#8: Shame in Motherhood - Why does it happen & how do we navigate it?

Jul 21

Written By Ava

In this episode, I have the honour to have Kyira Wackett, Founder of Adversity Rising and a licensed mental health therapist based in USA to chat with me about the topic of shame in motherhood. We talked about:

What exactly is shame and how it shows up when mothering
Why does shame happen to mothers and how does it impact the way we parent?
Exploring the relationship between shame and authenticity - is it cultural specific or a common shared lived experience that we struggle with both of them?
How does the magic of curiosity helps in navigating difficult feelings about shame as a mother?

Connect with Kyira via:

Her website: http://adversityrising.com/
She mentioned in the podcast on the video she made: 5 Things to Forgive Yourself for Right Now. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8QMwO7C_H0

Join me for my FREE course - "3 Days to Lighten the Load" on 23 - 25 Aug where you will:

Learn the top reasons why mental load happens for mothers
Know what’s required of you to unburden the invisible labour & stress
Discover the 4-step framework to reduce your mental load

Be part of my newsletter community where I share exclusive resources, tips, behind-the-scenes & everything else that goes along with ditching the guilt, defining your own version of mothering, and parent from the heart: : https://bit.ly/3RRQlKS

I'll love to know your thoughts about the podcast and this episode. Connect with me on Instagram @thecuriousmomma or write to me at hello@thecuriousmomma.com

Till then, take care and remember - you are enough and keep on making magic in your own unique ways ✨

+ or you can read the transcript by clicking here

You are listening to Making Mama Magic with honest and authentic conversations about all things related to modern motherhood, wholehearted living and peaceful parenting. Join me and my guests in our chats about redefining motherhood and parenting in a way that focuses on purpose, peace and presence while pursuing dreams and live career and business in our unique, magical way. I am your host - Ava, and I empower moms to parent with connection and curiosity and to own their confidence in motherhood.

Hi, welcome to making mama Magic podcast today. I have the honor with me, Kira to talk about this really interesting topic about shame and how does it got to do with our motherhood experience? So Kiera will come to making mama Magic podcast. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Great, thank you so much for being here. Let us know more about yourself. Like what is your work about and what do you do at Adversity Rising. Yeah.

