Beyond Guilt & Shame
How to have self-compassion as a parent after a mistake
There have been more times than I’d like to admit that I have felt guilt and shame as a parent.
Sometimes it’s a creeping feeling that sneaks up: I should have handled that differently. I bet the other parents would have handled it much better.
Sometimes it pops up quickly and punches me in the gut: Oh my god, how did I not realize my child was unsafe? My only job is to keep them safe. I can’t believe I dropped my guard.
And sometimes it’s a tidal wave that lasts for weeks or even years: I wasn’t there when my child needed me most. I don’t think I can ever forgive myself.
While there are many challenging parts of parenting, the guilt and shame that arise when we make a mistake can be incredibly painful. Shame can feel like a giant, over-sized magnet: we try to resist the pull, but we are powerless to its force. And once in its grip, it can feel impossible to pry ourselves from its forcefield.
In these moments, it’s so difficult to access the presence, clarity, and trust we need as parents. So how do we free ourselves from its force so we can access our most important parental resources and find connection to ourselves and children again?
A Bigger Perspective
When we are stuck in a place of shame, it can be incredibly helpful to expand our perspective of the situation. We live in a cause-and-effect universe, and the author and spiritual teacher Michael Singer explains this in his course Living from a Place of Surrender. In order to describe how this present moment came to be, he goes into great detail summarizing scientific evidence behind the creation of the universe and the formation of elements in the stars that led to all the physical matter that makes up the world around us.
From there, he then goes on to describe the process of how our individual lives came to be. As an example, he tells the story of a dinosaur who left a massive footprint in the mud, which over time filled up with rainwater and became a lake. Millions of years later, humans settled on the lake. One particular day it was pouring rain at the settlement, and he explains, your great-great-grandfather met your great-great-great grandmother while seeking shelter from the rain in a saloon. When they saw each other, it was love at first sight, and many years later here you are. His point is that everything that happens in life is the effect of something else that preceded it all the way back to the beginning of time.
A parenting “mistake” may on the surface seem to be the result of us being tired, exhausted, stressed, low on patience, and exhibiting poor decision making, but on another level, it’s also the culmination of millions of other moments. It’s the culmination of the way our parents raised us, the social experiences we’ve had, the cultural messages we’ve internalized, and the large and small traumas we’ve never fully healed from, and many more contributing factors from our own lives.
The moment is also the result of the behavioral tendencies and coping mechanisms that have been passed down through many generations to us, the biological makeup that has been hardwired into ourselves and our children, and historical and cultural events that far preceded even our own births.
A fascinating idea to contemplate as well is that, for mothers in particular, we existed as a small seed of possibility in our grandmother’s womb when she was pregnant with our mother. Since girls are born with all their eggs intact, there was a time that the cells that would lead to our birth one day existed in our grandmother’s body. When we think of all the experiences that the cells that would become us were exposed to, it’s another reminder that while our life feels so finite, the seeds of it were in the making long before we had any individual power or control as a living and breathing human being.
The point is that in any given moment there is at least 4.5 billion years (the age of Earth) that has informed the unfolding of that particular experience. While our mistakes can feel incredibly personal, it’s also helpful to remember that they are the sum of so many more moments than what our minds can even comprehend.
To be clear, this is not an invitation to shirk our responsibility as parents as we always have willpower and the ability to choose, but the ease at which we can make better choices is significantly influenced by many contributing factors of life. We want to take responsibility for the times we haven’t lived up to our own values, of course, and at the same time, also access compassion for ourselves knowing nothing is as personal as we think it is.
Leaks Will Happen
Prior to having children, I talked at length with my therapist about not wanting to “mess up” my kids, and I remember some particularly profound advice she gave me one time: “Caitlin,” she said with a long pause, “it’s impossible not to leak your stuff all over your kids.”
I didn’t want to believe it at the time, after all, I had been in therapy working through “my stuff” for years (one of my motivations being to not “screw up” my own children). Now, just a few years into the parenting journey, I see exactly what she meant. No matter the level of our commitment to personal growth and consistency of our practices, it’s impossible to remain conscious at all times. In fact, most of us are far from that state and are only beginning to wake up to new levels of awareness.
