Mothersuck and getting back to work
I have had a dozen enquiries just this month from women who want to be more than ‘Mum’.
I have a lot of compassion for these women because I too know how your confidence ebbs out of you with each breastfeed or T-shirt worn all day, inside out. And if that’s not bad enough, one day it dawns on you, you’ve morphed into someone else.
And the reason it’s hard to admit the ‘tragedy’ of this, is that with it, comes guilt. We DO love our children but why do they suck us dry as a husk? And since one in five of us are not having children, we all know a best friend shooting up a career ladder that we had to step off or at least move to the side.
We become moaning partners, impatient mothers and we start to not recognise ourselves in the mirror. As our childless career friends update their Instagram, we’re sponging marmite stains off carpets.
So the way I’m approaching this as a therapist, is working on self-esteem, confidence and ego-strengthening. Using a little coaching/NLP stuff to set goals but also hypnosis to strengthen ego. There’s a great maxim in NLP ‘if someone can do something, anyone can do it’ which I think is a great reminder when you’re beating yourself up that you’re just not good enough. Alongside this, I use CBT tools to flag up irrational beliefs and negative thought patterns, and then change them.
And of course, we all know that little Lula or Oscar or whoever we have given ‘it all up’ for, will grow up and in no time at all, have their own life going; and god help if we haven’t got our shit together by then and got the same!