So I am a licensed mental health therapist. I have my Master's degree in counseling psychology and my emphasis in my training program and kind of what I specialize in in the therapy room has been really focused on eating disorders, anxiety disorders and trauma since I started I've been working in mental health for many years prior to going back and getting my degree and things like that and I kind of learned kind of the more I got deep into the weeds of the work I was doing that everything was connecting to this term shame that I know we're going to talk about but at the time it really wasn't, I mean, even now people still don't really know what it is, there's a lot of confusion about it, we don't quite understand how deeply rooted and universal it is. So the more I got into my therapy practice, the more clients that I was seeing in the therapy room, the more I realized I'm I'm specializing in shame, I'm trying to help people let go of the feeling that they are somehow less than and unworthy when they walk into a room and that they need to do something or look a certain way or be a certain way in order to be worthy. And so I would say that adversity rising really got built out of it, even the name is sort of this like rising out of our adversity and the trauma, the pain, the negative self talk that we have and kind of finding ourselves rooting within that and moving forward. And so a lot of what I do now across the board is just promoting as much information around what shame is how it's affecting us and what we can actually do versus what I call Band Aid solutions, kind of, especially with moms, kind of all the stuff thrown at us, like do these five things and you'll feel better and we do that does not work that way. So how do we actually do work that's meaningful and sustainable and helps us live our best lives. Yeah, I love that you mentioned about sustainability because a lot of the things that we do as moms is about, you know, really on the ball. Like we see our kids doing this thing, we kind of like want to do something about it. But when it comes to us sometimes we feel like we need to go for massage or go for a long walk, it helps. But I think the sensibility of knowing why it happens in terms of some of our experiences, I think it's really important to know the reasons behind it and do something about it that is sustainable. I'm just curious in terms of your definition of shame. Like how do you define shame and how do you think this can impact in terms of our own experiences as mothers? Yeah. So I, I am trained and I would say I identify as cognitive behavioral therapist with a lot of caveats, although that's like a superior there. But we'll just kind of say it's rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy is this term core beliefs. I've heard it talked about now. Memories limiting beliefs in popular culture. But the idea is that when you're born our brains and our bodies, its sole purpose is to figure out how to function in the world. How do we have to show up? What's our place? What's this role that I'm supposed to play? How do I fit in? What we know over years of research is that human beings cannot survive without connection really connected to this desire to figure out how do I make sense of the world? Is this absolute need to figure out how I make sense of it and make sure that I fit into this world. And so from the time, you know, we're little little humans. So for all of us thinking about our littles that we're working with right now, they are constantly watching the world as we did at their age. They're going okay, so this person is treated this way when they act this way, when they dress this way, when they look this way and we can see things like race, gender, sexuality, informing it. But we also see things like, you know, the family system that you grew up in the country of origin whether or not you are in a country where you speak the primary language or not. Like there are all these different things that factor into our experience. Well, for 99.9% of the population, they develop a core belief that they are inherently not good enough or worthy unless fill in the blood link. So it's, you know, if we look at I live in the U. S. And so there's this, you have to be in a thin body, you should be white cis gender male, ideally all these things that it's like, oh wait a minute, here's a check against me here here here and then it's who's got AIDS versus CS in school and what does that look like. And so you start to kind of cross off, wait a minute, I'm not good enough. And all of that starts to create this basis of fear. That is where I see shame coming in. So shame is that fear shames the threat to connection and belonging. And what it does is I think about it like a sleazy used car salesman. That's like if you just listen to me like, here's my rules, follow this, do this, you know, access maybe this way. I mean the number of times that were closed, I thought that were so stupid, but they were trendy and if you just do this, you'll be okay. And so that becomes the base point of shame. And we've been doing it since we were 234 years old based on those experiences. So then we become moms. I mean, we've been living this life, we've been performing for years as the one that can handle it all. Do it all be it all. And now you've got a kid based on obviously everybody's cultural experiences are different, but in most cultures, the dominant stress is on the mom. And so and again, that is dependent on people's family dynamics and things like that. But that person that's in the primary caregiver role, which often times with moms, they're going to feel it even more. So then shame comes in and it goes, oh new situation, new place that you suck? Let me tell you how to make it better and that all just starts to wear on us over time.

