80: The 5 Big Mistakes Childless Women Make on the Healing Journey

If you've found yourself stuck in grief and triggers unable to get past it, today's episode is for you.

​​I'm unpacking five major blunders that keep childless women from moving forward and embracing their future. 

​​And don't worry, I made every single one of these mistakes and so do my clients.   I'm sharing them here not to judge, or cause you to judge yourself, but to show you that when you stop making these mistakes, your grief and triggers will lift. 

You'll be able to genuinely support your pregnant cousin, attend the baby showers with grace and sit through your friends' stories about their kids with curiosity and interest.

It's such a relief!
​
In this episode, we'll cover:

• the 5 biggest mistakes childless women make
• the consequences of making these mistakes and what happens when you stop
• what to do instead

If you're ready to start implementing some of the things you'll discover, continue your journey by downloading my free secret podcast series: 3 Secrets to Processing Grief so You Can Reimagine Your Future

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide.  You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way. 
Click here for your free guide

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast. We all make mistakes when we're trying to get through a problem. We're trying to solve a problem. We try different things and some work and some don't. And today I want to cover the five biggest mistakes that I see childless women making as they attempt to get over the grief. And don't worry by the way, I made every single one of these mistakes, so there's no judgment, but I want to share them because when I stopped making them, that's when my life completely transformed. So if you want to transform your life and find out what mistakes you might be making, then stay with me.

Speaker 1: 1:00

If you're here, it's likely because you're a childless woman. You wanted kids, and it doesn't matter what circumstances brought you here and there are a multitude of circumstances that might have brought you here. It really just matters that you're here and if you are, you might be seeking ways to get past all the grief, and maybe the triggers as well, so that you can get on with your life or get back to your life, or however you describe that. What I find is that most of my clients come to me feeling a bit stuck in grief and then they're also feeling these other emotions like feeling like they're inadequate or like they're not good enough, or they feel excluded, like they don't fit in with the popular crowd, the mom crowd. They might even feel invisible. The grief that you might be feeling is real, and this is something else. Well, this is a mistake in itself, and this isn't number one of the five, but there is this misconception in our society that you can grieve a person and that's what we're sort of accustomed to seeing but that there shouldn't be grief around the loss of something intangible. And I call BS on that. When you grieve a person that you lost, you grieve the past and the memories that you have with them, but you also grieve the future. You grieve the future that you don't get to have with them, and I would say it's similar to grieving the loss of a job, for example. You would also grieve all the days that you would have worked there if it had been your choice. You grieve the future, and when you realize that you're going to be permanently childless, you also grieve a future that you thought you'd have. So it's really the same thing. So if you're doubting that you belong in the childless community or that you're even childless not by choice or childless by circumstance. It doesn't really matter. If you're grieving, that grief is real. If you wanted children and you're grieving the future that you thought you would have, then, yes, that grief is real.

Speaker 1: 3:44

So then there are triggers, and that's something that I hear used all the time these days is triggered. I'm triggered, trigger warning. What I mean by this is triggers that there's. I see that there's two types of triggers. There are the things that people say or do that trigger your grief. They make you sad, they remind you of your grief, and then there's also triggers that are more like hot buttons, and those are the things that people say or do that trigger usually anger, irritation or maybe hurt, and those are also they're slightly different than than grief Triggers feel real, but they are the ones that I'm thinking about that are more like hot buttons, the ones that childless women feel when someone asks them if they have kids or someone says, well, you won't understand because you're not a mom.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Those are really the result of thousands of years of conditioning. Society teaches us that a woman's role is to get married and have children and if she doesn't, she's kind of an outcast or she doesn't fit in. Especially, I find this in the childless community if she's both single and childless. If you look at look at childless women in fairy tales, they're usually presented as witches at worst, maybe a shaman or medicine woman at best. They're often mean they're living out in the forest or outside. They're not living in town. It's like they're not fully accepted. They're different, they're kind of an outcast, and people go out into the forest to seek them out for wisdom or potions or whatever it is. And that messaging is rampant in our society and we don't even notice it until we're on the other side of it and suddenly are faced with having to deal with those kinds of triggers.

