Ep 31: How to Work with Parenting Guilt and Self-Judgment: The 4 D’s Framework
[INTRODUCTION]
Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.
[EPISODE]
One fascinating thing I’ve noticed about caregivers who are committed to practicing decolonized parenting is that we often say the meanest and harshest things about ourselves when we make mistakes. Do you notice that too? We’re so good at holding space for others to be accountable and own their oops with dignity. But when it comes to ourselves, we go straight to self-cancellation.
These inner voices of guilt, shame, and self-judgement can grind down even our most unwavering commitment to practice social justice, equity, and liberation. And because the journey of liberation is a marathon for the next seven generations, it’s important to transform self-cancellation to self-allyship and find new ways to work with our guilt and inner critics.
My dear listener and co-conspirator, welcome and welcome back to season 4 and episode 31 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.
In this episode, I invite you to explore your guilt and inner critics through a new perspective, specifically through the lenses of both western psychotherapy and social justice action. Because decolonizing mental health is what we’re about at Come Back to Care. That means I’ll walk you through reflective questions in a framework I call the 4 D’s that I’ve used with parents and caregivers I’ve worked with over the past decade or so. These questions will help you understand your guilt and inner critics a little bit better so you can upgrade your relationship status with them (perhaps from complicated to complicated but manageable). The 4 D’s will also come in handy in moments when guilt and inner critics arise so you can transform them into actions that align with your values.
With all of that said, your agency is so important so please engage with this episode in whichever way feels right in your body. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started.
Why is working with guilt, shame, and self-judgment important?
Raising a child and building a family are high stakes responsibilities. It makes sense that the inner critics are working really hard to make sure you do what you need to do to keep your child thriving. Now add social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting to the mix. You know the stakes are even higher because we see the impact of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy every day on our planet, our communities, and certainly our own wellness. I know you know that the best time to act towards social change was yesterday. So the inner critics might be even harsher and the guilt might be even stronger…to the point where we’re frozen in shame and defeat. And that’s the last thing we want in our advocacy, right? Because our collective liberation needs all hands on deck.
That’s why working through our guilt and inner critics is another adult developmental skill necessary to sustain our social justice action. Otherwise, when we feel guilt and self-judgment, there’s so much discomfort that we automatically react and revert back to old, familiar, and comfortable habits to get rid of the discomfort as quickly as we can. The consequence is we’re often stuck in the same patterns we’re trying to break, using the same behaviors like doom scrolling on social media, numbing our feelings with food (my personal go-to is a giant bowl of noodles), or hiding behind work and a busy schedule. And no meaningful actions toward social change take place.
Capitalism thrives on us never feeling good enough about ourselves. It’s so brilliant at co-opting our guilt and selling it back to us in the form of self-help books and other store-bought solutions and hacks. Then, we have individualism and white supremacy telling us that if only we adjust our mindset, act more disciplined, and – in air quotes- invest in our growth more, we can crush our guilt and unlock our potential. Yikes, hearing these words out loud isn’t helping at all.
I really believe that working with and through our guilt and inner critics with compassion instead of punishment and domination can be a small yet mighty act of resistance against capitalism and white supremacy on a personal level. Abolishing oppressive systems is already hard enough. I don’t think we need to make it harder by berating ourselves with guilt, shame, and judgment.
Another reason to strengthen our skills to navigate guilt, shame, and self-judgment is simply that our children are watching how we treat ourselves when we make mistakes. I have teachers and caregivers ask me very often: how do I teach self-compassion to children? How do we teach children to tolerate stress and distress? And the answer starts with how we, the grownups, treat ourselves and our inner child when we’re not at our best. Don’t get me wrong, I love mindful breathing activities for children. But…how we treat ourselves when our children are watching is even more powerful.
Before I share a story of how one caregiver and I applied the 4 D’s framework and worked through their inner critics, let’s connect the dots between guilt and colonialism and reframe guilt just a little bit.