Yeah, totally. I think like what you mentioned about our own life experience, I live in Singapore right? The culture that we have is still like what you've mentioned in terms of like as a person, there's what I call like a check list of things that needed eyes. Like you know, you, you get through school, you get a degree, you get a partner, you you get married and have kids, not just one kid more than one kid. Ah and in our situation like in Singapore where we have festive seasons like lunar new year because I'm chinese. So like people always say, okay you're married now, you know, we're gonna have a kid, right kid. And I think it's really about like culturally there's a lot of things about our identity, what we do achieve. It's really something that people want to talk about. Sometimes people said to be more autopilot sometimes. So they see that, you know, as as the default, but they don't realize that that caused a lot of stress shame and resentment within themselves. So I think especially for months because most moms want to be good mothers, right, They don't want to have like bad experience of being told that they are bad mom. So it's really about wanting to live up to the expectations, but I think um causing to understand like why am I doing this? Why, what does this matter to me as a parent? Why why is this important to me and my family and my partner? It takes very intentional effort. It takes a lot of knowing who we are as a person. And so yeah, yeah, I think one thing you said that's really key, so I love that differentiation between the sort of checklist, everybody gets one and it's just culture specific. And so thinking about it could be, you know, the community, you're in different aspects of your identity. And so then all of us get inundated with, we've got to get to the next step. So there's this hustle that gets created for us and it becomes about getting to a certain point and then things will be okay, but the marker is always moving, you know, so okay. So you got through school and when's the john, but when you're getting partner, when you're getting married, when you're a kid, when you bring another kid, you know, there's one of these pieces and so it's like wait a minute. So we start to condition ourselves to not know how to take that pause and not know how to be in the moment and to celebrate it and then when you like think about and this is where I think it gets, I see that because a lot of people go, well I do want to be a good mom because I love my kid and I care about my kid and of course I'm going to do everything I can. The difference is at the end of the day I screw up all the time as a parent. My shame is leading the day. I can't let that go. I can't give myself grace and permission to be fallible to make a mistake, to learn to let her down sometimes and know that my love for her is stronger than the mistake I made in the moment or the time that I maybe didn't handle it as well as I could. And but on the days that my shame is not driving, I can still feel those things of, oh not my best self, evidently missed the boat on a couple of these things today, but I can find a sense of peace within that to know that I am not defined by those things. And I think that that's the sticking point is we just start to it's a chase to get out of this hole that keeps seemingly getting bigger because we feel like we're never going to be enough. Yeah. You mentioned about defining ourselves, How do you think mothers can recognized that shame is not part of themselves? And how do we help them to detach that what is the ways that you think will be used for them to them to kind of like start recognizing or be aware of. Yeah. One of the first things I was tell people whenever they start this work is so there's a concept called radical acceptance which is accepting what's in your control and out of your control and learning to invest your time and energy and the things that you actually have power and control over. Well the point with with shame is to say this is an issue and everybody has it. This is a universal experience. And I think for moms in particular, it's starting off by saying if you're walking in the room not allowing yourself the possibility you have shame. You can't do any work to get through it. So then everything you're doing to feel better to deal with X or to do why It's all abandoned because you're not getting out of this route piece which is this feeling like you are defined by your mistakes and you are defined by your failures and your defined by all your inadequacies rather than saying I'm a human that makes mistakes has inadequacies. That's learning and growing all the time. And I think part one is really owning that and saying I have it and that makes me human And that in particular makes me a mom because a lot of moms are, they've been the person for everybody that holds everything for way too long. And so they are the one that their emotions have gotten pushed down to the bottom, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes just out of conditioning. So they've told themselves for years, you know, toughen up, you're fine, you're okay, you've got this, you can handle it so you should absorb everything for everyone else. And so I think the second part starts to become realizing this sort of differentiation between the performance you and the real you an example I'll give, I mean, I'm a therapist, I obviously love being there for people or I wouldn't do this professionally and I believe in the power of that also don't want to be there for everybody all the time. But I used to have this belief like I always had to be available for everybody. That is that differentiation between when it becomes an all or nothing rule, you have to do this, you can't do this. That is shame, shame functions in absolutes. And so again, I have shame, how am I performing and what's the rule book that I have and then you start to do kind of an experimentation of what would happen if I didn't believe that or I'm noticing, I seem to be the only one that I hold myself accountable to that rule. Like if another mom, you know, yelled at their kid or loss of temper, I would understand that they're learning and sometimes mom ng is hard, you know, like if another mom, I had to bribe their kids to get out of the car and the only way to get them out was a cookie, I wouldn't judge them. I'd be like, man, that's a hard day, I get it. But if I did it, you know what I mean? And I think part of it is to realize when the story is specific to you and the rules are specific to you. That is the opportunity to start to question it and to say, well what would it look like if it was different? I think I'm not totally giving them action steps and it's pretty your question. But I think the action really starts with backing up to build insight and curiosity and you can do that safely by saying no you have this, this isn't like your week. If you do it's and you have this now let's figure out how to dismantle your system. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that you mentioned about curiosity because I think you being curious is something that I hold readily in my own personal and also in the parenting life, which is the reason why I'm called the Curious one, right? It's true. The comparison looking at others that we feel lesser. But I think that is the opportunity for us to really pause and understand why we are thinking that way. And is it something that is serving us or not because sometimes we get into that spiral of shame and guilt and blame whether is it towards ourselves and towards the people around us and I do have friends who are moms who tend to be like that, what I noticed is some of them they totally don't want to get out of the rut. But one thing that I noticed is they tend to be afraid to be, who they want to be for the fear of other people might judge them. Other people may think that they are a bit weird and that brings me to another thing about authenticity because I think she university to me it seems to be quite interrelated. What do you think about the in terms of the correlation? Yeah, yeah. I mean I love what you're pointing out is this idea of I call it the predictable crappy nous. So a lot of people we get comfortable in define life and the idea behind it is I don't like this. I don't feel good in it, but I know it so I can function in it. And I think that there's a comfort in not feeling like you're gonna get blindsided and that you're at least prepared for the pain or the crappy experiences. And so the idea is that if we've been living in shame for this long, we've been performing that long. So we don't know who we truly are or if we do, it's so deeply buried behind all these walls of performance, You don't have any data to support that, showing that isn't going to lead directly to rejection, which is the whole thing you're fighting against to begin with is connection and to lose that sense of belonging. And there's a sort of protection to well if I am pretending and I'm performing and that's not really me. When I do get rejected, it doesn't feel real in the same way because they don't really know me. So there's kind of a way that we it all kind of comes together. And so I think authenticity isn't about there's a sense of becoming your true and authentic self and just acting a certain way all the time. I think authenticity is really about allowing yourself to be in a state of constant discovery of who you are, what you like, what you don't like because I think we can do the opposite where we go. I'm just gonna be authentically me and I'm not going to care what anybody else thinks. That's not a real way to exist either because we do care what people think. We have values and our goals and who we are change all the time. So I think really the authenticity pieces to say under work to get to know who I am and to start to understand when that performance comes out why that's happening. So I can show love and kindness to myself and when it's happening with somebody else, I can be present in that authentic moment with somebody to just kind of show up and connect as humans from an emotional space. And so I think to answer your question, they intersect a lot and I don't think it's that authenticity is the window to shame. But I think authenticity is this lifestyle of embodiment of sort of saying who am I in this moment and how and in what ways can I allow it to show it fully? Or at least partially because that's more than we would do if we allow shame to drive the bus.

