating ourselves up and not pointing out all the ways that we've done things wrong. The next part is common humanity versus isolation. Self-compassion involves recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the human experience. We all do this. We all experience it. Something that we all go through. It's not just you alone. And this is an important point to remember, because when we feel shame, when we feel regret, we feel like it's because of us that we're different, that we're alone, but it's not, right? They're shared human experiences. The third key that Kristin Neff suggests for self-compassion which is crucial for being able to move through shame, regret and also guilt and disappointment is mindfulness versus over-identification. She says that mindfulness is a non-judgemental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are without trying to suppress or deny them. This is huge, right? This is a lot of the work that I do with my clients each and every day, because again, we have to learn to retrain our brain. When we have lived in a place or a mindset of being in the black and white, in the right and the wrong, in the good and the bad, his way or my way. Right, these are extremes. These are polar opposite places, and our brain is actually wired to live in that black and white state because it wants certainty. But that's just not the world that we live in. The world that we live in is in the gray, and so we have to bring ourselves into a mindset where we can be mindful, we can be present, not living on the extremes, because that keeps us suffering. So what we really wanna do is start to live more in the gray area, and this is so important because this is not easily done alone. Shame and regret thrive in the shadows. They thrive in the secrecy and they thrive in the silence, so one of the biggest steps forward is taking the creators act of reaching out and getting help. When you're in one of these shame spirals which we all go through during the divorce process at one time or another, you are not alone, right? Elizabeth Gilbert has a quote of saying, "My mind is not a place to go alone at night." I remember in the midst of my divorce laughing because this hit home so much. My mind was a place I didn't even wanna spend time, and that's why I had to reach out. I needed help. I needed to understand that I had the strength and the power and the courage to shine a light in those dark corners of my mind, and that I could withstand what I saw because frankly, shame cannot live in the light. So it's so important and I urge you... I know that you're here listening to this, and this is huge, but make sure you know that you're not alone. Get support around you. Get support of people who understand what you're going through and can help guide you out; whether that's a mentor, whether that's a coach, whether that's a therapist, whether that's a support group, whatever it is. We need to be in community. It helps to link arms and have someone walk beside us while we do this work of turning the light into the shame and the regret, and also the disappointment and the guilt that we all feel, it's common, it's normal, it's part of the process. I know for me when I'm helping guide my clients through this, through the shame and the guilt, it's done with a lot of care and a lot of love. It's a holistic approach really to healing, that we have to start to understand our human value, not our accomplished value. It's where we learn how to feel and process and release the emotions, so that we don't end up just recycling them and re-living them. Right? I always like to think of it, is shame and regret, and guilt and disappointment, these are all things that we feel. Pretty normal. What we don't wanna do is set up a tent and live there. So we need to be able to learn the process to feel them to process the emotions and to release them. So we're not pitching that tent and living in that place. Also it's learning how to re-align your expectations. Life has changed, things have shifted. New awareness and clarity is coming for you as you're learning, as you're processing, as you're going through this. What you know today is so much more than you knew two months ago. It's in constant evolution, and so we have to be willing to realign our expectations so that we understand what matters most for you because that's what you're going to stick with. When we're trying to align our expectations with what everyone else thinks we're gonna do, it doesn't last. And so that's what I help my clients really start to put together a vision plan to understand what matters to me, because you know what, when you know what matters to you you're gonna follow through. And the other thing is, we have to learn to be uncomfortable without reacting, and that's really what shame does for us. When we're living in shame we're just hiding and we're running away from all of the things outside of ourselves. We're so concentrated on not looking at the shame, not even wanting to look towards it that we end up living our lives avoiding that place in our mind, but we're just suffering and we're not showing up in the way we want to. So when we can learn to be uncomfortable, when we set up that support to have people around us to help us shine the light where it needs to be shown, without reacting, without offloading all of our hard feelings on to other, people this is a powerful place of healing. So I hope that today has helped you. Helped identify the differences between shame and guilt, between disappointment and regrets, because we all feel these things. It's part of the shared experience, and divorce and co-parenting is a time when these emotions are very common and they pop up a lot. And there are ways to move through it. It is possible, and I know it to be true because I see it every day. If you know someone who is struggling I would so grateful if you would share this episode with them. If they're experiencing any of these feelings, please just take a screenshot and send it to them, or share it on social media. And if you share it on Instagram, I'd be so grateful if you'd tag me because I'd love to connect with you there. Thank you so much for spending this time with me, and if you have any questions or topics that you want answered please just email me at [email protected] and let me know. I keep all these questions in a file, and that's how I come up with new topics. So I would love to hear what's on your mind, so I'll see you next week and in the meantime take really, really good care of you, friend. Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]