Overcoming Mom Guilt And Anxiety with Therapy

<cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>0:06</time> <p>Welcome to 90834. It&#39;s the weekly podcast where guests share the biggest lessons they&#39;ve learned in therapy. In each episode, i&#39;ll pose two questions What were you looking to resolve by going to therapy, and what did you really end up getting out of therapy? I&#39;m Shannon Miller, a licensed clinical social worker and private practice who has the privilege of spending every day watching the therapeutic process lead to unexpected and beautiful places. Today we&#39;re welcoming Jane Doe. She&#39;s a 58-year-old American living abroad who&#39;s been in and out of therapy for what she calls decades. Her most consistent therapeutic routine has been within the last two years. Welcome, jane. What did you hope to get out of therapy Like? why did you start going to therapy? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>0:53</time> <p>Well, this most recent, the last two or three years I&#39;ll give a broader context that my youngest daughter has significant mental illness and has since she was a child. Our home life was basically a living nightmare. When she was young. She was very violent, very emotionally dysregulated, affected my oldest daughter, myself basically living in fear in our household. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>1:22</time> <p>Can you give a little bit of details about what she would do that would cause fear in the household. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>1:27</time> <p>Oh she would. It started with just kind of emotional dysregulation screaming, crying, kicking graduated to threatening to throw herself off the balcony and land on her head and break her neck, picking up knives and stabbing meat, saying this is my sister, this is my sister, coming after me with scissors and destroying anything she could get her hands on. It escalated to four to five days a week, four to five hours a night. It just escalated and escalated and was really unbearable until a certain point And I guess I&#39;ll mention we had an opportunity to start her on homeopathics, which was amazing to me. It was my last straw before putting her on pharmaceuticals And it worked. Actually for a brief amount of time, or for a couple of years. It worked. The extreme emotional dysregulation tapered off and we went through a couple of good years where she was pretty okay And then things started to kind of go downhill again when she was in entering junior high. But I think there were a lot of social issues there as well. We were living overseas in a very conservative culture. She&#39;s the daughter of a opinionated woman from the United States didn&#39;t jive well. She later reported a sexual assault. So a few years ago she had basically the flip switched again and ended up in the psychiatric hospital, and that&#39;s been a cycle over the last since 2000. In and out of the psychiatric hospital, several suicide attempts, in and out of residential treatment, diagnosed at the most recently and finally getting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder and bipolar. She&#39;s got a list of diagnoses as long as your arm. So why did I come to therapy in the last two and a half years? All of that history that I&#39;ve just described is stressing off to drive anyone crazy. Excuse my language, but why I really came to therapy was because I was experiencing an overwhelming, debilitating parental guilt. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>3:54</time> <p>Okay, so you had tons of parental guilt. And how did you feel towards that parental guilt rate? Because you&#39;re feeling it, but how does that compel you then to get to therapy? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>4:06</time> <p>Well, it got to the point that I became suicidal periodically. I would not only ideation and, granted, over the span of my life I&#39;ve gotten kind of close to that, I&#39;ve had that kind of you know, we can go into my emotional or mental health history later as well but literally beyond ideation, planning, just feeling worthless and like a failure, because I was actually verbally and emotionally abusive to my children when they were little, Not physically, but sometimes you don&#39;t know which is worse. My youngest daughter was born in 2001. I mean, my oldest daughter sorry, my youngest daughter was born in 2004. And it&#39;s the youngest one that has been experiencing severe mental health issues since she was a child. In 2005, I was actually diagnosed with depressive bipolar 2 disorder And it took me a while to find a decent practitioner and a medication regimen that actually kind of calmed my mind enough that I could actually begin to take on the work of therapy. I don&#39;t think I was like I said. I&#39;ve been in therapy for decades and it just never stuck, never moved anything. Yeah, that&#39;s so. I started therapy then, but it wasn&#39;t until the last two, two and a half years, when her mental illness progressed you know, seeing my oldest daughter&#39;s challenges as well, that it became so debilitating that, yeah, it was more destructive than I would have thought, just leading me towards suicidal ideation or planning. Was it&#39;s scary? It was really scary. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>5:59</time> <p>So then you start therapy, and so the tip of the iceberg is that there was tendencies getting stronger and stronger towards suicide. You start therapy, and what do we discover under the water line? