Why Capable Moms Have the Hardest Meltdowns

Seema Desai: I'm Dr. Sima Desai, and this is the joy first method, where high achievers stop white knuckling their way forward and start building something that's actually theirs. Let's get to it. Last week I had the mama of all mama meltdowns. I'm not talking about a moment at the end of the day where I blew up at my kids. I'm talking about hours and hours of the weirdest, most out-of-body, crazy experience I've had in a really long time. I felt just so out of control, waves of anger and frustration, helplessness. judgment, rage, exhaustion. And all of this, even as it was happening real time, I knew was rooted in fear that I was failing as a mom. I found myself catastrophizing about the world that we're living in and whether or not my kids would really be able to live the most empowered, compassionate Fully expressed versions of themselves. ⁓ Was thinking, ⁓ my gosh, how am I the champion of joy when it feels so heavy that I can't even see my way through it? And then I realized that is one of the many reasons that I was having this exact experience. Because my work is centered around helping people live and lead with joy, even through challenge, especially through challenge. And part of that work is in helping people understand for themselves what that joy looks and feels like. Because it's not always going to feel like rainbows and unicorns and cotton candy or whatever it is that brings you the warm fuzzies. Joy is sometimes it it looks very different than other days. It's not what you would think it would be. I sometimes will think about joy as a bright inner light. This is what we all have in us. It's a state of consciousness. It's on all the time, eternal and burning all the time, accessible all the time. But what happens is that our ego, or in my book, I call them the inner guards. So the part of our thoughts and beliefs and wiring that is meant to protect us and guard us from threat. That ego. Will eclipse that light. And depending on the day and the challenge, that eclipses, you know, either just a hint filter or a complete blocking, a complete opaque block to what that joy looks and feels like. Especially in these mama meltdown moments that I know we all have had at one point or another. They're not our finest moments. But we've all had them. And For me, what I have seen and experienced and also been taught through years of yoga training and coaching and studying Vedantic philosophy is in those moments where things feel so heavy and joy feels so far away, one of the best things we can do for ourselves is to extend ourselves compassion. Compassion for self. Compassion for the people around us and the situation that we're in. Part of that means acceptance for where we are instead of fighting for control and getting upset that we're not where we want to be. And I've also found that when we go to extend and practice compassion for ourselves, it's not accessible if we get too heady. If we try to logic our way out of things, oftentimes we just dig ourselves further into the whole. So the way out of that is to have it be a very somatic practice, a very body-focused practice. There's lots of ways that you can do this. One of the ways that I love doing these practices is to do a quick scan from head to toe. Just notice if there's any tightness, any tension, any pits of ickiness that we're feeling. I remember I would do this with my kids when they were younger and I would ask them, where where are you feeling your inner guard talking? And they would tell me, ⁓ my head. And it feels like it's throbbing or it feels like a bright red. If the more we can assign adjectives to things and describe things to our mind's eye, it helps us make something that feels so intangible and scary more tangible so we can put it down or understand at least what to do with it so we can be at peace with it rather than trying to throw it away or cover it or run away from it. So the head-to-toe scan is something that I really love. And when we the other way to do that is to just connect with your breath. Notice where it is that you're feeling sticky, shallow, erratic. And just in that awareness of what you're feeling and how you are breathing, even how you're sitting, sometimes. you might notice that like, ⁓ my shoulder has hiked up a little bit. What can I do to bring that down? Or sometimes I will notice weird things like my fist will have clenched up. That's a signal for me to know, ⁓ I need to kind of care for myself with compassion ⁓ and walk myself back from the edge of this challenge if I want to really thrive through it. So it's often in that simple awareness of how we're feeling and what we're feeling that we can find some expansion and release. And that's really the goal. One of the other things that is helpful for me once I have learned to understand what's happening for me real time in my body and with my breath is to ask, okay, what would I tell a friend or a child who was struggling through this? I wouldn't tell them to muscle up buttercup. That's not effective. I wouldn't dismiss their feelings. I wouldn't judge them for having those feelings. I would just hold them with compassion. So can I do the same for myself? Now there's things you can do to externally sort of stimulate and emulate that. You can wrap yourself in a blanket. Remove yourself from a situation, first of all. As long as everyone is cared for and safe, you know, remove yourself. Go to a room where you're allowed to just sort of be wrap yourself in a blanket. You can drink tea. You can do the whole lavender essential oil aromatherapy thing. Those are all great. But until we connect with that sense of compassion and kindness for ourselves, empathy for ourselves, that release and expansion can't happen. The other thing I really love to do, and I actually tried it for the first time with this latest mama meltdown. I had I'd heard about it before. But I remember a few months ago, my yoga mentor had said to me, Can you can you touch yourself and hold yourself the way you would reach out and touch a child? So if you so if you think about, you know, holding a newborn baby. You wouldn't grip them, you wouldn't squeeze them too tight, you would you would hold them with that