Yeah, I think you already pointed out that you know, authenticity and it's a journey. It's not everyone can be 100% of who they are. I mean the situation, different things that's happening in our life and things that you know, sometimes we may not be fully authentic, but it's a journey is about embracing who we are and just fully recognizing that hey, you know, this is what it is, but I can be kind of myself, I can be, I can show raise and compassion to myself and to other people and yeah, I think authenticity is something that it's really a struggle for people. Like especially I'm just sharing from a cultural perspective like asian culture as well because there's a lot of parenting styles that's really focused on outwardly kind of achievements and you know, the common parenting style that a lot of people here is like the tiger parenting style where you know the genesis of parenting is to have the Children achieve what they think is success in by and what they think they need to have to be good to their parents and to the family. So there's a lot of influences around that. But I think basically it's about Children are there to serve their family's honor in that sense. Nothing it links to when they grow up become moms, we want their Children to be also like that and they get very stressed because of expectation, they see the necessity of the authentic thing is, you know, it's not relevant, it's just not something that they want to consider. All right, well, I think it's become a very like individualistic culture and predominantly like an american dream sort of thing where it's like that's just a very different lifestyle and belief system and all of these different things. But the point being met, you can be authentic and part of a collectivist culture and community and still have that connection to family. I think one of the things that really hard for people to is to realize that, you know, if you go generations back, everyone's trying to do the best that they can for their kids. What we see is that sometimes the scope of their traumas or their life experiences limits what they feel like they can their kids can and should do because they want to protect their kids from familiar, they want to protect their kids from, you know, again, X, Y and Z. And so I think it's really making space to even say you might still parent that way, you might still follow all these same things, you might still choose to do some of those things you are allowed to explore where that came from without feeling like you're doing something wrong with that. And I think it's kind of allowing that curiosity around what was the thought for my parents and what were they trying to protect me from and how can I give Greece and space and flexibility to them and that? And then sometimes it's learning forgiveness to the parents, it's learning forgiveness to the world and the cultural experiences that you've had given where you grew up in those different things. Sometimes it's also been learning to grieve sometimes when being your true self, you're either going to make a choice to hide a part of yourself sometimes. And that's okay because if you're making that choice out of a value set up of something with your family, something there that's different from just doing it without exploration, you're either grieving maybe, okay, I'm not going to lean into certain parts of myself or you're grieving the loss of the type of relationship that anybody wants of their parents, which is wanting your parents to be proud and wanting your parents to support you. And so I think some of this shame work, that's why it's really tricky is we're asking people to make hard choices where both sides have lost. And sometimes that's where the performance feel safer because there's a distance from the emotion in a way where one We can blame it on external factors and yet at the same time we're blaming ourselves for everything. So it's this weird dichotomy of blame but it feels somehow a little bit safer at times. And so I think that is the catch like authenticity is not this like beautiful rose tinted lenses, authenticity is a really hard dissection of life and realizing that life is an accumulation of really painful decisions that we make, that we're just trying to understand the world and show up in our values every day.