Guilt, Discomfort, & Whiteness
Alright, guilt. And my shoulders are already up to my ears, cringing. It’s okay I won’t ask you to think about your most recent mistakes and the resulting guilt. I’ll share mine instead. Here we go. Someone unintentionally misgendered a colleague of mine whom I was standing with and I didn’t catch it because we were in New York, pre-pandemic- trying to find a good Thai place to eat. That person walked away and immediately my colleague said to me “Nat, I thought you cared about me. You could have said something to the other person who misgendered me.” And. I. Was. Hangry. My mouth moved faster than my heart and I said “It’s your gender, Baby Cakes. Why didn’t you say something?” Hangry Nat and regulated Nat are very different people, okay?. It’s safe to say that I hurt my colleague’s feelings. Guilt followed…after I had my noodles that I was searching for. Did I apologize and repair that rupture in our relationship that evening? Nope! Instead, I ordered another bowl of noodles, got food coma, and went to bed. It was definitely a long day.
My guilt was so overwhelming that my stress responses- fight/flight/freeze/fix/people please- kicked in right away. In other words, instead of doing what I was supposed to which was apologize and reconnect with my colleague, I used my coping strategy of eating my feelings to numb my guilt. Had I sat with my discomfort long enough to work through my guilt, I could have practiced accountability and apologized to my colleague sooner.
I’m sharing my growth lesson with you to highlight our body’s intelligence. It’s so good at protecting us from being overwhelmed; that fight, flight, freeze, people please, shut down stress response kicks in right away. Then, we often automatically revert back to our familiar and comfortable coping behaviors. How’s that tracking for you?
You might have seen different examples of this “feel guilt, get overwhelmed, and use coping habits” cycle. You might have seen the fight response where instead of getting curious, people might cope with the discomfort of guilt by using blame. Or for the flight response, people might cope with the discomfort of guilt by intellectualizing or thinking about feelings instead of feeling the feelings.
These survival intelligences are very human. And what we do at Come Back to Care is ground these coping behaviors in their political contexts to actively practice anti-racism and anti-oppression. So, shall we politicize our nervous system?
Throughout history there are countless examples of harm done to marginalized bodies when the dominant bodies got overwhelmed. To say it differently, when a white, cisgender, heteronormative, middle class, Christian, able-bodied person feels threatened or scared by marginalized bodies, they get rid of that discomfort using their fight, flight, freeze, people please stress responses.
The fight response could be calling the police on Black bodies. Or it could be straight up blame. For example, as Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan describe in their book Fumbling Towards Repair, in conversations around prison abolition or defunding the police, we hear people justify this systemic punishment by saying things like “what about murderers? Or what about dangerous people?”
The flight response could be fleeing to a book club or intellectualizing. We often see this pattern get coupled with white supremacy’s perfectionism where some of us just want to read five more books before taking action, not out of curiosity but out of fear of being imperfect and making mistakes.
The people please response could be throwing your boundaries out the window to completely abandoning yourself so that you can quote unquote do everything you can be a good ally. I hope you can see that the flavor of saviorism in this example is much stronger than the flavor of intentional, meaningful action.
Whether it’s fight, flight, freeze, or people please, we automatically react to our guilt to get rid of the discomfort. And the result of this self-abandonment is not acting for social change in ways that we intended to.
That’s why the impact of working with our discomfort with firm compassion instead of violent punishment of self-shaming is twofold. First, it’s an adult developmental skill we can practice so that we can respond intentionally to our children instead of automatically reacting to them out of our inner child wounds. Second, it’s a practice of decolonizing white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy out of our body.
Now that we’ve contextualized guilt, let’s reframe it together.
Guilt and growth are two sides of the same coin. To have guilt, you must have grown to a point where you realize that you could have done things differently. So, guilt is a piece of evidence of our growth.
