How to instantly stop anxiety and find the courage to do motherhood your way, with Martha Beck

0:08Hey, it's Zoe. Welcome to Motherkind. We are sponsored by Stocker. This is the show that's going to anxious if you feel unsure of yourself, this episode is going to grab you by the hand and show you the way through. Martha Beck, PhD, is a Harvard-trained sociologist. She is a world-renowned coach and multiple New York Times best-selling author. She is very famously Oprah's personal life coach and Mel Robbins said that Martha changed her life. I cannot tell you how lucky we are to have Martha Beck on Motherkind and to hear her wisdom. This is an incredibly special guest and a very special episode.

1:07Martha reveals how motherhood was the catalyst to change her life and how you can use it as the catalyst to change yours. She tells us what to do if you feel stuck, what most parenting advice gets completely wrong and why following your own rules is the only way to feel happier. Please share this episode far and wide and if you haven't already subscribed so you never miss a new episode, I hope you love it. Here it is.

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4:17Well, Martha, I cannot tell you what an honor it is. I followed your work for so long. And, you know, when I became a mother nine years ago, I really, I really loved your book and all your books. And so to be sat here, you know, interviewing you and chatting to you on the podcast does feel like a bit of a dream come true. So thank you so much. Well, for me too, obviously you write a book like a message in a bottle, you throw it out there. And when someone shows up and says, I found it, I read it. It's such a huge honor. Thank you. I've thought long and hard about where to start because something that marks your work is just how, in how many ways you're able to help us.

4:59And I wondered if you could start by thinking about the mothers out there that are listening to this. And if there is one thing that you wish that more mothers knew, what would it be? It's this. Your children will not treat themselves the way you treat them. Your children will treat themselves the way you treat yourself. health. How did you learn that? It was interesting. My third child, Lizzie, Ellie, she lives in the UK now. Oh, does she? She's married and I have a wonderful kid-in-law. I just think you're amazing. Everybody over in the UK, one of my favorite places. Sorry, I digress. I was in my house and I had a friend visiting and she was sitting on the floor.

5:54She had her legs stretched out. And little Ellie was maybe 18 months old. And she went zipping past and tripped over my friend's foot. And she was, you know, she was starting to cry. And my friend said, oh, that was my fault. Bad foot, bad foot. And she started hitting her own foot. And Ellie looked at her and seemed to think for a while. And then she took her own foot in her hand and started hitting it and saying, bad foot, bad foot. and what the friend was saying was oh I'm sorry I should have been taking putting all my focus on you but what Ellie got out of that was no even if it's just an accident I should blame myself and it was just this moment when it crystallized and I'm like oh my gosh how have I been treating myself because that's what they're growing up to be what did you change after that point I started asking myself when I would in the middle of the day not just what would my children like to do but what would I like to do?

6:53This felt very selfish to me at first. It was not the way I was trained to parent. And so I would try to do things that were culturally approved, like in the holiday time, we would make cookies and decorate them. Only they didn't like that. They would be wandering around the house and I'd be like, get back here and enjoy this warm and loving family tradition. They hated it because I was just a ball of anxiety. But when I decided what I really want to do is watch wildlife documentaries and they're just going to have to keep up or fall behind. Turned out my kids loved wildlife documentaries and loved watching with me because my energy was so cheerful when I was doing that.

7:33And I felt guilty for always wanting to paint and draw. And some time ago, my two, I had this complicated thing where my oldest child is now a they them. and then my third child is a she her. Anyway, they were talking together and I heard one of them say, if we could just get her drawing or painting, we know we're going to have a good time. And I wasn't paying any attention to them when I was drawing and painting, but that's when they felt me come to life. And you can't fool children. They feel your energy. They sense your hypocrisy. If you are saying love all people and be good, but you loathe yourself and torture yourself, they will see the hypocrisy and they will feel confused and adrift and have to learn how to live from somewhere else.

8:21It's so, I know this to be true, what you're talking about because of my experience with my mother. I really know it to be true that children pick up on what they see, not on what they're told. And yet, like you're describing, it's so counter-cultural yes it's so counter-cultural because what we've been taught for you know millennia is that you become a mother and you cease to exist and that you have to pour everything into your children and I think that conditioning in me oh I still have to work every single day on breaking that still feels difficult for me what would you say to someone who who intellectually understands this but still struggles so hard with guilt if they prioritize themselves feeling like a bad mom for not loving every minute and all that messaging.

