Remember how our brain’s mission in life is to try and understand it’s world and figure out how to best “survive”?
Well, for this reason, your brain has been intentionally soaking up messages (i.e. expectations) surrounding who you ‘should’ be, what you ‘should’ do, and how it’s all ‘should’ feel. Ultimately, it’s the brain’s innate way of ensuring physical and emotional safety through the process of ‘fitting in.’
Similar to temperament’s ‘goodness of fit’ concept, when these learned lessons and expectations fit who you are or your experience, all is good and easy. Enjoy!
Unfortuniently, many of the expectations are not only unrealistic and unattainable, but their existence has been linked to increased maternal anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and overall loss of joy. (Note: this applies to all areas of life, but for our purposes, we’ll continue to focus on the experience of motherhood.)
The good news is, unlike in the early days of mankind when being accepted by your tribe really was a life or death issue, today we can safely worry less about fitting in and focus instead on meeting our social-emotional need of belonging.
But how?
The 2 Step Path to Resiliency
The noise level of motherhood has never louder than for our generation. Now, more than ever, it’s important that we take the time to foster resiliency in order to be able to protect our experience and joy.
Step 1: Awareness
Since developing expectations and comparing ourselves to others is biologically wired into our brains the first step to taking our brains off autopilot is to develop insight and awareness of your experiences, thoughts, and emotions surrounding this motherhood gig (see insight on attunement for additional help in this area),
Step 2: Re-wiring
The second step revolves around consciously challenging and reframing the harmful thoughts or emotions when you recognize you are having them.
Side Note: Be patient with the process. You had, and continue to have, a lifetime of “should” messages thrown at you. It’ll take time to identify and rewire your brain to better fit your needs. Hold the vision, trust the process. This may seem fake, forced or unhelpful at first, but remember the brain needs and responses to repetition. The more you do this the better and quicker your brain will get at noticing the threat (in this case, the toxic thought or expectation), and the better it will get at automatically working through the experience in a healthy, adaptive manner.
Self-compassion has been proven to be one of the most effective methods towards building resiliency and re-wiring our brains responses to harmful thoughts and expectations. See more on self-compassion HERE.