Guilt reminds you of the past. Right now, in the moment of guilt, you’re standing in between your past and your potential. Guilt is showing you your past iterations to use the language of Emergent Strategy. It takes every U-turn, trial and error, and learning curve for you to get here…right here, right now. Isn’t that growth? Besides, we discussed Why Your Child’s Resilience Needs Your Parenting Mistakes in episode 27. I’ll leave the links to every resource mentioned in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
Giving yourself grace and holding your mistakes with tenderness is one of the most radical things you can do in a world that’s forcing you to contort, conform, and perform. As a parent, caregiver, and community weaver, you’re likely giving so much care to others and advocating for others. Being on your own side or self-allyship is necessary to sustain this lifelong practice called liberation.
To recap, we covered the what and the why of our guilt and self-judgment. We also explored guilt and inner critics in their political contexts. Next, let’s get to the how. How do we begin to unpack and work with our guilt and inner critic?
How about we start with a story?
Case vignette & the 4 D’s
Jamilah or J was a wonderful nonbinary parent with an 8-year-old child. J wanted to power-with with their child more intentionally so that they wouldn’t micromanage, control, and coerce their child to be who they “should” be…because that was how J grew up. And J wanted to stop passing down this intergenerational family pattern to their child. And they sure did what they said they would do…most of the time because perfection isn’t real, right? Whenever J reverted back to old habits of power-over, their guilt quickly turned into shame. They would go from “Oh, shoot I really missed that window to power-with” to “I’m such a terrible parent.” Then, the inner critics chimed in “oh so you want to be a decolonized parent and you can’t even keep it together.” And insert debilitating curse words. J told me that by the time the inner critics were done berating them for making a mistake, they practically gave up on this intention to break the family cycles and they were frozen in defeat. J’s pattern would be saying “well. why bother? I already used power-over today. Maybe we’ll start over next month.” How does J’s story resonate with you?
Building a family in a hyper individualistic culture that has no societal structure to support you is painful enough. That’s why it’s so heart breaking for me to see many caregivers are stuck in their guilt, shame, and self-judgment, and this stuckness becomes a barrier keeping them from being the parent they know they can be.
J and I worked together to get curious about the inner critics instead of automatically or immediately getting rid of them. To say it differently, I walked with J through a series of reflective questions I call the 4 D’s to help J get to know their inner critics better and decide when to heed their wise suggestions and when to let go of their unnecessarily hurtful statements. Our work is working with the inner critics and guilt by adjusting their volume instead of listening to and believing in everything they say.
The reflective questions in the 4 D’s framework come from various psychotherapy modalities like the Internal Family Systems, Inner Relationship Focusing, and Compassion-Focused Therapy, all of which are explored Come Back to Care style which is through the lens of social justice action, equity, and abolition for the purpose of decolonizing mental health.
And just like all things liberation, the 4D’s framework is neither linear, nor a quick fix. I honor your pacing and rhythm. If you’d like to read these questions, you’ll find them in the show notes and transcript at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
These questions are for your self-reflection when you have a moment to yourself. I know it might be rare. I trust your process. I often think of these questions as a warmup you do before the workout…something you do to prepare for when the inner critics come out and do their thing. I’m all about staying ready so you don’t have to get ready. Once we walk through the 4 D’s framework together, I’ll share one practice that you can experiment with right in that moment when guilt and inner critics arise.
The 4 D’s are: disidentify, discern, distinguish, and decide. Please play with what suits you and leave the rest.
Disidentify means taking a few steps back from the story the inner critics are telling about who you are. The inner critics might have you say “I’m such a disappointment.” To disidentify is to replace that “I am” with this statement: “Something in me is saying I’m such a disappointment. And I hear it.” or “A part inside me is saying I’m such a disappointment. And I hear it.”
The invitation here is to rewrite your inner critic’s script slightly. Whatever they usually say, I invite you to play with this prompt: “something in me is saying (blank). And I hear it.”
For J, their go-to script is “I’m such a terrible parent.” Then, J tried rewriting this script to “something in me is telling me I’m such a terrible parent. I feel it. I see you, inner J.” I also remember J’s skepticism. If you feel that too, that makes three of us. J told me that it feels so silly. But it did make them feel like the self-judgment wasn’t as strong. It’s still there but it’s smaller and more manageable. So, that’s our first D, Disidentify.