9:10You have to really, really question your cultural assumptions, like be incredibly sensitive to your own feelings of joy or lack of joy. And if you feel you have to do something that lacks joy because the culture taught you, you had to do that question the culture and not yourself. If you are doing something that is joyful and the culture tells you, no, that's not good. If you're not hurting the kids and they're with you and you are in a state of joy, question the culture. Tell them to question the culture. I remember when my children were very young, I was trying to be a good soldier in my family and community by going back to the Mormon church where I'd grown up.

9:56I had a son with Down syndrome and after he was born, I was still getting my doctorate from Harvard, but I moved back to Mormon country because I knew they would treat him really well. That's part of the religious acceptance of difference in that place. And I'm very grateful for it, though I left the Mormon church. Because I would take the kids with me to these church services. And there was this very rigid, they have to sit completely motionless and pay attention for an hour, two hours, three hours at a time. And if they didn't stay quiet and attentive, reverent, as we were told, The recommended procedure was to take them into an empty room that wasn't in the chapel, make them face a wall, and be absolutely still for the remainder of the meeting.

10:46I heard that. And everything, you know, somebody told me to do that with my two-year-old and my three-year-old. And everything in me said, that's whatever. I didn't really believe anything at the time, but I was starting to accept there may be some mysterious force in the universe and maybe the universe is conscious. And if it is conscious, it is ruled by love. And I just thought that is the very last thing love would do. Absolutely not. So I instead developed a tradition. If they weren't in a tentative in church, we would go out and have donuts. and then much later much later when they were teenagers they bought me a very appropriate t-shirt which said sorry I missed church I was busy becoming a lesbian and practicing witchcraft and we all like it better that way I love that I love that how did you find that, you know, your story is just phenomenal.

11:49And, you know, I think about you as a young mom and the pressures that you faced when you left the charge. I honestly don't know if I could have withstood some of what you did. How did you find that strength? Well, it was very much related to my experience of pregnancy and childbirth, because as you probably know, I went off to Harvard when I was 17, left everything in my childhood behind me, and tried to be a good Harvard citizen with materialistic values and overwhelming desire to achieve. And then I married, I had my first child just as I entered graduate school. And then I got pregnant again in the second year of graduate school.

12:32And it turned out that I was very, very young. I was 24. But even though I was young, they tested, they did amniocentesis because of weird things. I'd been caught in a fire. I'd inhaled a lot of smoke. They just did all these tests. And they found out that the fetus I was carrying, who at that time was almost six months gestation, had Down syndrome. And the recommendation was very, very strong that I terminate this very, I had like a week before it was illegal because it was that late in the pregnancy. And I was already bonded to the baby. I had one child already. So I sort of had just grown the same type of love inside me for the little boy in my womb, in my uterus, as I had for the first child that I bore.

13:22And I just couldn't do it. I would totally support anyone else who decided to terminate, but I didn't. And so the head of the Harvard obstetrics community, there were five different doctors there and they all told me to terminate. and the head doctor said well it's obvious we've never had a person make this decision and you're also the youngest person that we've had with this diagnosis and I don't think that's a coincidence I think you're too young to know what you're doing and this is like refusing to let me excise a malignant tumor and I sat there looking at him in my little hospital gown here's this big imposing doctor.

14:03And I had the strangest like visual illusion that I was looking at this 50 something man, but in front of his face was another face. And it was terrified. It was absolutely terrified. And I thought, I bet he doesn't even know anyone with Down syndrome. He's afraid of this baby. I can see that. It was just really clear. And I thought, you know, no one goes to Harvard because they're sure they're smart. They end up at Harvard because they're afraid they're stupid. it. They fight like crazy to prove themselves. So the most horrible thing this man could probably imagine was to be a little boy who couldn't achieve intellectually.

14:42He was afraid of the dumb little boy inside him. And I had to stand up to those doctors and I had to have my child delivered by a doctor who believed him to be a malignant tumor. And the first thing he did in this life was to pee in that doctor's face. And I was very proud. So I got a bit of a spine during that time. It was not fun. It was not easy for me to accept at all. It's not like I blissfully was okay with it. It ripped my concept of what the meaning of life was to shreds. But what I came up with was, if there's any purpose in this world where we're all going to die, it's the capacity to experience joy because Emerson said beauty is its own excuse for being and joy is felt beauty and it's its own excuse for being.

15:35And if my son could experience that, then his life was in every way as valid as my own. So then I moved to Utah thinking, okay, at least I'll be supported there and realized that I thought the Mormon church was a cult and I needed to leave it. And this is considered in that community to be the one thing you can do that's worse than murder. It's an unforgivable sin. And I have not seen in 30 years, most of the people I grew up with, like one or two of them, out of everybody I knew, my whole family, all the friends I had made in growing up. So it was a horrible, wrenching decision. But by standing up for this little life inside me, because I thought he can experience joy, I learned to stand up for my own like childlike parts that knew that they weren't happy being in this belief system and knew they weren't happy in that community.

