MOMENT | This is how you know you're a cycle breaker with Shelley Robinson

0:03Hey everyone and welcome to this week's Motherkine moment, your place on a Monday for calm, connection and maybe even a shift in perspective before the crazy week ahead. If you've followed me or my work or the podcast for a while, you will know that I am deeply passionate and interested in cycle breaking. So understanding what our own childhoods were like, what were the messages that we received and the beliefs that we picked up, and then asking ourselves, do we want to change any of those for our own families now that we are parents ourselves? And this week's episode is such a brilliant insight into what it means to be a cycle breaker, how you know if you're a cycle breaker, and how do you know which cycles you want to break?

0:51How do you know which cycles you are breaking? And how do we navigate that when we are around our extended family? And that is a question I get asked all the time. So I asked the wonderful Shelley that, and her answer is part of this episode. Here it is. Let's talk about shame and the good girl. Yeah. I think they're really, really connected. So can you tell us your insight on shame and the good girl and how both of those get triggered when we become parents? Oh, I love this question. So I think one of the things that's really harmful to kids and that I think so many in our generation grew up with is this binary of our behavior being good or bad.

1:36Either you're a good girl or you're a naughty girl. There was no nuance. And so we grow up, if we're not good, well, then we must be bad. And so that left no room for all of our feelings. So feelings like anger and impatience and all those things that come up being apparent, when we feel them, we are catapulted back in time to that narrative of like you're bad because you're feeling all of these feelings. And so it's so hard to work through that as a parent, when you're busy and you're overwhelmed and you're just trying to get your kid to eat dinner and you don't have time to like sit there and think about your inner child.

2:13You're just like, just eat the macaroni and cheese for the love. That's what we have to unravel are those narratives that like uncomfortable, I'm going to put this in quotes, negative feelings are bad. And that equates us as being bad. And so many hard feelings come up as a mom So we sit there and wallow in shame around them because we feel like they were never allowed and they shouldn't be allowed today. And then we unconsciously pass that to our child and we don't mean to, but if our feelings aren't allowed, why should their feelings be allowed? And so it's kind of overrating that belief that all feelings are okay and that doesn't make us a good or bad girl.

2:52And there's no shame in any of our feelings, which is why I'm so passionate about that whole conversation of give kids the space to feel all their feelings and breaking that shame cycle. But the good girl, bad girl thing that comes from so many different institutions in society. And I received a lot of that in the church growing up. And so that's a huge part of my journey. Yeah, that one could be a whole other podcast episode, but just how little girls are supposed to be and compliant and quiet and just nurturing and don't you dare have any anger it comes from a lot of different places but for me that was a really big thing and like religious indoctrination growing up yeah and I think anger is it's so fascinating isn't it I never really experienced an anger like I did when I had kids you know and I'm exhausted and I'm stressed out and I'm like just get your shoes on and you know now I know it's totally fine of course I'm feeling angry right you know I've got great flooding in my body and there's stress it's almost like biochemical it's like it's totally fine but what I used to do is then shame myself about the anger you know why am I so angry what's wrong with me being angry and then you know do the same unwittingly to the kids like anger's not okay and I think for women in particular just got this message that it's not okay to be angry.

4:21And yeah, it's so cool. Like just telling myself first, your anger is good. And someone said to me once, you know, anger is the emotion of self-esteem. It's kind of like, if you're angry about something, it's like, this isn't okay for me. There's kind of a steam in it as opposed to pushing it down, which we know as you were describing comes out sideways in emotional eating, depression, anxiety, physical illnesses. so yeah I just think anger is so important to just normalize isn't it yeah it is bring into the normality of what it means to be human and particularly a parent right and I think another aspect of anger that's not discussed as much as I would hope it would be is underneath that anger is almost always fear and I think if we can look at it that way we can be a little softer with ourselves and we can be a little softer with our children because we react differently toward fear than we do anger.

5:20But underneath anger is a fear of abandonment or rejection, shame. So anger, it's got like everything else, a story to tell. And usually when you start peeling back the layers of that anger, someone's afraid. And I use that, I've actually used an actual onion with my kids. If they've been angry, we don't do this in the moment, of course, but after they've been angry, we kind of take this onion and say, let's talk about, and they, it's such a cool, tangible way to kind of get them to understand like underneath of that, what was really going on. It's been a fun experience to kind of help them see like their anger doesn't make them bad.