So we do our best to plug the holes where our unconsciousness flows out, but still, leaks and moments of disconnection will always happen. Even highly evolved and conscious people are always imperfect humans at the end of the day. The people who we may say have been the most “enlightened” beings on the plant have made decisions that have negatively impacted others at times: Buddha, the Dalai Lama, and Pema Chödrön are a few that come to mind, but of course, there are many more. No person never fully rises above their human nature, and imperfection and lapses in judgment are woven into the fabric of our human experience.
Your Child’s Journey
It’s also impossible to know how our words and actions, even when done with the best of intentions, will impact our children. There’s a saying, “Earth is a place where souls are sent to evolve,” and this points to the fact that each person is here on their own journey.
A huge part of our children’s journeys include their time with us when they need to have life experiences that will become “grist for the mill” as spiritual teacher Ram Dass would say.
Ma Yogashakti, another spiritual teacher, put it this way:
Problems are the nectar of life.
Both make it clear that we need some suffering to evolve as humans. Like the butterfly whose wing strength increases as it struggles to break free from the chrysalis, children need some struggle to emerge as their own fully actualized selves. It’s a natural part of growth and life.
We obviously don’t want to impart suffering on our children purposely, but when it happens, we can also take solace that they have their own journey to live, of which suffering and mistakes made by others are an important part. We cannot be the hero in our own children’s story and have them thrive; the only hero in their story should be them as they learn to rise above the challenges of their lives. It’s in their rising that they will discover the incredible being that they are.
Release the Pain
Another way to release the pain of guilt and fear is by working at the heart, and this is the most powerful level where we actually feel painful emotions transmute into love and acceptance of ourselves. Here instead of using our mind to talk us out of the pain or form a new more compassionate perspective, we actually relax and stop resisting the pain. It can feel incredibly scary to quiet our minds and accept the discomfort, but when we do that, something powerful begins to happen — the painful feeling begins to move up and out of our bodies on its own and in its place we can experience a swell of love and total well-being.
Michael Singer describes this process and explains what you can say to yourself to be the relaxed space for the feeling to move through:
I am completely open. This is coming in and I feel tremendous pain. It is so beautiful to be alive. It’s beautiful to be experiencing the depth of what I’m experiencing. Now you’re not blocking it. It’s releasing. It’s coming up inside. Pain can turn into love. It’s called transmutation. Literally, it can come in and all of a sudden you feel the pain… but then there is this tremendous love… that’s overwhelming.
When we work with guilt and shame this way, part of it leaves our bodies for good. We don’t need to use the mind to convince ourselves to have self-compassion because it naturally arises when the painful emotion is allowed to move through us.
Beyond Space & Time
One of the incredible things about being alive during this time is the collective understanding we’re gaining about the effects of trauma and repair on the human psyche. While we often think of our lives as a linear series of static events, what we’re learning is that a memory is not just an event but all the feelings and emotions we’ve attached to an event every time we think about it.
So, when it comes to parenting, we can go back to an moment in time — whether it happened yesterday or years ago — and help our children associate new feelings and emotions with the memory of when we failed them in some capacity. Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, author of Good Inside, and mom of three, describes repair after a moment of conflict with her child or spouse like this:
If [I] do repair, what I get to do — and to me the image of this matters — is I get to go back to that moment. It’s a chapter in my kid’s life. It’s a chapter in my husband’s life, and I kind of get to reopen the book. I literally get to reopen the book and I get to go back to the point in the chapter. And instead of that being the ending, it’s like magic. I get to rewrite a very different ending to the story. And we all know when you write more of a chapter, the theme of the chapter changes. The title of the chapter changes. The lessons you’ll learn completely change because instead of that bad moment being the end point, that moment is just the part of a much larger story.
In this way, doing repair work transcends the boundaries of time and space, which, if we really think about it, is nothing short of a miracle. Anyone who has had a healing experience in therapy knows you don’t even need to have the person who failed or disappointed you present to access deep healing. In all the experiences of life that generate guilt and shame within us and our children, the possibility for healing is always there.
Of course, we do our best as parents to facilitate repair when we can while also taking comfort that the healing of children can continue long after even our own lives. Their healing story, our healing story and the collective healing story of humanity continues on — always. As long as there is healing in this world, there is always hope.
About me: Mom of two, wife, writer and podcast co-host who is fascinated by the intersection of parenting and spirituality — one seeker exploring the wild experience of being a parent and being human. For more reflections on parenting and spirituality, follow me on Medium and subscribe to my free newsletter: aparentspurpose.substack.com.
© Caitlin Frauton. All rights reserved.
