Embracing the Shadows: A Mother's Journey to Inner Light

In the sacred journey of motherhood, we often encounter moments that challenge our deepest sense of self. At Pamperology, we believe in the power of vulnerability to awaken our inner glow and foster deeper connections with ourselves and our children. Join us as we explore how embracing our shadows can transform our parenting experience and nurture our souls.

 

The Hidden Struggles of Motherhood

When was the last time you felt overwhelmed by your child's emotions, triggering responses you never thought you'd have? Or found yourself caught in a cycle of stress and guilt, wondering if you're failing as a mother? These moments of intense emotion are not signs of failure, but invitations to deeper self-discovery and growth.

Motherhood, at its core, is a profound journey of love, challenge, and transformation. It's the willingness to face our deepest fears and most intense emotions for the sake of our children. However, our society often discourages open discussions about the struggles of parenting:

• We're told that "good mothers" always stay calm and composed.
• Social media portrays unrealistic images of perfect parenting.
• Our productivity-driven world leaves little room for the messy, emotional work of raising humans.

 

The Magic of Embracing Our Shadows

By acknowledging and exploring our triggers and emotional responses, we open ourselves to a world of healing and growth:

• Self-Awareness: Facing our shadows leads to deeper understanding of our own needs and emotions.
• Empathy: By exploring our own struggles, we develop greater compassion for ourselves and our children.
• Authentic Connections: Honesty about our challenges helps us forge more meaningful relationships with other parents.
• Emotional Resilience: Embracing our full range of emotions builds our capacity to navigate the ups and downs of parenting.

 

Cultivating Self-Compassion: A 7-Day Challenge

Ready to invite more self-compassion into your parenting journey? Here's a week-long challenge to help you embrace your shadows and nurture your inner light:

1. Practice Mindful Awareness: Notice your emotional triggers without judgment.
2. Explore Your Past: Reflect on how your childhood experiences influence your parenting.
3. Express Your Feelings: Find healthy ways to release intense emotions (e.g., journaling, movement, or talking with a friend).
4. Cultivate Self-Care Rituals: Create daily moments of peace and rejuvenation.
5. Seek Support: Connect with other parents who can relate to your struggles.
6. Challenge Perfectionism: Embrace "good enough" parenting and let go of unrealistic standards.
7. Practice Self-Forgiveness: When you lose your cool, treat yourself with the same compassion you'd offer a friend.

Remember, embracing our shadows is about approaching ourselves with curiosity and kindness. It's about creating those sacred pauses between breaths where true healing and growth can flourish.

 

Creating Space for Reflection

At Pamperology, we believe that nurturing ourselves as mothers starts with creating sacred spaces in our lives. Our bath, body, and abode products are designed to help you carve out moments of tranquility where you can reconnect with your inner wisdom and strength.

As you embark on this journey of self-discovery, consider how you can transform your environment to support this practice. Perhaps it's lighting a CocoSoy candle during your evening reflection or indulging in a soothing bath soak as you process the day's emotions.

 

Embrace the Journey

Embracing our shadows as mothers is a beautiful, ongoing process. It may feel challenging at first, especially if you're used to holding yourself to impossibly high standards. But with practice, you'll find that self-compassion opens your heart, expands your capacity for love, and brings a sense of peace to your parenting journey.

We invite you to join us in this exploration of authentic motherhood. Share your experiences, challenges, and discoveries with our community. Together, we can create a more connected, compassionate, and nurturing world for ourselves and our children – one honest moment at a time.

Remember, at Pamperology, we're here to support you in creating those sacred spaces where self-reflection and healing can flourish. Explore our collection of pampering products designed to awaken your inner glow and nourish your soul's innate wisdom as a mother.

More of a listener? Listen to the Bonnie's recent shadow work transformation after having a full melt down in front of her children.

 

 

Full podcast on Spotify.

 

 

 

Full Transcript:

 

And they looked at me stunned.  All of a sudden I felt like they felt unsafe in the world, which made me cry even more. Because the last thing I want is to make my kids feel unsafe in the world when I'm struggling to feel safe in the world. Welcome to Can I Say That? A podcast by Pemperology where we create a safe space for women to share their stories, embrace vulnerability, and be truly seen.

 

In a world that often shies away from difficult conversations, we believe in the power of speaking our truth.  We're here to dive into the grey areas. To tackle the topics that are often whispered behind closed doors and to bring them into the light. Each week, we'll be joined by incredible women who will be bravely sharing their experiences, their challenges, and their triumphs.