5:54There was a story to tell there. And how do you pick apart the nuance? Cause there's definitely some nuance when we talk about anger in particular, you know, you were describing at the start, you know, one of your big gateways into awakening was why am I angry all the time? And yet there's the kind of other side of it, which is like anger's welcome. So someone's listening, thinking, wait a minute, yeah, I feel really angry. And the minute ago you were saying that's good and it's okay to be angry. But then at the start of the conversation, you're saying, actually, that was a gateway into what's really going on with me.

6:22Where's the nuance? Well, I think you can look at anger, you know, you can look at it with compassionate curiosity. That's how I view really any feeling that kind of bubbles up either for myself or my kids, of course, that doesn't mean I do it perfectly. But if you can just be compassionately curious about where it's coming from and be able to sit with it and know that you can come out on the other side of it, it allows you to have a relationship with it instead of running away from it by using the coping mechanisms that we all use in some way, right? Whether it's food or scrolling or alcohol or whatever, but just to be able to sit with it and have a relationship with it, I think is really the most powerful gateway into integrating that part of yourself that might've been as suppressed as a child.

7:12I think that word curiosity is just the most powerful word with this work. I use it so often with myself. Like I'll say to myself, isn't it interesting that triggered you? Yes, right. I feel like it's so much softer than - It is. You know, what's wrong with you? or isn't it interesting that you're questioning yourself or isn't it interesting you feel guilty about that isn't it interesting dot dot dot and I use it with the bell too yeah there's no judgment there is there it's just an observation like it's a compassionate observation really like what if I use the what if like what if this has something to tell me and you talk about breaking cycles and it's something I talk about a lot as well.

7:59And I was really curious, do you have a sense of what those cycles are? Like, do you name them? Like we're breaking the cycle of shame, we're breaking the cycle of feelings not all being welcome. And how many cycles are you breaking? I know there's so many we could be breaking. And I think that's just a really personal question for each parent that goes on this journey. I actually just shared about this on social media and I said something like, you know you're breaking generational cycles. and I kind of curated the most common responses I hear in my community. But I think once you start this work and maybe you start with one like that's really clear and obvious to you, like I'm not going to spank my kids because you were spanked and that's like an easy, low hanging fruit, like I'm not doing that.

8:43But as you get further and further into that one, you're like, well, if I'm not going to spank my kids, that means I'm going to have to break the cycle of shame. And if I'm going to break the cycle of shame, I'm going to have to let my kids have a safe space for all their feelings. I feel like it cascades or it's almost like a domino effect. Like they all are interconnected. And I don't think there's really a whole lot of value in the lake worrying about labeling them or not. It's just more of a culture inside of your house, the environment that you want to create in your family. And by defining that first, by saying, I want this to be a safe place where all feelings are valued and given a safe space to exhale, defining that first, the other things that kind of just fall to the wayside, the spanking and the shaming and the threatening and the invalidating, like those automatically don't line up with that value and that goal that you want to have for your house.

9:37Have you talked to your kind of extended family, siblings, parents, you know, the work that you're doing is quite public. Have you had that conversation or are you just kind of allowing it to be? And I wonder what they think of it. I've had, I would call them rather insignificant conversations about it. And my family, to be honest, it really isn't on social media, but we've had enough conversations over the years to know that we have different viewpoints about things. And that seems to be okay. Like that hasn't broken our relationships. And I, you know, I'm kind of going on my own journey and they're on theirs and it hasn't harmed us in any way, but I think we realize we're just very different people.

10:22And I've always felt a little bit like an outsider. You know, it's been interesting to see how that has manifested as an adult for myself. Like I've continued to just listen to my voice and use it in a way that I hope helps people and helps impact other families in a positive way. And how do you handle those interactions with your wider family, with your children? It's something I get asked all the time. People say to me, you know, we try not to use the language good and bad in our home and then my kind of in-laws come and they're saying good girl bad girl good girl bad boy do you experience that and how do we hold those boundaries or actually well maybe I'll share my view in a minute yeah so I think and this is an opportunity in this reparenting raising yourself journey to reclaim your voice so if my parents or send a family member does something that is not in alignment with the values I have for my family I say something to them.

11:22I set a boundary and say, we do not use that kind of labeling or we don't do the timeouts or whatever it is that they're doing maybe when they're caring for my child or around my child. So it's setting a clear boundary with them. And then it's setting a clear expectation with my children and saying, these are our values and I'm making sure I'm protecting you by not confusing you with getting mixed messages from family members. And it's okay to say something when someone crosses a boundary and violates like a value. So I'm holding boundaries in like two different places, one with my family and one with my children.

11:57And I think that's a really important thing as parents for us to model. And it gives children a template to follow to say, my mommy didn't like how that person treated me and I deserve to be stood up for.

12:16Thank you.