I caught up with a friend today and it reminded me of the struggle a lot of us have with expectations. She was talking to me about how her husband likes the house to be spotless and she finds it hard to do with 3 kids. Even though she’d like it clean herself, anyone with kids knows that keeping a house clean is like beating your head against a brick wall. You just get to the point where you say, ‘why bother?’
Realising what your expectations are is very important to your mental health. Are you expected to work, are you expected to be a stay home mum, are you expected to keep the house in a certain way, are you expected to always be nice and help others. More importantly who makes you feel these expectations? Is it you, your partner, your parents?
The problem with having expectations is that they are often created through someone else’s value system. What that means is that you’ve taken on their value system and forced it into yours. I ‘should’ keep the house cleaner or I ‘should’ want to play with the kids. Any time we use a ‘should’ we feel bad about ourselves and make ourselves feel guilty that we are not stacking up to that ideal. And we judge ourselves and effectively tell ourselves that our choices are often wrong.
I ban my clients from using the word ‘should’ in their vocabulary. Should is in the past, it refers to something you can’t change anyway and just ends up being a way to put yourself down. You can have hindsight about how you could have handled something differently without putting a should on it and making yourself feel guilty.
Guilt is something most women can definitely relate to in some area of their life. For men it’s a little easier, their job is to work and they tend to feel more stressed when children come along and they have to care for the family financially whereas women’s roles are more blurred especially since the role of women is different now to what it was 20 years ago and is still changing rapidly.
Some women’s beliefs say ‘I should be able to do it all’ or ‘I should be able to be supermum’ and they are increasingly hard on themselves. From that viewpoint they find it hard to see how much they truly do because they are too busy beating themselves up for what they ‘should’ be doing or what they haven’t done.
The way out of this pattern is to start to question why you ‘should’ do this or that. Say to yourself ‘why should I do that, who is it saying that to me and why do I follow it so unconditionally’. Unlocking these voices is your key to changing these beliefs leading to choices that more accurately reflect what you want rather than what others want.
As children we take on the beliefs of our parents and if at some point they become incongruent with our beliefs, there is a conflict in our subconscious between what we want to do and what we feel we should do (there’s that word again). Because the conflict is subconscious it is not in our control to change until we start asking these questions to find out where it has come from, who’s voice is it and why do I follow it’s rules instead of my own. Awareness = consciousness = change.
Questions and comments are welcome and every effort will be made to answer them.