stable, calm, grounded sense of presence. So what I did in this latest mama meltdown was I actually cupped my face. And I just held it the way I would hold my little my little niece's face, who's tiny tiny when she's having big feelings. And it was amazing what. That experience was like, because the moment I copped my face and I pretended that I was looking at myself, or rather, not pretended, but where I visualized that, something really moved for me. I actually started to cry more because that was a practice of acceptance, of seeing someone with compassion and not judgment, seeing myself that way. I just allowed those tears to run through me, flood through me, ugly cry through me, and I didn't try to rush through it. And once I rode those waves of turbulent emotion and I found myself able to return to some semblance of stable. I went back to my yoga mat. I wasn't doing anything that was gonna be too involved, nothing that was gonna be an inversion or something that was gonna be require me balancing too much. But what I wanted to do was return to that practice of somatic self-compassion practice. So can I hold myself in unusual ways in different positions in different asanas? And still feel compassion and acceptance for what it was that I was feeling. Now, if you've ever practiced yoga, you'll maybe you will you have had, maybe you have had this experience of when you try to force your way through to the fullest expression of the pose, that's when you often your muscles grip, you your breathing becomes sort of cut off, your face gris grimaces, you can't quite. Find that expansion and ease, and then you're violating the number one foundational rule of yoga, tiram sukkum asanam, the steady, easeful pose of ahimsa, nonviolence towards self as we look to move through life in these uncomfortable, unusual situations. Can we be compassionate? So when I was in my yoga practice and just allowing myself to feel the experience of Being in my body on the mat, I experienced another wave of icky emotion, which told me, good, I'm moving more energy. I'm moving whatever is looking to come through me, to release through me. And yeah, it wasn't pretty. It didn't belong on the cover of a magazine. It was ugly crying, but there was so much expansion and liberation. And me giving myself the time and space to just be in my body and accept for what my body was doing and feeling in the moment. And when we allow that space for ourselves, what often comes into clarity, into sharp perspective, is that the blame, the shame, the anger, the anxiety, the frustration, the helplessness, the rage, all of that settles. And what we can see left standing are the stories that we told ourselves that. Aren't necessarily true. And when we have that clarity, then we can pick and choose and say, okay, what do I want to believe? What's helpful for me to believe? What would it be like for me to just throw away my agenda and just be here and not worry about what's going to come next or what I'm going to say next or do next? I'm just going to allow myself to be here because the stories we spin are often rooted in fear. And when I say that, I mean false evidence appearing as real. F-E-A-R, false evidence appearing as real. That clarity is a gold mine for moving through these mama meltdown moments. But we can only do that if we can ground into self-compassion first. We can only extend compassion for other people and the situation that we're in once we've bathed in that compassion for self first. And that sometimes that joy that we're looking to live and lead from, it's not. It's not anything other than a quiet surrender. A surrender into what is, a surrender into faith for what will be, and that we are cared for, we are nurtured, that we are our own source of empowerment and love and acceptance and peace and joy. I feel like we've kind of moved through a physical vinyasa practice ourselves through this podcast episode. But what happened after that for me was really interesting because I wound up coming back to you guessed it, the three Cs creativity, community, and connection. The creativity was through my somatic exploration. The community was returning back to. My family when I had burned myself to the ground and I had decided to come back into the rest of the house, allowing myself to to let my family be there for me, to let them support me, to let them, you know, to even approach them and say, I'm I just was having a really, really hard time and I did not handle that well. Fostering that sense of communication and connection was really, really healing and nurturing. And guess what? Our families are so forgiving when we go back with an honest sense of clarity and desire, intention to reconnect with them. It's it's oftentimes all just waiting for us to allow that in, to accept that in. So While that mama meltdown day felt awful, I actually did wind up falling asleep with both kids nestled around me for a f for a few hours and just sort of taking the edge off. And it was lovely to wake up and tell myself that I just had a human experience. Tomorrow's human experience will be very different. And maybe next month or ne ⁓ next year's human experience will be very different, or maybe the same. But the goal is To move through each of these experiences with greater awareness, with greater self-compassion, so that those experiences shift with time. They get lighter with time. And even when they're heavy, we have the clarity to know how to care for ourselves through it. Okay, guys, I am so excited for you guys to take this episode. internalize it, reflect on it. I am always excited to hear from you as far as what's been challenging for you, what's been helpful for you. But until next time, here's to you living and leading from a place of joy. If something in today's episode landed for you, great, sit with it. And then share it. Send it to the founder who's running on fumes, the leader who's got everything and still feels like something's missing, the friend you keep meaning to check on. That's how this work travels from person to person, the way real change always does. Follow the show so you never miss an episode. And if it's been valuable, leave a review. It helps more people find their way here. I'll see you next time.