16:38And standing up for that part of myself was something I had practiced by standing up for my son. And I really think any mother, any father who feels that desire to make the world a safe and welcoming space for our children and to accept them unconditionally gains the ability to stand up for the self, herself, himself as well. And it's one of the great gifts of parenthood to look at your child and think that is uncontestably a completely precious, priceless being. And then turn that logic on yourself because you were that baby once. There's no baby in the nursery of any hospital who's worse, who's bad.

17:25Go pick one out. Oh, that was no good. No, they're all infinitely precious. And so we remain infinitely precious as we grow up. when each of us and all of us are infinitely precious. It's just, it's so beautiful. As you were talking, I was thinking about how much conversation there is about our children triggering us. And I was thinking how powerful it is for what you're saying, which is actually that they can also do the opposite of that, which is help us unearth those qualities. And that was my experience. You know, becoming a mother has unearthed unbelievable qualities in me that I never thought would be possible for me, to be honest.

18:05Wow. And I, yeah, I just, I find that so powerful to focus on that. And, you know, I love, I love, love, love your work on purpose and feeling stuck. And I feel like so many mothers feel stuck. They feel stuck in the cocktail of emotions that motherhood brings with it. They feel stuck in that complete tension between work and presence and wanting to be there, but also wanting to be in the world. They feel stuck in their relationships, taking on the majority of the parenting and the load. And how does someone move from stuck to whatever the opposite of joy? To freedom. I think the opposite of stuck is freedom.

18:54And I love that because the Buddha used to say, wherever you find the ocean, you can know it's the ocean because it always tastes of salt. And wherever you find your own enlightenment, no matter what it looks like, you will recognize it because it always tastes of freedom. So it's not necessarily comfort. It's not leisure and happiness. It's freedom. So what you're talking about is a sense of a loss of freedom. I wrote my dissertation on this at Harvard because I was completely overwhelmed by it. And I'd never met a woman at Harvard who had a child at that time. It was not something you did. And then I'd grown up in this really weird traditional culture where you were supposed to be barefoot and pregnant your whole life.

19:39Or as I like to say, Mormons just want their women to breed well in captivity. So, sorry. Sorry, I'm not sorry. So, I knew all these women who were stuck in the traditional role. I knew all these women who were stuck because they felt like they wanted these careers and they couldn't have children. And I was stuck having children and trying to have a career, which seemed to be the worst of all of them. So, I wrote my dissertation on the pressures that women specifically feel as our culture advances. And what I found was our whole culture is based on two unlivable ideals. And one is that you achieve, achieve, achieve as an individual and you out-compete everyone to become really, really impressive.

20:25And everybody's supposed to take that and like go for like gold. On the other hand, you have this idea that you should, a mother should give up everything for her child and that your only real purpose is to serve others and that you should sort of obliterate your own needs. They could not be more opposite. And they are actually, they have their roots in things like the history of slavery. I'm not even kidding. Where some people got to be in charge and never had to do anything, but they had to be very wealthy and sort of hate, you know, willing to hurt other people. And then there were people who had no rights and had to serve, serve, serve.

21:03So it's a really broken culture. And I took the, I did the whole history of it. I traced it. And I actually wrote my first book on this, though it sank like a stone. And it was called Breaking Point when it was published. But I called it deadlock. Because when you're pulled by two mutually antagonistic sets of pressures and expectations, you can not win. So the women who had careers and didn't have children were seen as less than women because they didn't have kids. The people who had children and quit their jobs were seen as ridiculous and unimpressive because they didn't keep their careers. The people who are trying to do both, like me, were inadequate in both areas.

21:50Whenever I was with my kids, I thought I should be working on my career. Whenever I was working on my career, I thought, oh, I should be working on parenting. It was hell. And my advisors said, well, what's the solution? And I said, there is no solution. This was not a problem set up to have a solution. This is just where we are given the two contradictory, hypocritically central ideals of our culture. And they were so unscientific. They were like, well, that just can't be allowed. Go find a solution. I was like, I really don't think there is one. But then I went back and I looked at all these interviews I'd done, 300 plus interviews with women about their lives.

