Imagine breaking free from the chains of self-blame that you’re feeling, especially after going through divorce. This episode explores the profound self-blame women often experience during and after divorce, rooted in societal conditioning and expectations. I’ll discuss the fine line between taking responsibility and succumbing to guilt and offer tools to reprogram your conditioned societal beliefs to step into a healthier self identity.
Things that you’ll get from this episode:
Understanding societal conditioning around blame and worth
Exploring the impact of self-blame on motherhood and relationships
Strategies for recognizing harmful thought patterns
Encouraging self-compassion and embracing imperfection
How to rewrite narratives keeping you stuck in self blame
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
This is Becoming you Again, the podcast that offers you the mental and emotional support that you need as you go through your divorce. You are listening to episode number 197, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Hello, my friends, welcome back to the podcast.
It's the new year. You're now through the holidays. How are you feeling? What's new, what's different? What do you want to let go of as you begin with this fresh start that you have coming up? These are just some things to think about before I dive into today's topic, and so give those things a thought. If you haven't been thinking about them, maybe take a moment to think about them. You are totally allowed to create intentions for this coming year, whatever those intentions are, and if you haven't thought about them, maybe now's the time to do so.
All right, so I've been toying around with the title of this podcast, and I haven't quite decided on it yet, and so I guess we're just actually going to have to see what it ends up being, but it's definitely going to be something to do with why we as women, as mothers, blame ourselves for everything while we go through divorce and, even beyond that, after the divorce. So, yeah, you can see that that title would be like totally crazy. It would be so long and so, um, that's definitely probably not going to be the title, but it will be something around those lines, because that's kind of what I'm going for as far as topics go, because a consistent trend that I see with all of my clients is that they blame themselves for so much as they move through the divorce, and then that blame often continues to pop up after the divorce, and so my goal is to provide some understanding as to why we, as women, are taking the blame, and then I also want to give you some tools to help when that blame shows up, so that you can reprogram your brain to stop the blame game. I've been thinking a lot about this topic of blame for quite a while now, and a conclusion that I've come to is we, as women, take the blame for so many things, things that we should probably take responsibility for and things that are completely and utterly outside of our control, and the reason we do this is because of the way that we have been socialized.
Now listen, I talk about socialization a lot on this podcast and how it affects us as women, and I don't focus as much on the other half of that. But, to be real, this same socialization also affects men, right, they are raised in the same society that we are. However, they are socialized differently than we are. But the point is that we are, however, they are socialized differently than we are. But the point is that we are all, men and women, socialized to believe certain things about ourselves and our roles in this society, and what we believe about ourselves has us feeling certain things, and it's those feelings that drive our actions, our behaviors, and it's those actions and those behaviors that create a certain return in our own life, that create some kind of result in our own life. But because this podcast is made by me, who happens to be a woman, and it is for women, I will be focusing on the socialization of women, and so, in case you haven't heard it enough. Or maybe this is your first time listening to this podcast ever. I just want to talk about some of the ways that women are socialized in this society that we live in today, and it hasn't just been going on for today. It's been going on for many, many, many, many, many many years, right, okay, so women are socialized to demonstrate our value and our worth.
We are often taught to believe that we are not inherently good enough as we are, but rather we have to show our value or our worth, and that comes out in many different ways. I'm going to talk about this in an upcoming episode, very in depth, about self-love and self-confidence and self-esteem and all of that. So make sure and look forward to that podcast. But it is. It is something that we are kind of taught that our value as women needs to be shown, needs to be earned, needs to be, like, achieved in some way, and once we do that, once we've shown our value, then we can be accepted. That's when we are given permission to believe that we actually have value, that we actually have worth.
Maybe you grew up with the idea that if no one wants to marry you, then there's something wrong with you. I definitely did. I had this underlying fear that I wasn't pretty enough and I didn't grow up in a family that had a lot of money, and so I believed that it was definitely going to be harder for me to be chosen as a wife. I believe that that is part of the reason I got married so young, at 19. I believe that this idea was based on this belief that someone found me, someone chose me, and so I better not let them go, because this might be my only chance at being completely worthy of whatever I believed that I was lacking in worth right, and as women, we are also socialized to only like ourselves when certain conditions that society has decided upon have been met. So, for instance, if you look young enough, even as you're getting older right, then you can believe that you're pretty and people will like you.
