Doing the 'Bad' thing does not make you Bad.
Even if you believe it does.
I don’t know about you, but I find social media to be full of voices. And they’re all really persuasive. However I find the ones that are most persuasive are the ones that actually reinforce our old beliefs about ourselves and the world, even if these aren’t beliefs we have necessarily chosen ourselves.
And when you become a new mum, these voices are SO loud, because it’s such a time of adjustment that we can feel desperate and want to cling on to things that we know. So these old beliefs can be particularly enticing, even if they don’t actually serve you very well.
One of the beliefs that a lot of us can absorb from childhood is that we have to do the ‘good’ thing to be loved, to be a good person. If we don’t, we will be ‘punished’ in some way by the universe (or just emotionally by people around us).
And so that can mean that we end up doing things that we don’t really want to.
Breastfeeding. Bottle feeding. Co-sleeping. Sleep training. Not taking time for ourselves. Taking time for ourselves. Seeing people. Not seeing people. None of these things is inherently good or bad, but you will possibly have absorbed ideas about what we ‘should’ do. The good thing.
And it can set up such a battle inside us, because we’re desperately trying to do the ‘good’ thing because the fear of being ‘bad’ is too big to face. The idea of doing what we WANT might be terrifying.
Now I’m not suggesting that you do everything you feel you want – these things take a bit of thinking about. But having support to really think about what you want can be really helpful.
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have people around us who don’t care about the ‘good’ thing – they can trust that what we want is actually ok for us and that we will be able to cope with the consequences of our decisions. And sometimes we need a bit of support from a therapist of some kind who can help us gently tease out our old beliefs and help us decide what we really want to do.
I hope that is a useful thought for you today.
Until next time (which won’t be until the new year), take care,
Sarah x
