Self-Love: The Antidote for the Anger and Guilt Loop

I used to be stuck in this loop with my children where I really wanted to parent without getting angry or making threats or punishing them, but I was constantly slipping up and getting angry and making threats and punishing them. Then I would feel like a failure, and instead of doing better, I allowed my guilt to manifest externally as more anger, more threats, and more punishments. Whew. It was exhausting. Then I had a revelation. What if I let my kids hold me accountable?

Don’t get me wrong: my intention has never been to make my issues their responsibility. I am the one who must take responsibility and make the internal shifts necessary to change. But what if I let down my guard and told them about the kind of mother I want to be—and the kind of mother I believe they deserve? What if I let them call me out on my own immature behavior? What if I let them demand an apology from me the same way many adults demand apologies from children? What would happen then?

Oftentimes, when we feel guilt for the way we treated our kids, we are tempted to make a silent repair with them. We might make a sudden switch from anger to kindness, or we might try and “apologize” through sweets, toys, and seemingly random bursts of affection. But this kind of treatment doesn’t register as an apology with our children. It confuses them. Now they are not sure how they deserve to be treated. Worse yet, it might reinforce the idea that they deserve to be treated disrespectfully in certain scenarios by the people they love.

This was usually a part of my own anger and guilt loop, too. I would say something awful in the heat of the moment, then I’d be filled with remorse, and I’d give the kids an extra big scoop of ice cream after dinner to make myself feel better. But I didn’t ever really address what needed addressing.

Not to oversimplify a complex issue, but I think one of the greatest reasons why so many adult children harbor feelings of resentment toward their parents is because they are yearning for the acknowledgment of unaddressed past hurts. Our parents are the first ones to begin to shape the subconscious beliefs we hold about our worthiness, our sense of belonging, and our ideas about what kind of love we deserve in life. When a parent hurts us, that longing for repair is a cry for affirmation about our own self-worth.

What complicates the issue is that, in a culture that believes strongly in the reward/punishment parenting paradigm, parents believe that inflicting pain on their child is in their child’s “best interest.” It’s hard enough to swallow your pride and apologize for hurting your child. It’s especially difficult to apologize for hurting someone when you were doing what you thought was the “right” thing to do in the first place. No wonder you see so many parent-child relationships erode as the children grow up.

I could see this dynamic beginning to take shape in my relationship with my older daughter Penny within the first couple years of her life. I could already feel the cracks forming, the first hints of resentment coming to light. As she grew older, it became worse. I could not handle the shame I felt for all the times I messed up, and that shame building within only made me less capable of maintaining control of my own emotions. I had never been less patient in my life. And then I had Bella, and it only grew worse because now my reasons for shame multiplied exponentially.

The only way out of the loop was through self-love. Self-love is about rising beyond "good" and "bad," "right" and "wrong," to a place where we view our own behavior as information. It's a rewriting of a story about who we are and what we must do in order to change. Internally, I was doing the same thing to myself that I did to my daughters.  I berated myself. I punished myself. Then I would make excuses for myself, to try and avoid punishing myself further.

Punishments do not help a child calibrate their internal moral compass. Punishments do not provoke children to think about the kind of person they want to be and how they want to treat others. Punishments put children into survival mode, where they will either learn to fight back or hide their mistakes. Survival mode is, necessarily so, a selfish state. The focus becomes about preserving the self by any means necessary. It is not a time to consider how our actions affect other people or to ponder the long-term consequences of our choices.

The same thing happens internally when we are self-punishing and self-shaming. We either teach ourselves to avoid and hide from anything that might cause us to feel like we deserve to punish ourselves, or we will defend our actions, even at the expense of further hurting those we love. And we become blind to how our actions are affecting our children and the long-term consequences of those choices.

To get out of these loops with our children, to stop going from angry to guilty to angry again, we must stop the self-punishment. We must be ok hearing them tell us that we’ve hurt them. It’s only from this place of self-love and compassion that we can truly listen, truly apologize, and truly repair the relationship.

So now Penny understands what a punishment is because I told her what it is, and I’ve told her that I don’t want to be the kind of mother who punishes her child. More importantly, we’ve discussed that she doesn’t deserve to be treated that way. And now Penny calls me out. I’m sure Bella will be doing the same in another year or so, too. And yeah, in the moment, when I’m feeling angry and my nervous system is amped up, I sometimes try to explain to Penny why I think she “deserves” the punishment. But she isn’t afraid to push back now, and I’m getting faster at backtracking.

A common idea in the world of parenting advice is that “consistency is king.” This is typically applied to the concept of rewards and punishments, harkening back to Skinnerian behaviorism, which requires a steadfast belief in the dualistic worldview that permeates our culture. There is right, which shall (and must) be rewarded, and there is wrong, which shall (and must) be punished. And our job as parents is to drive home this point with our children. God forbid you slip up and let a time-out slide, or the next thing you know your kid is headed straight for juvie.

My greatest pride as of late is that I have become less and less consistent with my follow-through when it comes to threats of punishment. And my family is happier and more harmonious for it. Yes, I still lose my cool. Yes, I say a lot of things I regret. But I apologize, I let the kids call me out, and we work through our problems together. No, it isn’t easy, but I know my children are worth every ounce of effort. No, I don’t do any of it perfectly, but I know every ounce of my effort matters.

If we can work on no longer hiding from our own selves internally, if we can shift to a place of self-love, then we set an example for our children. Not only will they learn a different type of internal dialogue, but hopefully they will not feel like they must hide from us either. If we can do this, we will be doing more than breaking out of our own loop of anger and guilt; we will be breaking a cycle for future generations and mending the tapestries of our families along the way.