 

Together, we'll explore the questions that keep us up at night, the fears that hold us back, and the dreams that inspired us forward.  This is a space for empowerment, for support, for confronting our demons and for celebrating our victories. It's a space where we can grow, learn, and heal together. But fair warning, this podcast isn't for the faint of heart.

 

We'll be delving into real, raw, and sometimes uncomfortable territory. We'll be pushing boundaries, challenging norms, and facing our fears head on. Because here's the thing, growth and comfort rarely coexist. But on the other side of discomfort lies transformation, strength, and the power to create the lives we've always wanted.

 

So if you're ready to get to go on this journey of self discovery, listen on Can  I Say That.  Welcome home and let's dive in.  Hello and welcome to another episode of Can I Say That. I'm just jumping on here to go through two major breakthroughs that I've experienced in the last few weeks.  Now this isn't an easy episode for me to share.

 

There are some things in this episode that I am deeply, deeply fucking ashamed of.  My behaviour. And some of the things that I've done. And I don't want to share that.  In all fairness, if I'm getting guests on this podcast, which hang five, because we will be dropping our first guest episode so, so soon, and if I'm wanting to get people on it and to bare their souls and to talk about their triggers and to really discuss those topics of, can I say that, That I have to be willing to say that as well.

 

So, we'll go with the lesser one first. It was really, really interesting. I have recently joined a business mastermind, and it is run by an amazing couple who are deep into mindset and NLP work. They actually teach NLP and hypnotherapy. Now, coming from a psychology background,  I never knew much about NLP and I have to admit I still don't.

 

I'm only new on the journey of experiencing and learning about NLP  because I've always had that, you know, thought that it was just a load of crock. It's pseudoscience. It has no psychology backing. It's got no science backing. It is just  And so I rejected learning about it for a very, very long time.  And then I've started to hear and see so many successful business people talk about the importance of NLP and mindset work for their success that I'm like, okay, I need to, I need to learn about this.

 

I want to give this a go. I don't want to live the rest of my life in this hamster wheel of overwhelm and stress and frustration. Fear of not having enough money. And then when I have money, you know, you're having those stories, uh, the feast and famine cycles. So I was in my typical overwhelm cycle, uh, recently.

 

The kids have been off daycare quite a lot over the last six months. They'd probably been off about 50 percent of the time. Through various illnesses, um, a few work things that we had to go to. Just life. Life as it happens. And I was sitting at my desk and I was, I was feeling just overwhelmed and  I have a few things coming up, a few big bills.

 

And it's like, I need to work, I need to work, work, work, work, work, get this paid. And I sat down with one of the business coaches that I was with and I was trying to tell her, I'm like, no, you don't understand. You just don't understand.  Like I am physically so stressed and overwhelmed that I just cannot fit enough hours in the day and no,  there is nothing you can do about it.

 

Like I've done all of the. Overwhelm exercises. I've sat down and I've done the worry time. I've prioritized my tasks. But what do you do when you do all those tasks that they tell you to do? Like, you sit down and you're like, Yes, just focus on the top five things that are gonna move your needle. And you do that.

 

And then you keep doing that. And you only have time to do that. At the end of the six months, you're gonna look back and your to do list is still gonna be friggin  huge! And you've still got stuff on there from six months ago that, Yes! Okay, so it may not be urgent and a priority, but if you don't do it, then one day it will be an urgent and a priority.

 

You know, things such as making sure your passwords are secure, because yeah, it's easy to not put that as a high importancy until your identity gets left and you've lost money and then you've got to waste all that time going through that. And so I had gotten to this point where I had tried to overcome my overwhelm as best as I could by using these tools and techniques that you can find and, you know, most coaches take you through.

 

And so what she did next astounded me. She was like, okay,  take a deep breath. And she did some timeline therapy with me and she took me back and I was so surprised because she took me back into some trauma, some times in the world where I felt unsafe.  And that was mainly due to, you know, drug addicted.

 

Stepfather, which is going to come up quite a lot in this podcast because he had a very large impact in my life And it will actually come up in the next lesson I learned which I'll get to soon  and it come up to a point where I remember when I was very young He was drunk and he had my mom up against the wall by his throat and I panicked I thought she was gonna die.

