THE HIDDEN WEIGHT OF MOTHERHOOD — HOW RESENTMENT AND GUILT KEEP MOMS STUCK | EP. 54
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 54.
Hello, friends. So I decided to do a little weight loss reset with myself. Over the past few months, I've noticed some pounds creeping on.
It's so easy to give up, now that we're in our 40s or 50s. The weight just seems to come on, even when we haven't done much to deserve it. It can be frustrating.
And that frustration alone can keep us stuck in a situation where it feels impossible to lose weight. Well, I refuse to give up. So here I am, in June of all things, committing to cut out alcohol, flour, and sugar to try to get myself back on track.
So I don't know if you've noticed, but if you've ever gone on a diet or tried to cut back on something, some habit that you have, drinking or scrolling on social media, when you commit to stop doing the thing, that's when all the emotions we've been trying to buffer against come up for us. It's good times. This is what I mean by buffering.
All of us experience negative emotions sometimes. It's part of the human experience, right? We're happy sometimes and not happy other times. Call it 50-50.
Truly, when you average the good times and the bad times over the course of your life, you'd come out about 50-50. And the negative 50 isn't always terrible. Sometimes it's just uncomfortable.
If you expressed it in terms of emotions, the negative 50 might include fairly tame emotions like feeling bored or shy or slightly annoyed. But what many of us do, and I'm actually convinced that the majority of us do this, what we typically do is we find a way to try to feel better when we're experiencing a negative emotion. It sounds like a good thing, right? Of course, we want to feel better.
But sometimes the way we look to feel better can be in seeking short-term pleasure as a diversion or a buffer against the negative emotion. Take food, for example. Have you ever been stressed and found yourself mindlessly snacking when you're not even hungry or thought to yourself, after a long day, I deserve a glass of wine? There's absolutely nothing wrong with eating or drinking.
We're grown adults. We get to do whatever we want to do. And there are plenty of times when we eat or drink that have nothing to do with buffering against a negative emotion.
But for me, and I've shared this in past podcasts, my buffer of choice has always been a glass of wine with a nice chunk of cheese and maybe some chocolate on the side. So when do I typically buffer? Before I learned about mindset work and life coaching, I buffered away a long list of negative emotions, boredom, stress, anxiety, social anxiety, frustration, anger, loneliness, I could go on. I would also use wine to try and capture a more positive feeling when I was feeling low.
Like I thought wine brought me feelings of relaxation, even joy and happiness. When we buffer with things like wine or food or really anything that brings us a big hit of dopamine, it could be sex, drugs, online shopping, binging Netflix. So we do these things sometimes to escape a negative emotion.
And we do get a short-term hit of pleasure in the form of dopamine. And our brains, our primitive brains actually think something along the lines of, I'll have more of what she's having. And think about the habit reward loop, trigger negative emotion, habit, drinking wine, reward, dopamine hit.
The more you practice this loop, the more deeply ingrained this habit becomes. And when we do this, we're actually creating a neural pathway in our brain that puts us on autopilot. It's actually a beautiful thing that our brains like to learn so we're efficient.
But when we learn habits like using wine or food or anything else outside of us to feel better, when we're feeling bad, we become really good, really efficient at buffering. This is why you can find yourself at the bottom of a bag of chips before you even know what's happening. As you're listening to this, I wonder what your buffer of choice is, if you have one.
And maybe even more importantly, what's the emotion that you most want to run away from? Or maybe like me, you have a long list of negative emotions that feel intolerable to you. So as I said, I'm on this health reset, cutting way back on sugar and flour and alcohol. And in the process, cutting back on the mindless snacking and drinking I've found myself doing more and more of over the past few months.
Have you noticed that there's always another party or event or holiday that makes it hard to cut back on the fun stuff? And summer's no exception. So while it may sound crazy for me to be picking now of all times to do this, I guess the other side of the coin is there's never a perfect time. So why not now? And as I cut back on this mindless eating and drinking, say no to the buffering against negative emotion, using food and wine to feel better, I'm left with those negative emotions.