The second D is Discern. This one is a 1-2 step. First, we apply curiosity instead of judgment to find the function of the inner critic. The invitation here is to ask “what’s the inner critic afraid would happen if they stopped being so harsh?” I’ll say it one more time: “what’s the inner critic afraid would happen if they stopped being so harsh?”
For J, their inner critics are really afraid that if they’re not so harsh, J would risk raising their 8-year-old the ways they were raised… that J would forget their intention to break the painful family cycles and unintentionally repeat those cycles and pass on the wounds. J shared one wisdom with me that I really cherish and that is: the inner critics’ harsh judgment isn’t about us. They’re not saying J’s a terrible parent. But the judgment is more of a warning which is “hey watch out…if you make mistakes, you would end up being a terrible parent.”
When we really get to know the inner critics, we often see that they’re here doing their best but in clumsy ways to protect us. It’s almost like the inner critics are in fact inner protectors who don’t have any tools except harsh, painful comments. So underneath all the harsh things the inner critics have to say, their hearts are in the right place. They’re actually trying to protect us from rejection or humiliation. So, intention? Great. Impact? Umm, questionable. That’s why our work as an adult is to let these well-meaning but unskillful inner critics know that “hey, I see you and what you’re trying to do but you don’t have to work so hard to protect me anymore. I’m a grownup now and I have other tools besides shame to help me get through the day. I can keep myself safe.”
And just saying that out loud I can see my inner critic, the little Nat in rainbow leggings and red shoes rocking that Asian bowl cut hair for boys doing her best to keep me protected. I’m not sure how that resonates with you but when I see the inner critics’ intention I just really love them.
After knowing the function of the inner critics/inner protectors, the invitation is to do some fact checking. How I explained it to J is first we do background check then fact check on our inner critics. We do so by asking “Whose standard am I measuring myself against?” Because sometimes we’re judging ourselves for failing to fit into some societal standards that aren’t even our own. Maybe we’re unintentionally using capitalism’s standards to measure parenting success by how productive our children’s afterschool schedule is instead of making sure it’s well-rounded with something our children really love. By fact checking we’re making sure that we’re not policing ourselves into a pass-fail binary defined by white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy.
J fact checked their inner critics and it was reaffirming that it wasn’t about them beating themselves up into a perfect parent…instead it was about making sure they don’t repeat the cycles they’re trying to break with their child. J told me that it was more about motivation instead of perfectionism.
And that’s our second D which is discern. We do a background check to find the function of the inner critics by asking “what’s the inner critic afraid would happen if they stopped being so harsh?” Then we do a fact check to understand “Whose standard am I measuring myself against?”
The third D is Distinguish. We distinguish between when to heed the wisdom of our inner protectors and when to let go of the harsh judgment of our inner critics. The invitation is to ask “how do I know when to listen to the inner voices? When are they adaptive and when are they outdated?” Having clarity on these questions can help you anticipate when self-judgment is going to be costly so you can prepare for it as much as you can.
J realized that the inner judgment could be a good motivator at work because it helped J not make mistakes so they could keep their job and pay bills. The inner critics can help monitor our behaviors so we can survive this hunger game of capitalism. Very adaptive. So I asked J about situations where the inner critic’s script of “I’m such a terrible parent” is not adaptive. J said that because they are frozen in shame, the inner critics are not adaptive in helping J connect with their two other co-parents after mistakes were made. J said that because there were three co-parents, clear communication was essential. And when J shut down and stone walled the other co-parents, it’s a lose-lose game. How about for you? When are your inner critics adaptive and when are they outdated?
Lastly, our final D is Decide. We decide on other ways to reach that same goal without harming ourselves with harsh judgment. The invitation is to ask: “What could be other ways to serve this same function but without the cost?”
