Guilt vs Grace

So all this talk of thinking about your thoughts and deciding whether you consciously want to keep believing old patterns, may start to sound like rationalizing bad behavior, so let my try to clarify that a bit more today.

Of course we want to always pay attention to our own moral compass to tell us what we believe is right and wrong. That is what i mean by having a healthy amount of guilt. We want to be alarmed when we do something that we deem as “bad”. But the problem comes when we let every little piece of parenting advice turn into a moral issue for us. Of course we would never want to abuse our children and if we did anything that comes close to that line for us, we want to feel bad about that for a time to help us get back on track. But if we didn’t feed them enough veggies, or get them to bed at some random resubscribed “correct” time, etc, we don’t need the guilt and shame that accompanies a moral dilemma. Because we tend to make every little matter into a huge weighty matter, our “guilt-o-meter” starts to get out of wack. And that is the problem we are trying to drop.

So, yes please keep your moral code of right and wrong but after you do something “wrong” grace sounds like “ok yep, that was not cool. We don’t want to show up that way. But I am a flawed human and trying my best and sometimes my best is pretty bad but I’ll keep trying and next time I’ll try something different” etc. Which is not rationalizing bad behavior. That would be deciding that what we did wasn’t actually that bad and it’s ok if I do it again. And I do think there are a lot of areas of our parenting that could use some intentional thought to see if you want to keep it in the moral bucket or the suggestion bucket. Which again is not rationalizing bad behavior but rather deciding whether you really want to intentionally keep the thought that it is even “bad” in the first place. When everything we do or don’t do all day every day is triggering our “that was bad” response, it’s really hard to believe the new thought that I’m not bad to drop the shame. We must have grace for where we are in order to move to where we want to be.

This can all be a little tricky if you are buried deep in the thought patterns of beating yourself up. If you are used to going straight to the self depreciation thoughts, it can be hard to maneuver out of them and that is what a coach can help you do. I can help you see which thoughts are causing your unnecessary pain and problems and we can work together to decide where your moral compass will guide and where you can cut yourself some slack. Changing our patterns of thinking is a process and it’s a lot easier with someone who is not in your brain to reflect back to you some things that you’ve been thinking so long that you just believe them now but they may not be serving you. .Click here to schedule a free session and we can get started. You don’t need to be bogged down by guilt and shame. Your best life is on the other side. When you feel good about yourself and your parenting, then you can much easier change anything that’s not quite aligned. I’ll help you do that. It’s totally possible. and awesome!