Overwhelmed Mom Who Overreacts?

You love your children, but you are exhausted from being the mom you don't want to be. You get overwhelmed, impatient, frustrated, and angry. You raise your voice, react more strongly than you meant to, and sometimes cross a line that you wish you could take back.

Then comes the guilt. You feel terrible about the way you treated your child, you beat yourself up, and you wonder why you keep doing this when you know you want to respond differently. You promise yourself that tomorrow will be different, but then you get overwhelmed again, and the cycle starts all over.

There can be a lot underneath those reactions. Negative emotions, limiting beliefs, old experiences, stress, exhaustion, and all the expectations you carry about what a good mother is supposed to be can build up over time. You think you should be able to handle everything, keep everyone happy, and always have control of yourself. Then your child does one more thing, and you explode.

Knowing you are overreacting doesn't automatically make the reaction stop. You can know exactly how you want to behave, and still find yourself doing something completely different when the overwhelm takes over. Sometimes the answer isn't more self-control. Sometimes there is something underneath the reaction that needs to be understood and worked through.

My clients' results amaze even me sometimes. I recently worked with a mother who had struggled with a pattern like this. After working with me, she said:

“I don’t have any problems. I love myself. I was dancing before work this morning. I got what I came for. To go with the flow. To be happy in my everyday life, and I am.”

This is what can happen when you work with the deeper emotions, beliefs, and experiences held in the subconscious mind that are driving the pattern, rather than simply trying to control the behavior.

When a mother changes, the effects can reach much further than the mother herself. The work we do can change the way she experiences herself, her children, and her everyday life, and that can change things for her children, too.