Releasing the Motherhood Chains of Resentment and Blame

As a special needs mom, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of nursing resentment and blame.  After all, life has not treated your children fairly and it often hasn’t treated you fairly as well. You have had a front row seat to injustice, duplicity and sometimes the worst side of humanity. People that you believed in, that you knew you could count on, have quite abruptly tap danced right out of your life without a glance backwards. Systems that you believed you could trust have often betrayed your family, blamed you or your child for the circumstances and avoided any culpability for their actions.
 
If you have felt anger, know that your anger was appropriate. Holy anger is an energy that propels you to take protective actions on behalf of your family and yourself. This kind of anger can also move you toward restructuring your life and improving societal institutions for the betterment of all.

However, long-term resentment and blame are ego blocks that keep you stuck in a prison of your own making – a holding pattern that prevents you from fully engaging with life. These ego blocks depress your passion for living, contribute to strained relationships, and manifest in less than stellar mental and physical states. Unfortunately, resentment seeps out in all kinds of unproductive and unanticipated ways, when you least expect it, while being misdirected at innocent bystanders, including your precious children.

 If you find yourself struggling under the weight of resentment and blame, know that you are not alone. None of us were given the guidebook for navigating in never-ending, choppy, dark waters.
 
Here are some key questions to ask:

• Do you find yourself ruminating on betrayals of the past?
• Do you find yourself overreacting to minor annoyances?
• Do you say things in the heat of the moment that do not in any way reflect your character?
• Do you continually avoid and bury your resentment because your mind judges your grievance thoughts as unacceptable?
• Do you attach shame to your unwanted eruptions, while hiding these outbursts from others, and at the same time, promising yourself that your eruptions will never happen again?
• Do you find yourself replaying this pattern again and again?
• Do you find yourself rehashing a painful storyline that fuels your resentment, blame and righteous indignation?
• Do you keep yourself busy and distracted in order to avoid thinking about all the ways in which a fickle universe has let you down?
• Do you resent the overwhelming responsibility on your shoulders, and, on very bad days, do you even resent your child?

 
If you answered yes to some or all of these questions, validate with kindness and compassion that it’s completely normal for you to struggle under the weight of your circumstances. It’s normal for any mother who had walked ten thousand miles in your shoes to struggle with emotional reactivity. After all, we are mothers in human bodies, coping with a laundry list of long-term challenging and complex real life problems, as we grapple with the impact of unrelenting, special needs trench warfare, with very little reprieve or respite in sight. The lack of systemic support for us is a massive contributing factor to our resentment.
 
My ego wanted to shout from the rooftops, “I didn’t sign up for this role. It’s too much for one woman to carry. Send in the reinforcements.” But the reinforcements were often inadequate, late or came with a high price to be paid. One of the reasons your ego has your stuck is because your list of grievances are absolutely valid and true. However, holding onto that truth, rehashing that truth and carrying the weight of that truth harms you and those in your inner circle.
 
When you decide to release your resentments, you detach from the emotional toxicity that has never been yours to carry in the first place. Moving forward and healing from past betrayals begins with unconditionally accepting events exactly as they unfolded. It means stripping off your rose colored glasses and looking at the unvarnished truth – the ways in which you or others in the human family fell short.
 
It also means surrendering to the fact that the Law of Karmic Justice is not yours to impose. Your faith helps you embrace that in a loving universe -- like attracts like. It means accepting that whatever energy signature is emitted, it invariably comes back in kind. However, events at play are often beyond the purview of the limited ego mind’s comprehension. If past, present and future timelines are all playing out simultaneously, karmic justice operates far outside the scope of this one tiny human incarnation.    
 
Whether you accept that premise or not, the choice to forgive sets you free. It releases you from the burden of carrying unyielding opinions and judgments about events, as well as your accompanying painful, repressed feelings that have been buried alive. Forgiveness is your self-protective mechanism because it releases you from the weight of the past and allows you to re-enter the flow of life with lightness and renewed, inspired, passion.
 
Forgiveness happens when you choose to let go of any storyline that keeps you tied to your “so-called victimizer,” as well the illusions of shame and blame. Forgiveness happens when you choose radical acceptance. Radical acceptance does not mean that you are condoning harmful acts. Rather, it means that you are willing to set yourself free, even when you can’t begin to understand the karmic perfection embedded within your challenges.
 
 As the Course in Miracles declares, “healing is accomplished the instant the sufferer no longer sees any value in the pain.”
 
As Louise Hay taught, “I forgive everyone for not being perfect. I am living the very best way I know how. It is safe for me to release all of my childhood traumas and move into love. I forgive everyone in my past for all perceived wrongs. I release them with love. All of the changes in life that lie before me are positive ones. I am safe.”