MOMENT | The surprising reason you’re still criticising yourself and how to change it - for good, with Kasia Urbaniak

0:03Hey everyone, welcome to this week's Motherkind moment. Thank you for being here. Thank you for pressing play. This is your place on a Monday for calm, connection, and maybe even a shift in perspective before the crazy week ahead. This week's moment is from one of my favourite ever episodes back from November 2020. It is with Kasia Urbaniak. I love this clip where she describes how to stop attacking yourself and why it is so ingrained in us to do that. She also says how it's only once we can stop attacking ourselves that we can actually make space for our needs and desires. I really hope this episode gives you something to think about today.

0:55Here it is. The first step, and if this is the only step a woman takes towards it's Breaking Good Girl Conditioning, is to look at this self-attack as something that was born, again, out of love, out of care, out of a desire to protect. And that when we do it to ourselves, the first thing to know is it's not you. You are not attacking yourself. This is a universal phenomenon. I have not. At the academy where we had a headquarters for a while in this warehouse space that we made incredibly wild and luxurious. We had this giant sign on the wall. We would run through all of the transcripts of all the classes to see if new exercises were coming out that were successful or unsuccessful.

1:40And we would use that space to decide what works, what doesn't work in the most rigorous scientific sense. Like is this technique working? And the sign on the wall is, can a woman use this against herself? Can a woman use this against herself? And when we ran each exercise through the test, a woman who finally has this huge victory, she finally gets the loving velvet divorce in the house, or she finally gets the love of her life or the job where she finally, you know what she says? She can very easily go, I'm so stupid. Why didn't I think of this earlier? or why did I need a class? Why did it take so long, right?

2:19Anything. So can a woman use this against herself? A woman could listen to your loving podcast and go, I am not the right kind of woman. I am not the right kind of mother. So the self-attack, if a woman can just create a tiny gap between herself and the voice that attacks, there is not a whole lot of psychoanalysis. This is what happened because of my mother, because of my father, because of... It's just the radio waves. the police yourself to be safe. If I beat myself enough, if I attack myself enough, I'll get it right. And that's not how human beings actually learn. That's not how it works.

2:56We learn what we feel. And when something feels good, we do it again. When we acknowledge that something feels right, we do it again. And that lack of acknowledgement of doing something right is key. So in general, in terms of good girl conditioning, the first thing is awareness. The second thing is selectively breaking rules. And the third thing is creating new agreements, creating new requests, creating new arrangements. So, you know, we have this big word patriarchy and it is the word father. It's not just women that are invisibly bound by the confinement of the patriarchy. Underneath that is the secret level of motherhood.

3:39How this world is not really equipped or designed for mothers. It's not designed for women. It's not designed for mothers. And I think about all of the religions of the world with their gods. Yeah, we could replace the Virgin Mary with Artemis, a warrior goddess. Does that work? No. You know who I want to see be the archetype? I have this imaginary goddess. And she is the woman who broke her own good girl conditioning as a mother and went to her boss and said, I'm just going to ask for something crazy. I'm going to be absolutely outrageous and out of my mind. I'm going to sit this boss down. I'm going to say, I like my job.

4:14I want to keep my job. I'm about to have a baby. I would like to be paid while I'm pregnant at the same salary. Then I would like to have the baby and I would like to spend some time with the baby while you continue to pay me that salary. It sounds crazy. The first time you say it that way, it sounds crazy. Some bold ass crazy woman went out there. She's my hero, heroine goddess. She's the archetype. She's the archetype. I want to pray to. She's the one who went, I'm going to be selfish. You asked about the center, filling your own cup. I'm going to ask for something for me. I want to have this experience and I want to get paid.

4:53And in the context of something called maternity leave, not existing, it sounds outrageous. It sounds crazy, but because this figure, this woman once asked for something crazy. Now we have something called maternity leave. That It doesn't sound so crazy. And guess what? It didn't just benefit her. It didn't just benefit her child. It benefited all of society. Sometimes some of our most selfish sounding, unreasonable desires are a gateway to massive social change. And for a woman who's in good girl condition and ignoring those desires that seem outrageous or frivolous or still like, what am I lazy?

5:32I want both jobs and like not working and having baby or am I too much? Am I asking too much? Why should the boss have to pay me when I'm not at work? All that stuff, all that conditioning, right? Those desires sometimes are the gateway to the things that everybody needs.