If you weigh a certain amount or can fit into a sample size or whatever right a certain size, then you can believe that you're worthy of being out in public or worthy of riding on an airplane, or worthy of fitting comfortably into a theater seat, or worthy of being treated fairly and objectively by a doctor, or generally just being looked at as acceptable by society or generally just being looked at as acceptable by society, and if you're not, then sorry, you're shit, out of luck. We are socialized to underestimate ourselves in every way and then, in turn, we then underestimate other women as well, right, even if you're doing great and you are objectively excelling. One study has shown that women typically rate their performance as lower than men do, despite how they actually scored on a test. So we, as women, we are socialized to believe that we are in charge of making everyone else comfortable and making sure that everyone else is taken care of. This is one of the reasons why women lean toward people pleasing. We believe that it's our literal job J-O-B capitalized right To make sure everyone else is good, and if they are, then we can relax a bit and we can take a load off.
But if they're unhappy, we must fix it, and that means doing whatever it takes, even if that means pretending to be something that we're not, or trying to make other people's emotional lives safe, successful, happy, appreciated, loved, valued, praised. Whatever, even if it makes us feel like shit, we will do it. If people are unhappy, we got to fix it. If people are hungry, we got to change that. We got to make sure they got food in front of them. If they are struggling with a problem, we need to jump in and solve that problem.
This one socialized trait of women lends itself to the idea of blame, I think, probably more than any other, because we believe that if something goes wrong or if someone in our realm feels some kind of negative emotion, then we didn't do our job of making others feel comfortable and taken care of, and so, of course, that means that whatever has happened is our fault. And we are also taught that our actions create other people's emotions. Like how many times have you heard someone say well, you made me mad, what you did upset me, you hurt my feelings? We get fed this lie by other people that you are in charge of their emotions. It's like they're saying you're in charge of my emotions, whether I'm happy, proud, supportive, angry, upset, pissed off, supportive, angry, upset, pissed off, invalidated, whatever right.
And this maybe has shown up when you were growing up with your parents. Like maybe they gave you love if you got a good grade, but they treated you poorly or they ignored you, or they use the silent treatment or whatever. If you got a bad grade right, or if you performed well in your sport. You got the high fives, you got the accolades, you got taken out to dinner and if you performed terribly, you know you got to go practice more. You're not good enough. You're no daughter of mine. How could you right? This could have also shown up If you followed the rules, or if you were home by curfew, or if you had good friends, and or if you didn't speak out of turn or like whatever. It can show up in so many different ways. This might have also been reinforced in the marriage that you had. Like.
My ex used to use the silent treatment as a means of punishment constantly. This was his like go to way of telling me that I had done something wrong in his eyes. Right, it was his way of saying that whatever I did to him, it was my fault, but he's not going to tell me what that was. Instead, he's going to be completely silent and ignore me for days on end sometimes, so that I can have a chance to figure out what I did and change, and then maybe I'll treat you better, like. I don't know if that's what he was thinking, but that is how I felt. I felt like it was totally my fault that he was treating me that way, that it was something that I had done, but he's not going to tell me what that is. I just have to be good enough to figure out what it is so that I can change it and not do it again next time. So maybe things like this were happening in your marriage too, or maybe it was something else, but we blame ourselves for being in charge of other people's emotions, and it's just not true.
Another reason that we blame ourselves for everything as women is that women typically are the person who managed the household and the kids schedules, and for many, many women, myself included, this is happening while you're also working full-time, part-time, whatever. In Bright Horizons 2017 Modern Family Index Survey, it found that working women were two times as likely to also manage the household and three times as likely to manage the kids' schedules. If I asked every person listening to this podcast right now to raise your hand if you number one, work, number two, manage the kids schedules and number three, take care of the home, like cook dinner, clean most of the time, do the laundry, those kinds of things I would guarantee that, like at least 80% of the women out there are raising their hands, and even if you don't work outside of the home. I guarantee that you feel an overabundance of feeling like you have to manage the home and all of the kids' schedules without asking for help, because perhaps you're not working outside of the home and so you feel like it's your responsibility to just be in charge of all of that, which is, let's be real, a full-time job right In and of itself. So this points to the theory that women are blaming themselves for things because they feel that they are in charge of that thing, and so, of course, if something goes wrong, it must be your fault, when pain is felt, when something gets forgotten, when homework isn't done but it leads to the fact that women take the blame and we place it upon ourselves. Okay, so now that we have a pretty good idea about ways that women are socialized and how that lends itself to the belief that we are to blame for everything.