Speaker 1: 6:13

So all of those emotions that childless women feel are, they're all real, and if you're in that position and you're feeling this way, you're probably making some of these five mistakes that I'm going to share with you in an attempt to stop feeling this way. There's probably more than five mistakes. I'm going to walk you through what I see are the top five, and once again, there's no judgment here. These mistakes were all taught to us by society as well. They're all things that society taught us to do to try to get through grief, to try to get through triggers, and so it's not your fault. It's just the beliefs that you've been taught that are interfering with you finding the actual solutions that work. So I'm going to go through these five and I would love it if you go to my Instagram account and tell me which one resonated the most. I'm at Sherry Johnson Coaching and you'll find my Instagram handle linked up in the show notes, just in case you don't follow me already. Head over there and follow me and tell me which of these mistakes resonates for you. So here's number one.

Speaker 1: 7:38

I find that this is actually the biggest mistake that I find that women make when they're trying to grieve, when they're trying to get through grief, they're waiting for time to heal their wounds. And to give you some examples of how this might have shown up in your own life, you might have heard someone say oh, give it time. Or give her time, she just needs time. In time, it'll start to feel better. Or time heals all wounds. Maybe someone has actually said that to you, and I have a metaphor that I like to use to explain this misconception If you break your leg, you can wait for time to heal your broken leg and your body will do some healing.

Speaker 1: 8:35

It will slowly try to mend that bone and any inflammation that's around it. Your body is a wondrous thing. It will actually begin to heal that broken leg. But if you actually take some action and go to the hospital, have that bone reset, have a cast put on so that it doesn't move, so that it can actually heal more quickly, maybe when you have that cast taken off, you go to physio and work the muscle around that broken bone back in shape, all of those things, those actions are going to actually help you to heal more quickly and they're going to help that bone heal properly. So if you just allow it to heal itself, it may actually not.

Speaker 1: 9:35

You've probably heard stories like this, where someone has a bone that hasn't fully healed properly and that wound. It's still painful for them, or maybe the bone, maybe they even have to re break it to reset the bone if it didn't heal properly. So there's things that can actually go wrong if you don't take the action to heal it properly. And the same thing can happen with emotional healing. So you can wait around for time to heal or for your own body and soul to do its own healing. But when you actually take some action to to heal, it happens far more quickly. You can release that pain more quickly and more efficiently, and you don't have to come ever come back to it. You can just release it and let it go. So that's number one mistake Waiting for time to heal your wounds. Number two blaming your feelings on others. So let me explain this one before this might actually even be a trigger for you.

Speaker 1: 10:52

I did this one. This was a big one that I did. I thought that other people were hurting me, they were causing my pain. That can contrast with maybe they're just reminding me of it. So here's another example when someone says something that reminds you of your pain or that you feel is causing your pain, what's really happening is that they're pressing on a wound that is already there. So, to stick with our body analogies, our body metaphors, here they might be just pressing on a wound that's already there, hidden underneath of your shirt or hidden underneath of your pants, so they're not causing the wound. The wound is there, your pain is already there and it's actually your job to heal the wound. They may not even know that it's there and I would venture to guess that in the childless world there is a lot of us who are walking around with wounds that nobody knows about. We tend to keep our pain to ourselves. We think nobody understands, we maybe don't know anybody who is in the same scenario and we just we don't know how to get support or ask for support. It feels scary to even talk about it, so we don't. And so someone who says something to you may feel really hurtful or painful, but it's not because they've caused the wound, it's because you've got a wound already there and they're just pressing on it without even knowing it.

Speaker 1: 12:49

So an example of this there's so many examples of this I have had, I've heard, I've had clients actually say that actually in one instance I'll give you an example At a client who said her mother-in-law gave her a, she had had infertility and had miscarriage and so her mother actually her mother-in-law gave her a Mother's Day card and wrote something quite that I found actually quite touching to just acknowledge that she was a mother. And my client was actually really annoyed by this and she blamed her mother-in-law for reminding her of her pain. But that mother-in-law was actually doing something that she thought was quite thoughtful and and what the intention was to actually comfort her daughter-in-law. It wasn't to remind her. But for that particular client. That was something that really hurt, was something that was pressing on a wound, and so it's it's our job to heal the wound. I'm going to give you some other examples.