And so I thought I'd take you on a journey with me as I explore the most difficult emotion for me, at least in my life right now. Women come to me for coaching because of a long list of emotions. They feel anxiety, sadness, fear, frustration, anger, resentment.
Our thoughts about our lives and our teens bring it all up for us. And these emotions can feel intolerable. The hardest part is that particularly when the issues we're facing involve our kids or other people or generally things that are out of our control, it feels even more intolerable because it seems there's no escaping the negative emotion.
This is actually why I found life coaching in the first place. My boys were still young enough at the time that we hadn't hit the truly rocky teen years yet, but I did notice my habit of drinking wine at night was something I didn't want to be doing as much of anymore. I knew I wasn't an alcoholic, but I was totally at a loss about how to cut back or stop altogether.
It seemed out of my control. When I learned the concept of buffering, it all made sense. I didn't have a drinking problem.
I had a problem just feeling my negative emotions. I simply didn't want to feel the discomfort of the emotions I was feeling in my life at the time. And so I had a glass or two or three of wine at night to feel a little better.
And I've been doing this long enough that it was a deeply ingrained habit. Breaking the habit required me to welcome the negative emotions I was desperately running away from. So it's really no wonder that it's hard to break a habit like this.
It's so much easier to have the glass of wine than to feel the negative feelings. And as I said, there's nothing wrong with having a glass of wine or the chips or the cake. You get to have whatever you want.
But there comes a point, at least there was for me, where I started to notice that the downside of regularly indulging in the habit was that I was gaining weight, getting headaches in the morning, and generally feeling unwell in the morning. So all this to say in my life now, I'm not out of control, but I'm noticing that I've been reverting to this mindless eating and drinking again. And so for me, it's a signal that it's time to check in and find out what's going on with me.
What feeling am I trying to escape in my life? As I've said in the past, I've had a long list of feelings that I've wanted to buffer away. But right now I'm noticing one feeling in particular that's persistent and feels really uncomfortable to me. And so I'm curious, why am I feeling resentment? So let's start with the easy stuff.
First, I'm resentful because I wish I didn't have to try so hard just to maintain my weight. I've long given up the goal of being skinny. I'm not trying to get on the cover of Sports Illustrated by any means.
I just wish it wasn't so hard. I could blame my age or menopause, the person who discovered chocolate. I could blame a lot of things out of my control.
But the truth is, I'm resentful because I just wish it were easier. I wish I could eat whatever I want. I wish I could be one of those people who, when offered a glass of wine, would be able to say no thanks without one twinge of regret.
So this is the layer of resentment that's the first barrier to breaking a habit or being successful with weight loss in general. At the end of the day, there's a part of us that doesn't want to feel deprived of the thing we want, the thing we honestly think we deserve. Because we all have the right to feel better, don't we? So here's what I know.
I'm resentful that it's not easy to keep weight off and that I can't both eat and drink whatever I want and have a lean body that feels great. When I'm honest with myself, what I actually want more than the short-lived pleasure of a glass of wine or a hunk of cheese is the feeling of zipping up my pants without having to suck in my stomach. Also the feeling of waking up without a headache or a queasy stomach.
Because I want to feel lean and healthy more than I want to feel the rush of dopamine from that first sip or bite. Because honestly, the second, third, and fourth aren't that exciting. So because what I really want is to fit into the darn pants, I'm willing to feel a little resentment that it's not easier.
I'm willing to feel it and not to respond to it by giving in and eating or drinking. Nothing's gone wrong. I just wish it were easier and right now it's not.
So I feel resentful. Think about what resentment is. It's a vibration in your body.
That's true of any emotion. As I'm talking about this, I invite you to think about the emotion you most don't want to feel. Anxiety, fear, anger, whatever it is.
These emotions are vibrations in our body and for as much as we often want to run and hide from them, these emotions can't actually hurt us. They just feel uncomfortable. Anxiety might feel like a buzzing in your head, a restless energy, sometimes a big weight in your stomach.