The next question is now what, like? Where do we go from here? And the first thing that we need to understand is that just because you've been taught something, or taught to believe something, or because you have a thought about something, it doesn't mean that it's true Just because you have been socialized to believe all of these things about yourself and your role as a woman doesn't mean that they're actually true or that you have to buy into it any longer. Maybe you didn't know about these things, maybe you weren't aware of it until right this moment. That's great news, because now that you are aware, now is when we get to actually decide if it's something that we want to continue to buy into, something we want to continue to believe. If it is, that's totally fine. That is up to you. But you can't make that decision until you actually see it and understand where it's coming from.
Just because you've been told or taught or conditioned to believe that your role as a woman is one way doesn't mean that you have to continue to adhere to these socialized rules. It doesn't mean that you have to continue to blame yourself for everything that goes wrong in your life or in your partner's life, or your kid's life or anyone else's lives, anything that's gone wrong, that's going wrong or that will go wrong. You don't have to take the blame for that. And I just want to add a little caveat here. I'm not saying don't take responsibility for things, taking responsibility for choices that you made. That is an active, powerful place to be. That is owning your mistakes, if necessary. Right. That comes from self-acceptance, self-trust, self-compassion, that comes from love of yourself and love of others. But blindly accepting blame for all things just because you have been conditioned to believe that it's always your fault, that is passive, that is blindly following, that is blind belief, that is full of shame, that is full of self-hatred, that is full of self-abandonment, where you're not even having your own back in things. And that's what we're trying to step away from is to have you step into your power, and that is going to come from possibly taking responsibility for things in moments where you feel necessary, where you feel it necessary to take responsibility for those things. That is totally different than blaming yourself, is totally different than blaming yourself. And so the first step that we need to do is we need to see the thoughts that are keeping you believing that you're to blame.
How do we identify what we're thinking? Well, the best and easiest way is to write it down. Write it down with a paper and pen. Write it down on a computer, like type it up, or a typewriter, or on your iPad with an iPad pen or with some markers, like literally, however you wish to do it, just write it down. And what I want you to do is I want you to write what feels heavy to you, what you wish you could change, what you're feeling guilty over, what you're blaming yourself for, what you feel is all your fault. Write that out, set a timer for five minutes and then just let your consciousness out on paper. I don't want you to judge what you're writing. Don't edit it, don't feel like you need to change it, don't feel like somebody's going to read this and judge you for whatever you're thinking. No, that's not what we're doing here. We're just writing it all out. Getting it all out on paper, because once you have identified the thoughts, that's where you have the opportunity to bring awareness to what you're actually thinking, and then you get to decide if that thought is serving you or not, if that thought is helping you or not. You get to see how you actually feel when that thought pops into your awareness and if you want to keep it or not.
Right, the incredibly great thing about thoughts is we can change what we are thinking and believing to things that we are more intentional about. If we know that we don't have to believe everything our brain tells us, then we also know that it's possible to intentionally choose what we want to think and believe instead. So write your thoughts down, stream of consciousness, get it all out. And once you've written down your stream of thoughts, I want you to take one of the sentences or one of the thoughts that stands out to you. That's the one we're going to work on first. We're going to work on intentionally changing that thought first. You don't have to change all of them to work on first. We're going to work on intentionally changing that thought first. You don't have to change all of them right away. Okay, we're not shooting for perfection here. We're just shooting for a little bit of change, a little bit of feeling better, a little bit of reprogramming how we think about ourselves in this socialized world. Right?
So maybe one of your thoughts is I'm a terrible parent for putting my kids through a divorce. Well, when you think that thought, how do you feel in your body? My guess is you probably feel some guilt, maybe some shame, maybe you feel inadequate, maybe you feel something else. Those things, they don't feel that good. If we want to be real. Shame feels terrible. Inadequacy feels terrible. Guilt does not feel good, right, when you feel those negative emotions because of that thought I'm a terrible parent for putting my kids through this divorce. You then behave from those feelings of shame or of guilt or of inadequacy, and then that keeps you in this place. This cycle of blame, guilt and shame which keeps you believing this thought that you're a terrible parent for putting your kids through a divorce, which keeps you stuck in that cycle. It just continues to repeat itself. Which keeps you stuck in that cycle. It just continues to repeat itself.