Yeah, I love that you mentioned about intergenerational trauma as I go along my own parody and my learning and talking to other people, I realized that that's something that's very real that we as mothers and parents need to be mindful about. For me. I've come a journey as well. When I first became a parent, I I realized that I was grieving a lot in terms of my old relationship with my mother because there was a lot of questions in my mind like wish that she has done is I wish that she has been more aware about this. Um, and I think that was a bit dicey because while I was grieving that relationship I can have as a child and even now as an adult and I'm also trying to figure out what kind of parent I want to be. So there was a lot of things that was going in my mind. I think a lot of mothers do experience that as well based on my conversations with them. It's really challenging because that ties into also how we choose parents and you know, how we wanted to, what they called break the cycle in that sense because sometimes we do have some beliefs and thoughts that doesn't really align to what we value as a person as a mother anymore. Yeah, it's tricky. Yeah. I think one of the things that often happens is that and we, I mean we see this for so many of us. We said, well I'm never going to do what my dad did or I'm never gonna do it. My mom's did or I'm never gonna do you what, you know, my aunt did or my grandma did or whoever their caregiver was that they had this experience or on the flip side it's, I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the same person. I want to create the same sense of connection. And I think so much about that is about trying to deal with our own grief for our own love and our own sense of connection. And I think one thing that I have a lot of hard conversations with people around especially I think the point you made of feeling some questioning, feeling some grief about maybe what you didn't get with your mom is knowing that we can't solve our in through our relationship with our kids. And so there's this really weird piece of saying, you know, again, the authenticity piece rather than kind of allowing shame to come in because then if you didn't do it, like let's say that your kids get older and then they have grief and they have pain and they have regret, well, that's going to compound your shame because you were supposed to do something different. You were supposed to make it be a certain way. And instead you say, what does it look like for me to grieve and to forgive my mom and as someone who's had a very similar thing to and feeling like I didn't get the childhood. I feel like I wouldn't want or deserved and I had a lot of trauma. I was very much a parental find child. I lost out on a lot of things that I felt like I should have and deserve to have. And so I've had to work on knowing that I can't make up for my pain with Everly with my daughter, I have to instead feel that painful league reeve that fully and then make a decision about what I'm going to carry with me in that because if I make choices about how I parent based on that they're rooted in shame and pain. They are not rooted in values and authenticity and that is a really tricky place to be.