Anger feels hot and red. Your face might flush and your fists might clench. It feels strong, almost like your body's winding itself up, getting ready to fight.
Resentment to me feels like a gritty, small churning in my chest. When it comes to an urge to eat or drink, it's often accompanied by a craving just to eat or drink to feel better. So often the combination of the resentment and the craving are just too much.
You just give in and you eat the thing. So right now during this reset, I'm not eating or drinking the thing. So I'm noticing the cravings and a resentment that it's not easier and I can't just eat what I want.
I'm noticing these feelings and I'm allowing them. I'm not making it a problem that they're there. Allowing looks like sitting with the feeling, actually inviting it in, noticing what it feels like in my body.
Allowing is so much different than using willpower. Using willpower is really just resisting the feeling, either trying to run and hide from it, distract yourself from it, or just baring your teeth and fighting against the feeling. Neither resisting nor fighting these feelings work in the long run.
They just make the feelings bigger, which is why when we use willpower to lose weight, for example, after a few weeks or days, even we find ourselves binging in relief. Resisting can make the feeling so much bigger. Allowing it just lets the feeling pass over you.
The skillset is incredible to master. But here's the crazy thing about allowing resentment about eating. That resentment comes and goes throughout the day, but I start to notice other feelings coming up.
I mentioned before that we often buffer to escape from feelings we don't like. Once we develop a habit of doing this, it's like we need to buffer or escape from the craving and a resentment connected to the habit. In my case, the overeating and drinking.
But what about the feelings that led us to buffer in the first place? Let me ask you, do you have a habit that's your go-to that makes you feel better? This doesn't need to be a bad thing. Some people go on walks or exercise to feel better. Some people paint or journal.
There are productive activities that just in the doing of them help us access more positive thoughts. But often we have other habits, pleasure-seeking habits, that may not be as productive. How can you know if you're buffering? Ultimately, only you can know.
But if there's some negative consequence to the habit, even if that's just a bit of shame around our reliance on the habit, then it might be a sign that we're relying on the habit to feel better about something. Now look, we can break any habit by not doing it, allowing the cravings to come and go and practice that to the point where we crave doing that thing less. But what I want to explore more than the habit itself is what is that feeling, that negative feeling that caused us to buffer in the first place? What about our life are we trying to escape? Well, the answer for all of us might be a lot of things.
In fact, for each of us, we might have many different feelings we think are uncomfortable. Do you know what I've realized my uncomfortable feeling is? It's still the resentment, not only about food and wine, but about things that happen in my life. In thinking what I wanted to say about this, I asked Google what it has to say about resentment, and this is what I got.
Resentment is often defined as anger and indignation experienced as a result of unfair treatment. Those who experience resentment may have feelings of annoyance and shame. They might also harbor a desire for revenge.
I'm still quoting Google here. Resentment is the feeling that you didn't get your way in the past. These feelings are therefore based in selfishness, the need to get your wants fulfilled.
That's the end of the quote. So here's what I want to say about this. I think we as moms hold on to a lot of resentment, and with that, a lot of shame.
Stick with me. Here's what I mean. In so many ways, I believe moms are incredibly selfless.
We give up our bodies for nine months per child. Statistically, we bear the brunt of child rearing. We often manage the home, the schedules, the purchase of clothing, groceries, supplies of all kinds.
We keep the home clean. We're on the front lines of supporting our kids in any way that they need us. That's not to say that dad or our partners don't help out too, but it's different.
The things we tend to focus on are different. And I understand that this doesn't happen in every family, so I'm generalizing a bit here. But we also tend to carry a lot of the worry and the stress in raising our kids.
That's not at all to say that dads don't care, but they seem to hold onto it less. Even more, and this is a big one, they don't seem to hold onto as much of the guilt as we do. At least that's what I've noticed in my experience.
We as moms, not all of us, but many of us feel guilty about not being enough in the past. We feel guilty we're doing it wrong now. We're worried we'll regret the mistakes we don't even know if we're making today.