So, believing something else, even if it is a small teeny baby, kiddie, step away from the thought I'm a terrible parent for putting my kids through this divorce. Believing something else will have you feeling a little less terrible, which will have you behaving in a slightly different way, less terrible, which will have you behaving in a slightly different way. That's going to create a return on your life that is slightly different than what you've been creating in your life until now, and maybe even big difference, right. But what we want to do is create slight changes. We're not going for night and day difference here. So what thought feels a little bit better but is still believable to you?
Spend a few minutes coming up with some of some ideas. Right, make your brain really work here and again. We're not looking for toxic positivity here. We don't want to go from I'm a terrible parent to whatever. I'm just the greatest parent alive. Hello, that is toxic positivity at its core, right? It's not believable. You're just trying to like trick your brain into believing something that's completely out of the realm of actual parenting. Right, we don't need to be the greatest parent alive. Why would you even want to be the greatest parent alive? What does that even mean? Who would you even compare it to? That's just an empty affirmation that has no merit, no belief associated with it that your brain and your body are going to reject immediately. So we're not shooting for toxic positivity here. Okay, don't go to the opposite. Pretend affirmation here. Really make your brain work.
Come up with some tangential thoughts meaning like they're pretty close to what you already believe, but they're a little, they feel a little bit better tangential thoughts that can work. I'm going to give you a few ideas and then I'm going to give you, just like this, one thing that you can think. It's like a little starter thought that works on almost literally every single thought that you might have that's negative about yourself and it's going to be a great one. If you can't think of anything else, you can use this one. I use it sometimes and it's really great. But I want you to start with these starter thoughts to get you out of this blame cycle.
So if your thought is, I'm just going to go back to the example that I've been giving, I'm a terrible parent for putting my kids through this divorce If that's your thought, right, a new starter thought might be. It's possible. I'm thinking this thought because it feels familiar, not because it's actually true. Okay, that's a good thought. Like maybe see it, see how it feels familiar. Not because it's actually true. Okay, that's a good thought. Like, maybe see it, see how it feels. Is it slightly believable to you? Do you feel a little bit better when you think that that's what we're shooting for? Just a little bit better, right?
Another thought might be just because my relationship ended does not mean it was a failure on my part. Or I can't protect my child from the full range of the human experience, and that includes negative emotion. Negative emotion often comes associated with divorce. Right, that's what I mean by you can't protect your child from a full range of human experience. Okay. Or something like even great parents get divorced sometimes, or there is not a one right way to be a parent. So those are some ideas. Take one of those, work off one of those, build off one of those. If it doesn't quite fit for you, come up with one on your own, whatever the case may be.
But the the starter thought that I want to give you that works literally in almost every circumstance to help you feel a little bit better is you take the thought that you want to change. So in this case, I'm a terrible parent for putting my kids through a divorce. And then you add this ending how human of me. You are a human. You are not perfect. You make decisions and those decisions have consequences, good or bad. That is part of being a human. Your choices will affect other people, other people. That is also part of being a human. So, how human of you.
This small sentence can offer you a small dose of self-compassion, while simultaneously allowing you to feel a little more neutral about your choices. Perhaps it's about this choice to divorce, or whatever it is that the thought is that you're adding how human of me to it. Right, feeling neutral definitely feels better than shame. It definitely feels better than blame or guilt or whatever else that you are feeling. So, if necessary, start here. How human of me. And then I want you to work on believing this new thought. Human of me. And then I want you to work on believing this new thought. I want you to work on changing the old thought to this new thought. How do we do that? We practice, we practice, we practice, we practice, we practice.
New thoughts do not happen overnight. They take time. They take practice, they take patience, they take self-compassion. They take us failing to remember to say it or to trying again, or to using it over and over again. Right, it takes time. This is a process of believing new thoughts.
You've had a lifetime of socialization keeping you believing things about yourself and your role. That has kept you in blaming yourself for everything. Now it's going to take a little time and a lot of repetition for the new thought to take hold. That does not mean that it is not worth doing. You are worth doing this work on. You are worth changing your thoughts. You don't deserve to blame yourself for everything that is happening to yourself, to your kids, to your family, to your partnerships, to your end of marriage. Anything right. Totally okay for you to take responsibility, totally not necessary for you to be blamed or take the blame for everything. All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Do this work. You deserve it. You are worthy of it. I love you. Thank you for being here. I will be back next week.
Hi friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to karinnelsoncoachingcom. That's wwwdot karin nelson coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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