 

I thought he was gonna kill him. Like I thought this was it this is the time he's going to die and I ran I ran and got a neighbor and And They called the cops and once everything settled down, mom was like, no, no, you overreacted. You didn't see that. Like she brushed it completely off and made me feel like, sorry, mom, if you're listening to this, but it made me feel like  I was an idiot.

 

Like I was unsafe and I was not just unsafe in this world from people, but I was unsafe from expressing my emotions. And now I haven't talked to my mum about this event and having kids of my own now, I can see how different things can be from children's perspectives. And also diving to psychology, how memories are not fail safe.

 

We can kind of like chat GBT does. We can't. Mix and match information and images and get things a little bit warped. So  who knows if that even happened. Just disclaimer, I don't want you to think anything bad of my mum.  So I was crying all through this time. I was just crying. I was bawling my eyes out.

 

And what came from that? And I was a deep forgiveness. For both of them, because I know that they did the best they could. And finally, even though I had worked through a lot of emotions on that topic, still need to keep doing the work of releasing and releasing and releasing and, yeah, sending them love.

 

And what I realized was the fact that I felt unsafe in this world, I felt unsafe to feel my emotions. And so this overwhelm, It was coming from this place of lack, it was coming from this place of trauma, it was like a flight and fight. I didn't know how to balance without being lazy. I didn't know how to  trust in the universe and just be like, yes, I can relax, I can just, I can work hard  without having to stress.

 

I can work hard without having to feel unsafe. And that was really, really powerful.  It was a whole lot more what that came up, but just that release and sometimes in work and life, there is so much story and emotion in our body that we just push down, push down, push down that we just don't acknowledge and we don't really take that time out to go deep because it was time out.

 

It took an hour to dive that deep and I wouldn't normally just sit here and do that by myself if I didn't have a coach taking me through that. So that was really, really powerful. Now, the next one that I really, I guess was, is the main thing I wanted to talk to you about today, because it's the main thing that brings up shame.

 

This last six months, not only has it been, you know, stressful and overwhelming with kids being sick and a lot going on, my husband's been away a lot of the time. So I've been here with my husband. You know, two kids, you know, solo parenting and, you know, shout out to all the solo parents that do this full time, like, wow, like you all deserve a bloody medal because parenting is hard, but when you have no support and you can't take five minutes away for yourself, that is even bloody harder.

 

And I've noticed that over the last, like, year, I get triggered by my son, like badly triggered. Now there is a whole lot here, like, I'm not going to bore you with the whole history, but here.  When he was a baby, he went through, you know, he nearly died from an unknown rash and was in hospital for three days.

 

And then after that, he got really severe separation anxiety. Was crying up to eight, nine hours a day for weeks, weeks and weeks and weeks on, on stretch. You know, he didn't sleep for more than an hour at a time until he was over seven months old. It was horrendous. It was really bad. And he's starting to get better now, which is really good.

 

But he can be still very emotional, like very, very emotional. One minute he will be giggling and playing and happy and then the next minute, like, you might just go to the toilet and he will just be having a full on meltdown, like completely utterly crying, like won't leave your leg until you pick him up and hold him for another half an hour.

 

And as you know, if you're a solo parent, that can be really challenging because as much as you want to just sit there all day and hold your kids,  things have to happen. You have to cook dinner, you have to clean up, you have to do nappies, you have to help your other children. You have to wash clothes and do all of those types of admin work that comes from living these days.

 

And when I was trying to do those, and he was just constantly just crying and crying and crying at me while I'm trying to do it, and then you pick him up and you try and hold him and he just keeps crying, and then he was, you know, you try and play with him and he just keeps crying, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to fix him crying.

 

My nerves get shredded. So, my husband was away recently for a week. And on that last night, you know, by myself with the kids,  it had been hard. They'd been sick, there's been a lot of crying, and I was feeling Like I couldn't handle it anymore. I was like, I just cannot handle this. Like my whole body was vibrating.

 

I was like feeling like I was being cut by razor blades  and  We're having dinner. My daughter wasn't eating. She's like wasn't even trying it. No. This is disgusting and you know My son was just like throwing it on the ground and then started crying and I'm trying to eat and I've got one kid just running around like a lunatic.

 

Not eating. I'm trying to encourage you to eat one, that's just throwing it on the floor and then crying at me. And I lost it.  I burst, I, no, before I burst into tears, let's, let's go to the shameful part. I threw my plate of food all over the wall. Threw it. Just threw it.  And started to cry.  And then yelled at the kids to shut up.