Dads often don't carry as much of this guilt and regret and worry about the future. And this message isn't about dads. My point is that moms are selfless, but we can harbor quite a bit of resentment.
So to me, the definition of resentment as being rooted in selfishness doesn't ring true for me. I get what they mean, but the kind of resentment I'm talking about is different. It's also something we don't talk a lot about because the shame part rings true for me.
I find that I don't like feeling resentful because I think I don't have a right to feel that way. With all of the blessings in my life, my kids, my health, every blessing, what right do I have to think that anything about my life is unfair or not perfect? I think this is why the resentment can simmer because we shame ourselves out of allowing it. We actually would rather hide from it, pretend it's not there.
Except like using willpower to fight cravings, resisting or hiding from the resentment only makes it bigger. What are we resentful about? Well, I've declared the small jar as a safe space where we can explore these feelings without shame. So let's just put it all out on the table.
What are some of the reasons we as moms of teenage or adult kids can feel resentful? I'll share some that I've noticed not only with me, but with my clients. Well, let's start with the here and now. We can feel resentful when we think that our kids treat us like we're no one.
We literally love them more than life itself. And we can think about our interactions with them in a way that makes us feel dismissed, ignored and rejected. When our child slams a door in our face, literally or figuratively, we look at that situation and we feel hurt.
And we can also feel a deep sense of resentment. It just doesn't seem possible that we could have put our heart and soul into the raising this human only to be cast aside. We can feel resentful that our kids are off living their best life and we're at home waiting for them just in case they want to have dinner or cleaning up their messes, doing their laundry.
We're still waiting to see if they need us just in case. And meanwhile, our own lives are stagnating. We can feel resentment about the division of chores in the house, thinking that we're always doing more than our fair share, or even that we have to be the ones to ask or nag others to help us out.
We can feel resentment that we don't seem to get any acknowledgement or appreciation for a constant effort to support our families. Is this just us wanting to get our way? Maybe, sometimes. But also what we're asking doesn't seem unreasonable in our minds.
We can feel resentful that we even have to ask for help or gratitude. Shouldn't people understand that this is what they should do, help and be appreciative? Except people, including our families, are not perfect at meeting our expectations of them all of the time. There's an aspect of resentment that implies that something outside of us, something out of our control, has wronged us in some way.
Our kids, our partner, our mom, a friend, a boss. And I think resentment is a bit different than anger, although resentment can often manifest itself in angry outbursts. But I think more of resentment is something that simmers under the surface.
It's often unspoken, not addressed head-on. It's more of the source of passive-aggressive remarks to try to get someone else's behavior to change. It begs the question, why do we let resentment simmer rather than addressing it head-on? Sometimes it's because the problem feels unsolvable.
Take the case with our teens. If you've got a teen who you feel is disrespecting or dismissing you in some way, I'd be willing to bet that you've already tried to address it with them. But then they don't change.
So you're left with this simmering resentment. Again, it's the after-everything-I've-done-for-you feeling. I saw a Mel Robbins post that said, when someone says, after all I've done for you, they're revealing what they did for you was not for you at all, but their own need to control you.
Their generosity was a contract with hidden terms. It's actually a quote from Wade Mullen, who wrote Something's Not Right, a book about abuse tactics. I can absolutely see how the statement after everything I've done for you could be used in an abusive way and to try to manipulate someone.
But this is not what I'm describing or condoning. What I'm talking about is the natural tendency for us to ask ourselves, what did I do to deserve this? I gave you everything I could, everything I had to give, and now I feel rejected. But ultimately, we can't control how our kids treat us.
And so we're left feeling hurt and resentful when we think they are the ones who are causing our pain. I've also worked with women who have been navigating challenging marriages or romantic relationships, and we can build up a lot of simmering resentment in these situations too. Again, we often do try to tell our partner what we need or ask for help.
But when things don't change, we're left feeling powerless again, resentful about how we wish things were different and they're not. I personally have done a lot of work on resentment. It's a feeling I don't like to feel.