22:36And I noticed something really interesting, which was that when the interviews were over, a certain group of women who were much more relaxed than the others would sort of lean forward and tell me, now, if you want to hear the real story. And then they would tell me something that sounded outside the bounds of our culture, Mostly they would talk about having had a sense of a connection with some numinous force, a spiritual being, presence of some kind. One woman had been so pushed to the edge that she was considering suicide. She got a bottle of pills. She was a nurse and her husband had developed a terminal illness and she'd gone to work as a nurse to support the kids, but they were in this religious community.

23:22And her family was telling her, the reason your husband is dying is that you're working. and you're being punished and you're not taking good care of your children. But if you quit working, you have no money and that's not acceptable either. I mean, this is a classic. I saw case after case after case in these two mutually contradictory pressures, pushing and pulling women all over the place. Anyway, because she was a nurse, she got a bunch of sleeping pills and then she got a bottle of whiskey and she drove to a beautiful place near a lake so that she could take the pills and the whiskey and, you know, exit.

24:00And when she'd really decided to do it, the pills are there, the whiskey's there, the lake is in front of her. She is dead. She let herself die before she died. And from a condition of thinking of herself as dead, she thought, why do I give a rat's ass what these people think of me. I do not fucking care. And she threw the bottles into the lake, which is not a good practice. And I'm sure it hurt the fish, but you know, it was a good statement. And she went back and told her, her in-laws that they could fuck right off. Excuse me for the, I don't know if there's profanity in this. We encourage some strong language.

24:40Yeah. I mean, this was, this was a case that needed it. And she got her kids around her. They were quite young and she said, this is what's happening and I'm going to fight like a tigress to support you, but I'm going to be under a lot of pressure and we're going to do this together. And the kids were on her team. And she was so calm, Zoe. She was so outside of the pressures. And then I started to see that all the women, there was about a 10 % slice of people who I saw as being much more relaxed and pleased with life in general. and they seemed to be happier as parents, they'd all had something that broke from the culture completely.

25:24The experience she had in that car was not social. There were no other people in the car. She was having a connection with something from a different, she perceived to be from a different realm. And that is the quality that sociologists call charisma. It comes from the Greek word meaning someone who has contact with the gods. so all these women had had a charismatic experience of some kind and they went back and said I don't care what people want from me I'm following love I'm following joy I'm going to take care of myself so I can take care of these kids and I'm going to feel what I feel know what I know say what I mean and do what I want they were such good parents

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27:04That's M-U-M-1-5. So just head to jo majuri.com to get your perfect gift in time for Mother's Day using the code MUM15. Jo Majuri, the destination for thoughtful gifting. Isn't that incredible? It speaks to me because in many ways I've had a mini version of that. Have you really? Tell me. It's not as dramatic. but I'm still gathering data 30 years later really similar where I just had this moment before I started you know this podcast and the work and I just realized this is insane this setup and it's crazy that I am perpetuating this by trying to do it all and I remember just thinking I'm gonna do it differently and I really made myself my top priority and it felt risky because I thought, you know, I'm meant to be giving everything to everything to my little girl.

27:59And I started to get back into my meditation practice, back into my yoga. I went back into therapy and did really intensive therapy when my little girl was six months. And it completely changed my experience of motherhood to the point that I then couldn't carry on my corporate work. I was like, I've got to do something. And that's when I started the podcast. So I think it's so incredible to hear you talk to that, that idea of the way through this absolutely impossible bind is to become more empowered. Yeah. And if we have very self-sacrificing mothers that went into the spectrum and very career dominated women at the other end of the spectrum, what you're talking about isn't on the spectrum.

28:45No, you just jump off the spectrum. Exactly. You go up or down. There's no line connecting you with the other people. And it takes a lot of courage. And I'm so impressed that you did that. But I also want to say to all the people out there, I researched this very intensively and I found no other way. But the way you just described actually works. and my whole self-help philosophy grew out of this conflict between motherhood and work and all the cultural expectations. I didn't know that. That's incredible. Yeah. That's where I broke through first with my son and secondly, with the pressure of being a mother who was trying to complete a PhD, be an assistant professor and deal with three kids under five.

29:36And I had all these immune disorders. Yeah. I had to think of something. And I love how you talk about when you feel the most stuck. And I think mums with, you know, that setup that you just described, most people listening will relate to that on some level, you know, huge external pressures, huge internal pressures, you know, financial pressures, young children and you feel the most stuck, that is when you say we're closest to that breakthrough. Right. Because the one reason we abandon what we know naturally to be the best course for our life, I mean, we're drawn by things that bring us joy and we don't repeat experiences that are painful, except that we are so socially interdependent as social primates who can barely move when we're born.