 

And they looked at me stunned.  All of a sudden I felt like they felt unsafe in the world.  Which made me cry even more, because the last thing I want is to make my kids feel unsafe in the world when I'm struggling to feel safe in the world.  And I'd love to say that this anger and frustration was the first time that it's come up.

 

And I'd love to say I can just be like, I'll just do better next time.  But that night had crossed a line.  By throwing that plate, I mean it was a plastic plate, don't mind you, like it didn't smash, it wasn't,  it wasn't going to put the kids in any harm, but it would still cross the line for me. Because I remember being a kid and my dad had actually done a similar thing.

 

My dad, one day, when we were having my, Brother and I were having some little tats, my, my dad got sick of it and he  picked up our dinner, threw it on the lawn and picked up the foldable table that we had dinner at and threw that on the lawn and said if we wanted to act like animals we can go eat outside and eat like animals.

 

And it reminded me of that. I'm like frig, I really don't ever want to do that again. And so, after cleaning up and I put the kids to bed,  I sat in the bath and I had a big cry and I started thinking to myself, like, that can never happen again, that can never happen again, like, I don't want to keep getting frustrated with my kids again, like, you know, this isn't healthy parenting, in my eyes, because whenever I have to have the kids for longer than like a week by myself, and Tynan's crying like that, it starts to  overload my nervous system, I start to feel dysregulated.

 

If he's having one of his bad weeks.  And I remember hearing this, and I think it's such a beautiful reminder, that you cannot outthink your emotions.  And I was sitting there and I was trying to outthink my emotions. I was trying to be like, no, I'm just not going to do it again.  And I'm pretty sure all of you can relate.

 

If you've ever tried to do that, if you've ever just tried to use willpower to stop doing a behaviour, it doesn't normally go too well. It might maybe for the first time or two, but normally, you know, these, these passings come up.  And so I turned to another toolbox that I have heard about that I've never really used before and I kind of intuitively went into trying to do some shadow work.

 

Now, if you haven't heard of the term shadow work, it is, I guess, a bit of a buzzword now, But it has been around for a little bit. It was introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, and it's about the process of exploring and integrating the unconscious parts of the self. You know, the parts that we call the shadow are our personality, thoughts, emotions, and kind of our behaviors that we repress or deny.

 

Now usually they're not really acceptable by society standards. Such as throwing a plate of food at the wall when you are overloaded by your kids. Definitely not acceptable. And I really think that shouldn't be acceptable either. But I'd also really think that it takes one extra step as well in this shadow work.

 

And I think the shadow, it's not just parts that we repress or deny because we don't think that they're acceptable, but I think they're also parts of us that are maybe malfunctioning adaptive behavior that are there to keep us safe.  As we've grown up, we've learned behaviors That even though now they no longer serve us, at some point they kept us safe and we just don't realise it.

 

And so I really sat into this bathtub and I turned off all distractions and I felt into my heart. And I first of all dropped into my body and I was like, what is my body feeling?  And it was my heart. Now, normally I'm a very solar plexus feeling person, but it's my heart, my heart was breaking and not breaking from the actions that I did.

 

But when I feel overloaded, I feel like my heart is being torn in two. And so I sat with them. I'm like, Oh, love, what is going on? Why do you feel like this? Like what's happening? You know, like I spoke to in the last episode, I approached myself with curiosity.  If a friend came to me and said that they'd done what I did.

 

How would I want to speak to them? Like, how would I hold them and give them space? And that's what I did for myself. And I really dropped into that. I'm like, how is this behaviour keeping me safe? Why am I feeling this? And I couldn't quite put into words, like, why. I'm like, I just, this is how I feel. And so I acknowledged that and held space for it and I allowed myself to feel.

 

And then I was like, how is this keeping me safe? How is feeling frustrated, you know, yelling at my kids when they've been crying at me for so long and Demanding so much of me, like how is that keeping me safe?  And I realized it was, and it was a behavior that once again, I got from growing up with a drug addicted stepfather.

 

You see, my stepfather had a whole host of issues. He was a type one diabetic. Which meant his sugar went up and down a lot. He was also had Crohn's disease, so thyroid disease.  And he also, yeah, was a drug addict. So you could imagine the mood swings, holy moly, like they were astronomical. And as a young child, when you think all of these actions are about you, you learn quickly to pick up the mood and pick up when things are changing.

