Guilty-Mom Syndrome

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 1 John 4:18 (NIV) [Perfect - has not grown into a sufficient understanding of God's love. Amplified Bible]

Fact: The shame, fear, and guilt I experienced in childhood and carried into adulthood affected my ability to parent my children.

SHAME caused me to pretend to be someone I wasn’t because I didn’t know it was okay to truly be myself, nor did I know how to do that. Since I thought I was flawed in ways that other people were not, I learned to live inside a false reality. I wanted to create a “Huxtable-like” (aka The Cosby Show) family life for my children that ignored the realities of what my relationship with their father was really like. It was all in an effort to overcompensate and give them the kind of life that I didn’t have. But did it do more harm than good? In some ways, yes.

FEAR told me that if anyone ever found out the truth about my un-fitness as a person, not to mention a wife and mother, I would not be accepted by the people in my world. So, I ran and hid from any criticism and opposition. I became a fake version of who I thought I needed to be in order to succeed in life. The anxiety of not measuring up overshadowed every area of my life, especially my role as a mother, because I saw this as my most important role.

GUILT over not perfectly fulfilling that role haunted me for over 30 years. There’s no guilt like mom-guilt!! For me, it showed up as the anxious, unprotected little girl in me who pushed me to overcompensate as a parent, even though my children are grown and have assured me that, for the most part, I did an exemplary job raising them. As a parent, it’s hard to not worry about how the decisions I made/didn’t make when they were kids impacted them.

I saw this pattern of guilt even more clearly last year when I realized that my anxiety regarding them was still at maximum levels. When my son reminisced about an adolescent struggle/conflict he had with another youth, it sent me into an emotional tailspin. Young people can be cruel, and the pain of those childhood experiences can remain with us throughout our lives or until we begin working through them.

The anger and pain I felt was so intense that privately I couldn’t stop crying. And when I tried to pray, I didn’t know what to say. In desperation, I grabbed my journal and scribbled down my confusion over my intense reactions to an event that he had already lived through and resolved in his own mind and heart. Writing helped me realize that when he shared that experience with me, I re-lived one of my own embarrassing adolescent experiences, the shame of which had remained with me.

Additionally, counseling has helped me realize how I filtered my children’s experiences through my own painful childhood experiences, triggering old feelings of inadequacy and danger. This pervasive, habitual, anxiety routinely robbed me of my ability to experience joy in the present as I worried about the past. I want my children to witness my healing from the wounds of my past for their own empowerment and encouragement, but I do not want to project the fears from my experiences onto them! This can be a delicate and challenging balancing-act for all parents. But, we must guard against overcompensation so that our children can become well-balanced.

Peace,

Janet

Published 08/30/2022 by Janet Lyn Boswell, BA, CTRC