Yeah, you I think it's really getting clear about what we value and also it is so being very conscious about when things happen, the way that doesn't feel right in general. I think it's about really going back to, okay, this, this is not working. It's really about giving ourselves like what you say, the grace and kindness that you know, this is the thing, we can do something about it and and we, we don't need to rush into things like sometimes people tend to like, hey, I need to solve this, I need to fix this. I need to do this something quickly. It's about allowing that space recognizing as a journey here and it's okay to take time and to go gently as you were talking about kindness and compassion. I think so much of that has a lot to do with this idea of short term person in distress and short term distress is this kind of high acuity, everything super painful and it sucks and then we see this with our kids. So when they're, I want the cookie, I want to the playground, I don't want to go home. I don't wanna go to bed whatever it is. And as they get older, obviously it gets way more complex. But the short term distress is this like really intense feeling that they have and we have a tendency as humans to want to get rid of that as quickly as possible. What that does is we condition, you know, reactions that create long term distress shame works the same way. So in the moment pretending that you like the music, everybody else is listening to not a big deal, you know, wearing something you don't really like not speaking up in a room with other moms when maybe you don't agree with what somebody's doing or kind of asserting an opinion, it feels like it's fine in the moment. But the long term distress is this sort of continual micro erosion of yourself. And so I think what, what you're describing with that sort of kindness peace and obviously your whole focus from a curiosity standpoint is this concept of saying Shane's gonna want us to choose the option that leads to long term stress to get rid of that high acuity pain in the moment. And we have enough data to see that that's not working anymore because at some point the scales tip in a way that the lantern distress is an accumulation of way worse distress than the short term burst. And so the short term bursts have just been like we're not having any more cookies. It's that time we're going to sleep. That sucks to have a temper tantrum. And we know that that's ultimately the right decision because of the values that we're leaning into because of how we want to help our kids learn to tolerate their distress because of all of these pieces. So the flip is now how do we do that to ourselves? And the curiosity has to go deeper because it's much more of a complex web. It's not just I'm angry and I'm screaming because I wish that I could have watched tv. It's oh, it's a little subtle erosion of my thoughts. It's a tiny way that I've performed. It's telling myself that I can't wear a two piece swimsuit anymore because I've had three kids and my belly doesn't look the same. That's shame. Rather than saying I can wear whatever swimsuit I want to wear and the high stress short term of stress I'm going to feel when I put it on and I go out to the beach. Yeah, that's gonna suck. But I'm not going to tell myself for the rest of my life that my body isn't worthy of wearing a bikini because that long term distress is a worse experience. Yeah.