If you go, “Nat, what? What are you talking about?” You’re not alone. Many families and myself included find this question hard to answer initially. For me, I grew up with a family conditioning and a capitalistic programming that to be the best that I can be, I must work hard. I must grind, push, exert, force things to the point that if I’m not exhausted or suffering, am I even working. My parents’ favorite question is “do you even care?” So, for the longest time, I thought that guilt and inner critics are perfect motivators to keep me pushing and leveling up. Until I started my training in early childhood special education way back when and learned about positive reinforcement. Specifically, I learned that I could motivate my students by praising them and telling them what they did well. When I first heard it, my mind was blown away as someone who used guilt and shame as a motivator. It reminded me that we have other ways to motivate ourselves besides guilt, shame, and self-judgment. For me after years of practice, saying kind things to myself – the kinds of things I would say to the toddlers I work with -- works really well.
For J, however, kind and compassionate statements were quote unquote too yucky for them. So J would use what they called a coach voice instead. Something like “J, you can do this. I believe in you.” (For the record, J did a much better coach impression because they were also a little league coach and I do not do sports at all). You get the idea. So, the final D, Decide, invites you to reflect on: “What could be other ways to serve this same function but without the cost?”
Before I share one final practice for that moment when guilt and inner critics arise, let’s recap the 4 D’s.
First Disidentify by rewriting the script using the prompt: “Something in me is saying… I hear it.”
Second, Discern. Ask “What’s the inner critic afraid would happen if they stopped being so harsh? Whose standard are you measuring yourself against?”
Third, Distinguish. Ask “How do you know when to listen to the inner voices? When are they adaptive and when are they outdated?”
Fourth, Decide. Ask “What could be other ways to serve this same function but without the cost?”
Now When guilt and inner critics arise, I invite you to “name it to tame it, feel it to free it.” Dan Siegel used “name it to tame it” for children’s tantrums and meltdowns and I added “feel it to free it.” What it looks like is narrating your inner landscape to your child: “I’m overwhelmed. When I feel heavy in my heart like this, stretching my torso and shaking my hands over my head feel grounding to me. Would you like to try that together?”
This way you’re modeling emotional literary and problem solving to your child instead of perfectionism like we discussed in Ep 4: Three Ways to Practice Social Justice through Parenting & Promote Your Child's Development At the Same Time
And you already know that insights alone don’t lead to change; practices and community accountability do. That’s why I’d love to invite you to work with me and shift your parenting to be decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational together from June 7th to July 19th on Zoom.
[CTA IN OUT N THROUGH]
If you're a social justice curious and conscious parent who wants to stop performing parenting by white, colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal scripts so you can raise your child according to your own values, I'd love to invite you to join a community of like-minded families in the In-Out-N-Through® Program. An online 7-week, cohort-based social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting program.
Let’s write your own parenting playbook using child development science and social justice actions like solidarity, power-with, and accountability to guide your parenting decisions. So that you can practice social justice through your daily parenting while promoting your child's development at the same time.
And let’s re-parent your inner child too so you can intentionally respond to your child based on your values instead of automatically reacting based on your childhood wounds. So that you can heal your inner child wounds underneath your parenting triggers and do the healing work your ancestors couldn’t while raising your child with equity and liberation in mind.
If you’re interested in joining a community of decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational families please visit comebacktocare.com/learn for more information and registration. It's comebacktocare.com/learn.
Alright, back to the episode…
[EPISODE]
I’m so grateful that you’re here with me unlearning the violent and punitive ways to work with guilt, shame, and self-judgment. Thank you for relearning a more compassionate way to not replicate that systemic domination, control, and coercion onto yourself.
I know your inner critics can be so overly protective sometimes due to past experiences.
But neither you nor I have to be stuck in the same relationship pattern with our inner critics.
We can upgrade these relationships with our inner critics as we cultivate more tools and resources.
Hey, cheers to that growth, and cheers to you, your inner critics, and inner protectors too. Look how far you’ve come!
As always in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.