But in the past, this feeling was all-consuming to me. When I was younger, I used to feel resentful about how my bosses treated me or whether friends or family acted in the way I wanted them to act. I would often feel so justified in my thinking that my resentment felt like the truth to me, like it was the truth that I had been wronged.
I look back on all of these situations and realize how wrong I was. Not wrong in having the feeling of resentment, but wrong in how I was interpreting the situation. It's not even a matter of who was right and who was wrong or being able to see the other person's perspective.
What I was wrong about was that someone else could hurt me or treat me unfairly. At this point, I might be losing you, but what changed everything for me in my life was when I understood that the only one who was hurting me was me. I was creating my own pain by judging the situation as unfair.
And here's the thing, you can still think something is unfair or different than you want it to be and not create your own pain. Understanding how to do this has changed everything for me in my life. But there's another area of resentment that I'm still working on, and it's even more insidious than the resentment that happens in relation to other people.
This resentment is the resentment around decisions I'm making and not being honest with myself about that. It's fascinating what happens in your mind, really. The more I get to know myself and my own mind, the more in all I am of how complex, complicated, and beautiful the human mind is.
Here's a simple example of what I'm talking about. So sometimes I make dinner and if you regularly listen to this podcast, you know I don't love making dinner or cooking in general. There are some days that I do it because I genuinely want to.
Usually it's a Sunday and I know everyone's going to be home for dinner and I have time to plan something and not feel rushed about it. But there are other days, typically weekdays, when I get home after a busy day and I cook and I resent it the whole time. Here's the difference.
On Sundays, I'm literally thinking I get to create dinner and bring my family together. And guess what that thinking creates? Joy, purpose, precious time with my family. And no surprise, zero resentment.
But during the weekdays, I'm thinking something along the lines of, it's been such a long day, I can't believe I'm still working. Or I wish I didn't have to cook and I could just sit and relax. Or I wish someone else in the family would volunteer to cook.
Cue resentment. You're probably thinking that makes sense, that I would feel better about cooking on a Sunday because I have more time. I'm not stressed out after a long day of work, but it's actually none of those things that make me feel better or worse about cooking.
It is literally the way I'm thinking about it. I could just as easily think on a Sunday, I wish I didn't have to cook and I could just sit and relax. Or on a weekday, I could also think I get to create dinner and bring my family together.
So as a life coach, I get all of that, but I still sometimes feel resentment because it simmers under the surface. It's one of those feelings that can bubble up unexpectedly, so it can be harder to address it head on. But as I've been doing just that, I've realized often when I feel the most resentful, I'm not being honest with myself about what I really want.
There's something about resentment that implies that we have no power to change our situation. Like it can feel true that I have to cook dinner or that I can't sit and relax, but those statements are never actually true. I actually never have to cook again.
The truth is I choose to cook. I can sit and relax whenever I want. The truth is I'm not choosing to relax.
I'm choosing to do something else. So who exactly is in the driver's seat of my resentment other than me? When I remember that I'm the one in control of my emotional life, I'm able to drop the resentment just like that. I started this episode talking about buffering as a way to hide from negative emotions like resentment.
But when you're able to manage your mind, you literally don't have to hide because you know how to feel better. And even when you need to stay a little sad or hurt, you get to be in the driver's seat of your emotional life. You have more power than you think, my friends.
Until next time. Wait, one more thing. Raising teens is tough.
As moms, we feel responsible for everything. Our kids' happiness, their success, their safety and well-being, and yet none of it seems to be in our control. Still, we try and then we feel like we're failing.
So then we feel anxious and frustrated, guilty when things go wrong. I know that you are doing the best you can as a mom, but you need tools. And in Mom 2.0, I've got them.
Join me on a journey to gain control of your anxiety, sadness, frustration, and guilt and start finding joy and peace in your life right now. The moments you have with your child at home are fleeting. Don't waste them feeling miserable.
See you in Mom 2.0.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