Yeah. It really is what we see what we hear, what we experience links to, how we feel about ourselves and you know how we feel we to parent in a way. And yeah, I mean, the point that you make about our own image, how we think mothers should do and should look like. I think there's a link to shame, especially this age where, you know, social media at all. And I think you are one of the very brave ones that I know who, not on social media. And I think I think that's an intentional choice for you as well, right? Like into second life and we want to be and all, I think it's really brave for you to make the decision and it's really aligned to what you're you're trying to do as well, your own journey as a person, as a mother as well. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think so much too is realizing where what are all the inputs that we have. So again, if we go back to the definition of shame and how our sense of self develops its early childhood. So it's our peers, our caregivers, the communities we grew up in. But then it's also those daily inputs and they can be very rural specific, like when you go on instagram or Tiktok and you see all these mom videos, all these other things and the pressure you feel there or they can be more global and what we see across the board. And so the point just being that the inputs are ever changing, but they're constantly adding a sense of pressure to us and that is the mark moving system. That is the, you know, if I can get to this weight, then I'll be okay. If, if my kid just gets these grades or has this job, then everything will be okay. Well we hang so much on outcomes that aren't rooted in any basis of joy or fulfillment or connection, they're rooted in externally validated systems or kind of dynamics of success. And so if everything is hanging on what everyone else around you is doing or what the culture of the system or the norm has become, you will never feel fulfilled in that chase because you never got clear on who are you and does any of that align for you in the life that you're leading? Yeah, yeah, totally. I definitely see that that is very important. Kind of like directly on that. How do you think mothers in this modern age can enjoy parenting and Mark look better? Is that you feel that based on what you see always observe or in terms of like your experiences will pay with your clients. Like what do you think there's one thing that you think that they can, I would say, yeah, I was here to develop a response around kind of, what does it look like to forgive ourselves and to create values or a practice around that. And so thinking about, you know, and I can, we can put a link in the show notes to a source of video. I mean that's five things to forgive yourself for right now. And it's based on all the conversations I'm having with people all the time in particular, a ton of moms around. Can you forgive yourself for not being where you thought you would be? So it's, it could even be people listening to this that, you know, well I only have one kid and I feel like I should have had more or I haven't had kids or you know, I'm supposed to be working this job and doing these things or my house looks like a mess and so it's like all these pressures of where you thought you should be and what your life should look like. You're holding yourself accountable to a dream, that isn't your reality. And probably if we were honest isn't a reality that want based on who we are. You know, and then thinking about things like, can you forgive yourself for letting people down? Because the reality being, unless you are going to be completely robotic and try to be neutral and have absolutely no personality, You are going to let people down. I let my daughter down at least 47 times a day, sometimes very intentional. All on board with the decision I made that were, you know, taking a nap right now or you have to go and take a bathroom break and go sit on the potty no matter, what like I'm okay with certain ones and then some of them suck. You know, some of them are like, I missed that she was about to do this thing and she just cut her leg open because you know, I didn't see something that was happening or I lost my temper a little bit or I just wasn't as kind as I wanted to be and so can you forgive yourself for that And that's not just with your kids, but also not living up to the image that everybody thinks you should live up to because I think, and I'm giving a much longer answer obviously than what you're asking because you're saying for one thing, but I think in this is this idea, there's a term called context versus content. And so something talked about a lot in acceptance and commitment therapy, which is basically rooted in the idea of things are hard. You can't, you can't make life don't have pain. It's how do we want to show up and work within that pain? So you don't get there. And one of the ideas is to shift from seeing the self as content, which means like the bullet point list going back to your checklist point, like when interrupted this or here's a bullet point list of all of my failures and my failings, or well I only met these checkpoints versus seeing self in context, which means understanding the context of your full life. So when someone's got, you know, let's say A toddler going through a sleep regression and they haven't slept for a week and they snap at their kid because the kid asked for the 13th time if they can have Oreos for breakfast and they say like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to lose that. Can you pause and put that back in the context of your life and say I don't like that that happened. I can give myself grace and forgive myself for that because in the context of my lady for Verona right now, things kind of suck. And then if you do that and you start to see everybody's context, you realize that the Tiktok video is content, that's not context and you start to see that somebody else's beliefs and values, that's content boiling it down to give you a deliverable. And so I think I'm giving people a long answer, but hopefully it's because you can pick what fits for you. But the idea of again finding forgiveness and that really revamping of seeing a full human because full humans cannot be compared to each other. We can't, we're all too different to see that in any way. Yeah, I love that you mentioned about being human being for human. I think sometimes we tend to compare so much that we forget that everyone is so unique and all circumstances and our experience are so unique and it's really about embracing that good enough Nous and really about knowing that we have a unique set of values. It's really about owning that and owning that identity that we have. And it's hard, it's hard work, but it's about really being conscious and and curious and the different points of our situations in our lives, in our parenting and it can be really challenging, especially like high stress periods like like for me and my first month of the second born joined our family was crazy stressful women, like my first one was just out of norm, he was just crazy pushing buttons boundaries, Every single thing you can think of, he's doing it, he's just not himself and I am post part of and you know, going through that whole hormones over rage kind of building and it's really hard to be mindful and present. But I think what I was trying to tell myself is to to know that this is the season that that's going to be like that and I was mentally prepared that this is going to happen, but it was way more impressive than I thought, but it's just really about giving myself that grace and just telling myself that this is the period that it would be like that and not shaming myself feeling that, okay, I'm just doing a shitty job, shitty mother, you know, not not doing the best in all. And yeah, I mean that's that's really about like what, imagine giving ourselves the acceptance and knowing that we're doing what we can. Yeah. And for healing ourselves, definitely. Yeah, because I think at the end of the day, even if you think back to your life and like the things that you didn't get as a child or we think about, you know, when we have certain feelings, I don't ever, I never expected perfection from anybody. A lot of the times when I have pain, it's because I didn't feel seen, I didn't feel heard, I didn't feel like I got this space to be present. And I think that that is something if we can translate that to you know again going back specifically to our role as moms but in our roles in so many ways our kids don't need us to be perfect. In fact they don't they don't give a shit if we're perfect like they don't here. Yeah I just want to feel seen and they need the genuine connection. And so when I do have those moments we sit and talk about it and I joke because it's being a therapist. I feel like when my daughter gets older she's gonna like mom do we have to process another. Like I get it because we got all the time. That is the P. P. Square at the end of the day. She doesn't need me to never screw up. She just needs to feel seen in those moments and to have me be able to be vulnerable. So she can feel like she can be vulnerable to get that feeling of being seen. And so I think again, humans, we have intellectualized everything everything is about to logic through life. And get to these bullet point pieces. We are emotional beings, we connect and we thrive and we feel that sense of fulfillment in our emotions. And so what does that look like to bring all of that back in center and say, I don't need to be perfect. That's this part of my brain, that's the logic side. I just need to be a being that has a full spectrum of experience in existence and to explore that openly. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. The full spectrum of emotion. Experience is very important. Yeah, I think just really owning that's the experience as a human and there's no good or bad emotions. It's just what it is and where we have a bad day, It is what it is. It's just inspiring us into that whole shame and guilt. Yeah.