 

And so with a stepdad. One minute he would be like mucking around, wrestling, watching the footy, you know, living the best life, like giggling, having fun, and then the next minute he would just snap and he would just turn into someone who would like lunge at me and scare me and yell at me and yell at my face and call me all sorts of names and it made me feel unsafe and this went on for a good 10 years and I had no escape.

 

I had no power and no escape. And that is the cold hard truth. That is not just a story. I tried running away. I tried moving to my dad's. I tried to escape. As a child you do not have power. Your parents take that power away from you, which is a whole nother episode, which I will do one day. And so I couldn't escape.

 

So every day I was tortured mentally in this cycle of ups and downs with no escape and I nearly couldn't handle it. Like it took me to the brink. I had nearly committed suicide multiple times as a form of escape  and what I didn't realize is that when Tynan starts having these mood swings. And I can't escape, because I'm the sole parent.

 

And I'm the only one that can look after him. And it is my duty to look after him and protect him and care for him. It puts my body straight back to when I was a kid, in a situation where someone was up and down, I had no escape, I had no power, and I felt unsafe.  And so was it any wonder that when my kids are doing that, to me, I start panicking.

 

My body starts going into an overreactive state and I struggle to regulate my nervous system because of all the years it was dysregulated and I had no one to teach me how to regulate it. And is it any wonder that I start feeling that I can't cope anymore, like I can't handle anymore, I can't handle anymore, because I have had so many years of it.

 

And so I was really able to drop in, give myself some love, and appreciate that, and be like, Oh, no wonder why! Like, that makes sense! Like, no wonder! Oh, love! Like, ah! Just feel that. Like, feel that acceptance, and know that yes, of course it's going to dysregulate you. And then once I felt that, Once I knew the stories that were happening, once I knew the patterns that were playing out, then I was able to go and say to myself, Okay, love, I understand that, but we still can't let this happen again.

 

We cannot throw a plate ever again, even if it's plastic, even if it only just made a little bit of a mess that the dog made up and that the kids seem to be unfazed of now.  It cannot happen again. What can we do to help you feel and regulate better?  And so I did come up with a few solutions, and one is dancing.

 

One is screaming in the pillow with kids around so they can see healthy expression of that emotions. And the next is to not fight it. I get ashamed when I have to tell my partner I'm feeling dysregulated and overwhelmed with it because he doesn't have those feelings. I feel like I'm a failure of a mum.

 

Oh god, I'm going to cry now because I feel like I'm a failure of a mum. I do, like, and mums should be able to deal with this, shouldn't they? It's just crying, like, why can't my partner seem to just stand there and not let, you know, the baby's three hours worth of straight crying bother him, but it bothers me.

 

And I have to now unpack those beliefs and  know that yes, that is me and that is okay. And how can I support myself to support my kids?  Oh, geez.  I don't even know what I  hope that that has helped you feel less unworthy or less bad of a mum. Or anything else or that you can relate to some point of that because that was just, I just wanted to come on here and shed my shit to really make it so that I'm living truthfully with you and that when I have guests on that, I'm also being worthy of their openness.

 

So I'd love to know, like, have you done. any shadow work before or NLP? What are your thoughts?  Are you taking time throughout your day, throughout your week to really give yourself space and time to identify your triggers, to sit with and understand any strong emotional reactions and accept yourself for that without Are you avoiding or suppressing them?

 

No? Are you trying to think your way out of your emotions? I'd love to know. Jump on, um, if you want to come on the podcast. Come chat with me about it.  Anyway, that was just me, uh, for today. I hope you got some value from it. If you did, come over and jump onto Instagram and say hello at pamperology. au. Drop me a voice note in the DMs.

 

I love chatting and let's keep this conversation going. Alright, until next time, much love and light, Bonnie.  Thank you for joining me on another episode of Can I Say That? I hope you got value from this and I hope that it has lit your soul on fire and has inspired you, empowered you or made you feel seen and loved.

 

If you have liked this episode, do me a favour, please hit the like and subscribe button or share this with a friend.  You can also jump into my DMs On Instagram at can I say that, or come on over to pamperology. au and have a look at our beautiful products that help you cultivate self care and self love and really some of those just pamper comfort things that we all love and need occasionally.

 

Until next time, I'm sending much love and light and may you be seen and heard. Thank you, friend.