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>6:13</time> <p>I&#39;ve known for a long time, like throughout my history of therapy, that for decades, since adolescence, i had developed a pervasive feeling of inadequacy, uselessness, persistent depression and anxiety of my own, anxiety related to academic and professional performance as well as social interaction. So social anxiety, which led to years, again, decades, of self sabotage, both professionally and personally, as well decades of alcohol and drug abuse. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>6:50</time> <p>So can I ask you maybe to give a little bit more detail of how did your anxiety show up, the personal, professional and social anxiety. We use those words, but like. What was that like for you Describe what it feels like to have that type of? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>7:08</time> <p>anxiety. Well, i mean, i guess I can give examples of when I was younger. Just a pretty concrete example I never learned how to be social. My family was very insular, my parents weren&#39;t social, we never had exposure to other people. Really, and given what I learned about myself, what I learned, what I was taught, and the level of anxiety that I had adopted and the feelings of inadequacy that I had adopted over the course of my life, by the time I came to high school and we would go to parties, for example, i couldn&#39;t go to a party without drinking first. So this was part of the. I just couldn&#39;t, i couldn&#39;t function socially without having that kind of preparation. I guess I mean it&#39;s funny because I&#39;m a very high achiever academically and I always have been, but I still live with this and have lived with this anxiety from, like, my adolescence yeah, never going to be good enough, it&#39;s never good enough Like very, very high levels of performance, anxiety around homework and school. Even though I did very well, i couldn&#39;t shake it. I just couldn&#39;t shake it. And now, or before these last couple of years in terms of professional performance, still exist socially, but an anxiety that&#39;s paralyzing, to be able to express myself at work, express an opinion, do any kind of like presentations, this kind of thing where I automatically just freeze And therefore I yeah, i feel like it&#39;s kind of like I just shut down, like I know that I can do better, but I shut down and I anticipate well, it&#39;s going to be a failure anyway. So why, i don&#39;t know. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>8:56</time> <p>It&#39;s kind of hard to explain, like did you figure out or learn why you may be doing that in therapy? Was that part of the learning process? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>9:09</time> <p>Yeah, When I started recently, you know to go back to the issue with my parental guilt and circle back around there after I had, you know, gotten relatively stabilized with medication and had gone through these years and years of crippling parental guilt I remember most recently when I started therapy again. It&#39;s like I was dissociated. I could see what was happening, I could see what I was doing, but I couldn&#39;t control it. I couldn&#39;t stop it. I couldn&#39;t control it. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>9:43</time> <p>So it was almost like you were watching yourself do these things Yeah. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>9:47</time> <p>And it was so just trying to think of the right word. It was so deeply disturbing, saddening, devastating that me being who I am, what I know. I knew that but I couldn&#39;t do anything about it. I was out of control. That was so hard for me to deal with Starting in therapy this time, even though I knew I had a bipolar two diagnosis, a depressive bipolar two diagnosis. I always felt that&#39;s just an excuse. That&#39;s an excuse You&#39;re trying to find an excuse for why you were shit mom. So that was was some of the first discussions we had in therapy is because that was a huge source of my guilt. Also, it was impossible for me to deal with to know that I should know better. I do know better, i should know better. So it took a long time to get to a point where I could kind of move beyond that and learn to get some acceptance of it. One of the things that of course, we worked on in therapy or I worked on in therapy was because it&#39;s also convoluted that coming with the issue of my daughter working backwards to realize, okay, there&#39;s a huge issue of self-esteem not just self-esteem, but inadequacy and frustration and anger and really not knowing myself and who I am and what I&#39;m capable of. So, of course, diving into the roots of that, and of course I think it&#39;s logical that it goes back to family and my own background, and I&#39;m gonna go ahead and preface this because I think it&#39;s one of the things that I&#39;ve also had to learn, and I&#39;m not gonna say it&#39;s 100% there yet, but again I feel like it&#39;s an excuse. You know, blame your parents for all of your problems and not assume responsibility for your own actions. So that&#39;s the way I&#39;ve been finding with that particular issue my entire life, understanding that I have a lot of underlying issues and a lot of this comes from a lifetime of doubting myself and being depressed. So some of the things that we went to, of course, thinking about where my sense of inadequacy and anxiety comes from. We talked about the internal critic, that voice that always says you can&#39;t do this, you&#39;re not good enough, you&#39;re incompetent. And I was asked once to picture who that critic is. You know, immediately I thought my father. That&#39;s the only face I could see. My father was a very volatile, angry, distant, you know, emotionally, verbally abusive man, physically abusive with my brothers and sisters. So we discussed that And then also my experience with I mean the entire household was toxic and wrought with fear and anger and frustration. My brothers and sisters I had to deal with them as well because they were. You know, they had already suffered through all of this. They were angry and deeply unhappy, so therefore, you know how do they behave. They behave the way they learned, so their anger and frustration led to them acting out in cruelty as well. So I had-. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>13:25</time> <p>It&#39;s a fancy way of saying that shit rolls downhill, oh yeah. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>13:29</time> <p>Okay, and it keeps rolling downhill for generations, unfortunately. I hate cliches. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>13:35</time> <p>you know the intergenerational abuse, but cliches exist for a reason because there&#39;s always some truth to them. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>13:42</time> <p>Yeah, so another cliche which is interesting but true from experience. you know, i passed up numerous really great guys. you know really great potential partners And what did I do? I married a man who was volatile, angry, verbally abusive, distant and yeah, again, it&#39;s just like oh, there you go. you know it sucks, it sucks. I hate that. I hate that about this whole process and mental illness and generational, you know, makes me mad. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>14:17</time> <p>But it also sounds like through therapy you learned more of how to observe it than to criticize yourself for it, like understanding why did I choose that man that did that? You know why were my brothers and sisters cruel? You know understanding the whys of how it happened, taking the more academic, intellectual approach to understanding it, observing rather than being in it. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>14:43</time> <p>Well, i kind of feel like I have to frame this and where I&#39;m sitting and why I feel like why I became who I am and why therapy has helped me change it. Okay, i know that I remember one moment in therapy quite a few years ago you know, talking through all the family stuff, the cliche stuff and one of my therapists- said well, your mom sounds like a bitch. I was like what? Because I grew up thinking that my mom was my best friend, yeah, that we had a very close relationship, et cetera, and then, through the process, realizing that, well, you know, she actually used me as an emotional crutch, series of emotional abandonment, you know, micro abandonments, i guess, emotionally And I think one of the key pieces of understandings I came to was that my mom wasn&#39;t willing or able to protect me in the environment that I needed and deserved protection from. So I mean this kind of all folds into what brought me here over the last two years as well. Basically, what that whole vortex, you know, meant that I never felt safe in my own home. It was never a safe place to be. So therefore I learned you&#39;re not safe anywhere. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>16:10</time> <p>So that fear at home sort of generalized everything. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>16:14</time> <p>Yeah, everything. And because I grew up in a pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know you think you&#39;re sick, i&#39;m gonna take you to the hospital and show you someone who&#39;s sick, which basically just invalidates and whatever feelings, emotions, sadness, anger you might have. So we&#39;re talking about therapeutic methods. Due to this, i have spent my life intellectualizing all of my feelings, the way I approach things. So I think that many years of therapy never really worked because I wasn&#39;t able to. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>16:51</time> <p>I just wasn&#39;t able to go there. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>16:53</time> <p>I just wasn&#39;t able to go there. I think that you know, medication helped. I&#39;m good, i&#39;m following this train of thought because most recent therapy that methodologies of visualization and mindfulness and this kind of stuff just didn&#39;t work for me at all because I was completely in my head, completely in my head. So I needed to work within that intellectual framework first and just I&#39;m not sure, just I don&#39;t know, for whatever reason in the last couple of years, maybe because of, like, the desperation of my situation, i was able to go a little bit farther there. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>17:34</time> <p>Rather than observe and intellectualize your emotions, to actually feel them, yeah, yeah, and know that you could survive feeling them Exactly one thing that my therapist said to me which I would have. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>17:48</time> <p>That would be one of the things that I thought well, this is just too silly and stupid. It doesn&#39;t make you know, it&#39;s not gonna work. Whatever it was, you know, talking to your inner child Again, that sounds so cliche, but talking to that little kid that you were growing up in that environment, like defending myself. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>18:07</time> <p>Being the parent you had always deserved but never received. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>18:10</time> <p>Yeah, exactly And I always thought that was kinda gno gno as we say, but for whatever reason it kinda clicked this time and it&#39;s made a big difference. Another interesting suggestion most recently was I had already mentioned that inner critic and how to deal with that inner critic and how to relate to that inner critic, and I was asked to picture who my inner critic would be, and it was my dad automatically my dad. So the therapist suggested you know, take a picture of your dad with you everywhere you go, and I&#39;m like so what? So when I hear that voice I can say fuck you. Basically the conclusion is yeah, exactly. So also the whole inner critic issue. I think one important thing that we discussed in therapy also was realizing that it&#39;s normal for me especially. I mean, it was very, very real And I think it&#39;s real for everybody to some extent. But you know, the compartmentalize all of these different voices, persona, parts of yourself. So the critic, the anxiety, the understand. Ask this critic, for example, like what good are you doing me right now? How are you helping me right now? Because we develop these different compartments, these different persona and voices, kind of as a defense mechanism. It&#39;s the way we learn to deal things like my intellectualization, my internal critic, and it doesn&#39;t mean they&#39;re healthy, but they exist, they just are. Yeah, they just are. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>19:55</time> <p>So I think that methodology is called internal family systems. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>19:59</time> <p>Yeah. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>20:00</time> <p>So you start deconstructing sort of all of these things. What got you to therapy was debilitating mom, guilt Right of not handling other times of your life, not handling parenting in the way that you had wanted to, in the way that I wish I had. In the way that you wish you had had. And then there was I&#39;m inferring sort of maybe some guilt of blaming yourself for your daughter&#39;s mental health issues. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>20:31</time> <p>Oh, absolutely, absolutely. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>20:33</time> <p>Okay. Absolutely 100%, nonstop Okay and so now that you&#39;ve been going through this and do you still feel responsible to the same degree, Like how is life different now for you that you&#39;ve done sort of more intensive therapy over the last several years? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>20:55</time> <p>I guess one thing I&#39;ll say is I never thought I would get to this place. ever thought I would get to this place. Over the last couple of years it&#39;s been pretty intense. I think I mentioned I went into EMDR therapy when my daughter was at her worst, in and out of the psychiatric hospitals over the last year for several suicide attempts, and I thought something&#39;s gotta give because this is killing me. And the first thing we worked on was the parental guilt, that debilitating parental guilt I remember. go ahead. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>21:24</time> <p>And you had sort of nested EMDR therapy within already a therapeutic relationship. So you took on basically a second therapist just to do sort of semi-regular EMDR sessions, and then you processed that separately with your regular therapist. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>21:43</time> <p>Well, yeah, number one, i would have never gone to EMDR therapy if it wasn&#39;t for my regular therapist, and also they worked completely complimentary. I could go to EMDR and deal with some like very difficult traumatic issues and then come back and process it with my regular therapist and muck through the emotions, as opposed to just you know the EMDR this is the way it is And I mean you know it has their. They both have their different methodologies and their benefits, and it&#39;s not like I only would have discovered this through EMDR and it&#39;s not like something that I hadn&#39;t discussed already with my regular therapist, but I think at the time, both together it just clicked. I thought that I was over these many years, since 2007, when I was diagnosed and started medication, i thought that I had come to accept my mental illness and how deeply it affected me. I didn&#39;t, i hadn&#39;t. I had I had. But in the context of my daughter&#39;s lives, the guilt that I felt about their childhoods and my behavior. In the last six months to a year was the first time I was ever able to say I was sick, i was ill, i felt like I was out of my mind. So my whole you know struggle with, but you knew better. You know you knew better. You&#39;re smarter than that, of course. You knew better because you knew what it felt like to be treated like shit Not that that&#39;s funny. Yeah, i&#39;ve finally gotten to a place where I can accept to a greater extent that I was sick and I did the best I could do in the situation I was in. Beyond that, realizing that I came to parenthood with the toolbox that I learned and collected over the course of my lifetime And I&#39;ve said this before, i think that you know a lot of the tools were bent and broken and harmful but also realizing that there were some good ones in there too. My kids and I had some good times, and they&#39;ve learned a lot of good stuff from me as well, and that was extremely difficult to accept. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>24:02</time> <p>Difficult to accept that there&#39;s a lot of good in there too. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>24:06</time> <p>Yeah, i still struggle with that, but I&#39;m much more able to do so. And one of the things that throughout this whole time if we, you know, go back to the parental guilt and, of course, where all of the roots of all of that behavior I always felt like there&#39;s no way in hell that my children can love me. No way in hell, i mean, they have to hate me. You know, my oldest daughter says often she&#39;s like oh, i love you, mom, you&#39;re just a great mom. And I could never believe that two years ago, a year and a half ago, i would never believe that. And it&#39;s interesting because I mean and this is part of how therapy made these connections for me over the last decade or more, my relationship with my father has actually healed quite a bit. It&#39;s very positive. He&#39;s very supportive in his way. He can&#39;t say I love you, he can&#39;t talk to you about anything, he&#39;s just like, but he listens. Part of that process, the therapeutic process, helped me to realize that. Well, you know what he came to parenthood with a toolbox as well. Same way, lots bent and broken. But also I recognize very clearly all the great things that I got from him. Did you want to ask a question before I? </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>25:24</time> <p>I was just going to say there we see the intergenerational trauma cliche. Like part of this is recognizing my dad came into parenthood with a very limited set of skills And while it doesn&#39;t forgive or excuse any of the behaviors, I kind of understand why. Right, And it just makes some space for empathy. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>25:42</time> <p>You know my mom as well, but that&#39;s a different story You know you come to recognize that where they came from And, of course, being in the situation that I was being, you know, ill alone, single mom, working full time, two young kids, that&#39;s what I learned, that was my go to, that&#39;s all I. Yeah, anyway, i could feel really guilty all over again, but it makes makes sense, you know. It makes sense that in that context things would go to shit. So, yeah, it took me a long time to get to that point to say, okay, i was sick, it&#39;s not an excuse. It&#39;s not an excuse for my behavior. I had the parenting skills that I learned. So I had already mentioned how my relationship with my father has improved and healed itself to a great extent. Actually, i think it&#39;s pretty much healed. I don&#39;t have resentment, I have a clear recognition of man. You sucked, you know, but it&#39;s where he came from, that&#39;s what he learned. So I think, given all of these other extremely important realizations, i think one of the something very like pertinent, poignant, kind of simple, but a big like the big uh-huh moment, the big like okay, i can kind of start to get back to my life, you know, i can kind of start to step out of this constant guilt and anxiety and feelings of like helplessness and because I think I said that my daughter says quite frequently that I love you, mom, you&#39;re the greatest mom, you&#39;re the and I never could believe that. And then I sorry if I&#39;m repeating myself, but then I talked about how my relationship with my dad has healed and changed And there came a point in therapy where I realized because I hadn&#39;t like articulated in my head yet is that, hey, i love my dad, and if it&#39;s possible for you to love your dad. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>27:46</time> <p>yeah, it&#39;s possible for them to love you, Yeah. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>27:50</time> <p>I can believe my daughter, which is huge, i think. at the end of the day, all things considered and all the messiness of of a life lived that, given this particular issue that brought me into therapy this round, that&#39;s huge. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>28:08</time> <p>It sounds like it makes it therapy all worthwhile. Then recognizing that you do love your dad first, and secondly, then my daughters do love me. And then, nested within that was also my daughters weren&#39;t getting me, they were getting my illness Right, and there&#39;s a difference between the two. I am not my illness. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>28:28</time> <p>Yeah, that&#39;s hard to. that was very difficult to get to. Yeah, i mean, like I said, that over the course since my diagnosis I&#39;ve been okay with the diagnosis. When it came to accepting it in my major screw up as a parent, that was where it was very, very difficult, because I automatically went to you&#39;re looking for an excuse. you know there is no excuse. So I think that was when it was so overwhelming that I couldn&#39;t accept that And I think that&#39;s, you know, unfortunately, given this context, in that situation, that&#39;s where I really did really, really, really accept it. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>29:12</time> <p>Wow, that feels like the perfect place for us to stop. Jane, thank you so much for sharing your story with both the listeners and myself. The amount of bravery and courage it took to share those intimate details of your life, particularly those parts that are filled with guilt and shame, is tremendous, and I think I speak for both the listeners and myself when I say that we&#39;re so very grateful. If you have a story like Jane&#39;s about parental guilt and healing and would like to share your story with other listeners, please email me at Shannon at 90834podcastcom. Stay tuned for an unabashed plug of my own private practice. Wherever you go, there you are. That confused me when I was younger. Now I get it. You take your problems with you wherever you go And, as many of you might already know, a new location doesn&#39;t make things like depression and anxiety go away. If you&#39;re an expat that&#39;s ready to set down your emotional load and unpack what&#39;s going on, opricity Expat Therapy is here for you. Our therapists offer a compassionate healing space for you to explore, grow to understand, heal emotional wounds. Act with us today to schedule your free initial consultation. </p>