Yeah. Great. So if people would like to connect with you to know more about your work, where is the place to get to know more about you? Yeah, well, I love that you kind of pointed it out because yes, it was a very intentional decision to get off social media and so now pretty much it's easy just coming to my website. So it's adversity rising dot com. They can visit me there. You can sign up for my email list if you want to get content, otherwise just clicking the connect button and sending me an email. I think one of the things that happens is people might want to connect and they go, I don't know where to start. I'm overwhelmed and I feel like I should know where to start and what to do. So then they just don't say anything because that's shame playing out when they look at my website or look at anybody's website or listen to podcasts, you go, I don't know where to start on this helpful, Okay, I'm gonna just put it away. And so I think my invitation to people is to go to my website is something resonated email me and let me help navigate that conversation for people of kind of where to begin what to do and kind of go from there. Yeah, I have to say that. I love the way you write emails though. Like it's very, and it's very clear and it's very thoughtful. I feel that you have put a lot of thoughts around what you want to share and in terms of like, like what you're reading what you're thinking about and all. I think it's very, it's very nice to read and and know what exactly you are personally. Yeah, that's so kind of you. Yeah. I think at the end of the day there's a lot of tough decisions and decisions. I've had to, I mean when my daughter was born in the pandemic kid and you're a business owner, you're doing all this stuff. I mean shame, like brought the ship storm with it. And so then it's just really navigating, you know, the question I ask myself every day is who and what do I want to be held accountable to and what's the impact I want to have in the world. So when I do anything now it's realizing I'm always going to have someone that says, well you should post on Tiktok, you could be seen here, you should do these things and like, yeah, probably be super great. But it doesn't serve my greater purpose and it doesn't help me stay accountable to the things that are important and because I did that, I can give energy to spend a few hours sitting down to write an email that comes out every couple weeks because I want to, I can craft what I want to say and I'm talking to people that are making a choice to be there not happening upon it on social media. And so it becomes again, a much more intentional connection points. I just, I really appreciate the fact that that resonated and that you shared that. Like that warms my heart more than you know. So thank you so much for that.

Thank you so much Kira for sharing. And I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's really a lot of the things that I truly believe in terms of mono good energy and about shame and guilt. Anything is so important to hear. Also from a person who is a licensed therapist who is been through a lot of journey personally and professionally as well. So we appreciate your insights and your sharing of course. Thank you again for having me. Thank you.

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