How Guilt is Keeping You STUCK!!
- cheryl2149
- Nov 15, 2022
- 7 min read
Hi everyone! Cheryl here. Today I want to talk to you about ditching the guilt. We as women and as moms carry around so much guilt and there is no need of it. I want to share with you what it's actually doing to you and how it's stopping you from reaching your potential. And, most importantly, I'm going to share with you ways to stop feeling guilty.
Before I do, in case this is your first time checking out my blog, I'm Cheryl Bougie. I am a South Florida native, a 50 year old wife, and mom to two teenage boys with celiac disease.
I love to help moms live more and stress less.
I like to help you find the joy again in your beauty, your health, and your soul. We color outside the lines over here. We don't fit into any boxes.
Help! This Weight is TOO Heavy!
Now let me talk to you about guilt. I want to share with you what it's doing to you, how it's holding you back and I want to give you some tips to help you ditch it. We all hold guilt in our lives, right?
Some guilt, a little bit of guilt is healthy. It helps us to have empathy and remorse. It holds us to our moral values.
But most of us carry around way too much guilt and it's not healthy.
It causes anger, resentment, depression.
It can stop your energy and make you sick.
It can affect both your professional and personal relationships and keep you from finding success.
It’s time to stop holding onto that unnecessary guilt girlfriend. There is no reason for all the guilt that we carry around, especially as women and as moms. It’s time to kick that guilt out the door.
There are two types of guilt that I believe that we have the most - irrational guilt and valid guilt.
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Guilty Until Proven Innocent?
The first one I'm going to talk to you about is the biggest, and it's the one most of us suffer with - irrational guilt. This is the guilt that is not rooted in truth. It's assumed guilt.
It can be guilt from assumed judgment where we assume that other people are judging us for our choices.
It could also be guilt that you have from things in your childhood or experiences in your past that you're carrying forward.
You start dwelling on what you should be doing or should be saying or who you should be and you start feeling guilty about it. And really this is the biggest struggle.
There are many instances where moms feel guilty. One example is the guilt carried by working moms and stay at home moms.
Working moms might feel guilty that they're not staying home raising their children. They also might feel guilty because they feel that stay at home moms are judging them because they're going back to work and that makes them a bad mom.
Same thing goes the other way around.
There are stay at home moms that feel guilty for staying home because they feel like working moms are judging them for not going out and working.
There are a million different examples. That's just one small one. And it comes from perceived judgment. Some of them are from pressures and norms that society puts on us. Some of them are just from social media. We have a lot of things thrown at us on social media, but they're not all rooted in truth.
A lot of times we assume people are judging us when they're really not.
So I want you to take a pause when you are in a situation where you are feeling guilty, because you feel like somebody else is judging you.
I really want you to stop, and take a look at the situation and ask yourself:
Is that person really judging me?
Are they actually judging me because I chose to stay home with my child?
Are they actually judging me because I chose to go back to work?
If they are, you need to cut that person out of your life girlfriend because they are not somebody you want or need.
Nobody should be judged for making choices for themselves or their families that's best for them. Most times however, it's just us feeling like we are being judged.
Guilt can go beyond feeling like a bad mom.
Let’s look at weight as another example. People can feel guilty about their weight or how they look because they feel others are judging them.
There's also not feeling worthy guilt...
You might not feel worthy about a promotion that you got at work.
Or you might not feel worthy that your husband just bought you a spa day and you're feeling guilty that you're laying there in the spa when you should be at home doing the dishes or playing with the kids.
Or you feel not worthy to go on a business trip that you are enjoying with your girlfriends or a girls trip because you feel like you should be home.
That's “not feeling worthy” guilt.
That's usually rooted in expectations that are placed on us or things you carry from your childhood - the things that you learned as a child that were supposedly normal.
Sometimes you feel guilty about not doing enough or that you're not doing what you're expected to do.
Maybe by your own standards you expect to have a perfectly clean house all the time and cook dinner every night and sit down and have a meal because maybe that's how you grew up. Or maybe that's what your mom told you was the way to be a good mom. Or maybe that's just what you believe from seeing it on social media or it’s what you wish for.
But all of those things are again, not rooted in truth.
Just Breathe
So how do I control this unwanted, unneeded, unwarranted irrational guilt?
Whenever you're feeling guilty about something, I want you to stop and take a step back and take a deep breath.
I'm a big believer in stopping and taking a big breath. That helps so many things.
I want you to really analyze and ask yourself:
Is this guilt I’m feeling rooted in truth?
Do I need to be the perfect Pinterest mom and have the perfect clean house and bake cookies and bring them to a PTA meeting?
Does that make or break whether I’m a good mom or not?
It doesn't. It doesn't make or break whether you're a good human, woman, or mom. None of this stuff does. It's pressure that you're putting on yourself or maybe somebody's putting on you. And again, you may need to assess the people in your life and set some boundaries. Or perhaps you need to cut them out of your life altogether.
These pressures are not rooted in truth and they're stopping you from actually reaching the fullest potential that you have to be a mom, a wife - to just be you.
You should not feel guilty for doing things for yourself, for wanting things for yourself, for not wanting to do things. That's all pressure put on us from the outside world and lacking boundaries. It's not healthy at all. It hurts you. It makes you feel depressed. It makes you feel less than. If we don't work to remove that feeling and this guilt from our lives and it's just constantly weighing on us, it can actually affect you physically.
I Plead Guilty Your Honor
The second type of guilt I'm going to talk about is valid guilt.
A lot of times we have guilt about something we've done that we wish we didn’t do. It's okay to feel guilty for a little bit of time for that, but it's really more about remorse.
You're feeling remorse because you did something you shouldn't have done or you wished you wouldn't have done. And that's okay.
But some of us hold onto that guilt too long.
There’s a point where you have to stop and say, “all right, I feel bad, I've apologized, I've learned from this, and now it's time to move on”.
Holding onto that guilt is keeping you stuck in the past and what you've done and not allowing you to step forward and move into the future. Did you learn from it? Are you sorry that you did it? If so, that's a good thing. Would you forgive somebody else that did the same thing that you did?
Maybe and maybe not. And that’s also ok.
But I'm Ready To Forgive Myself
One thing you can do is you make apologies and/or amends.
You can apologize and you have to leave it at that.
Maybe the person you wronged will forgive you and maybe they won’t but they don't have to forgive you for you to not have guilt. You have to be able to release that yourself and then make steps to change your behavior. If you've done something that you feel guilty about, then make steps not to make that mistake again.
You can also write a letter of forgiveness to yourself. Most of this guilt we feel is because we're not forgiving ourselves.
Whether or not somebody else forgives you for what you've done is irrelevant - you have to forgive yourself.
It's done. You have got to move on. It's in the past. You have to forgive yourself and move forward into the future and make steps not to make that same mistake.
You might also need to seek some counseling. This goes for both types of guilt.
If you have so much guilt about something you're doing or not doing as a mom or a wife or whatever, or if you have so much guilt about something that you've done and you are not able to let the guilt go, please do not be afraid. There are groups, 12 step programs, individual therapy. There are so many different types of counseling and therapy that you can go for that will really help you to work through it.
Once you can release that guilt and once you can see guilt for what it is, feel it, move through it and release it, then you are on the road to...
unlocking the potential for you to be your best self, for you to live your fullest, have the fullest relationships, have the fullest business, and have the fullest amount of joy in your life.
And that's what I want for you.
There you have it! How Guilt is Keeping You STUCK!!
I hope you found this helpful. If you did share it with a friend that you think is feeling way too much guilt so that they can also release it and keep moving forward.
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