Speaker 1: 14:21

Belonging is a big one that I hear. We feel like we're made to, to feel excluded, we don't belong, we don't fit in. There's a clique of moms out there who exclude us and, yes, you might actually be excluded from some events or you may not get an invitation to something, and it might very well be because you, because you are single or you don't have kids. And but the problem is I'm gonna come back to that when you blame them for your problem, for how that feels, and want everybody to stop excluding you, you give all of your power to them to change, and they don't always change. They don't always see that they need to. So the way that I teach women to get through this is by looking at what they make, what they're making it mean about themselves when somebody doesn't invite them.

Speaker 1: 15:47

So let me tell you an example of myself, my own story, to help you understand this one. So I had two girlfriends who both had children and I found out that they went on a family ski trip together and I felt excluded from that because these were two of my very good friends and they didn't even tell me that they were going on this trip. It wasn't until later that it came up that they had been away and they'd been away together and I wasn't invited. And I loved to ski and it's been a dream of mine to take to go on a family ski vacation. I used to do that as a kid. My family went with a bunch of other families and it was. I have so many wonderful memories of that that I've always wanted to do that with my own family and so it hurt that they didn't invite me.

Speaker 1: 16:50

I made that mean something about me. They didn't invite me, they excluded me. So I took that as they don't want to hang out with me because I don't have kids, I made it mean that maybe I'm not a good enough friend. You can go down a rabbit hole and I did and I really started to feel down on myself by the end of that. But the actuality of that is that the truth of that, the actuality, the truth I didn't get to go on this trip. That I think would have been fun. It didn't necessarily mean that they don't want to hang out with me. I made it mean that they actually thought that I wouldn't be interested in going, first of all because I have a husband who can't ski he has a disability and because we don't have kids. So their assumption was that that I wouldn't be interested. And when it came right down to it, I probably wouldn't have gone. I wouldn't have wanted to spend my time on the bunny hill with them and their kids. I wouldn't have wanted to have to come home early instead of going out for dinner and, and you know, hanging out while they're putting their kids to bed. I just those. That wasn't my own reality, so I probably wouldn't have actually wanted to do that. So they were right when I really thought about it. But I made it mean something and that's the key is, I made it mean something about me and I blamed my hurt and my feelings on them. So when you flip that back around and stop making it mean anything at all about you, and then everything can change.

Speaker 1: 19:54

I also have had an I'll tell you another story sitting around with five other moms who couldn't stop talking about their kids. They all had young kids, four or five year olds, and again. The meaning that I made in that moment was that they don't understand. They're ignoring me. I can't participate in this conversation. You can hear the tone of my voice. I'm rolling my eyes, I'm you know, I'm upset by this because I'm annoyed and I feel excluded. The truth was that I wanted to connect. I was living in a new town, I wanted to make new friends and I didn't feel as though I could connect with these women. So that's the truth. The actuality, the additional truth, was that they weren't ignoring me. They were in their own space. I mean everybody, not everybody.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Many women who have kids want to talk about their kids because that also means they feel that that means something about them If they have. In this particular instance, they were all. They were completely in this situation. They feel that that means something about them If they have. In this particular instance, they were all. They were comparing stories of the funny things that their kids do, and it was almost like a competition you know, as I was watching from the the periphery almost like a competition of whose kid is the funniest. And if the kid was the funniest, then they must be the most valuable. So there's some some of their own self worth going on there. That had nothing to do with me. They were placing value on the best story that they could tell. It wasn't about me at all, it was about them.

Speaker 1: 21:43

So what to do in this case? When you're not invited to something or when you're excluded from something, make it known to your friends that you would like to be invited, and this will be uncomfortable for you to actually voice that. It can feel really vulnerable and it will take some courage to talk to your friends or your family about this, about wanting to be invited wanting, you know, don't make that assumption that I don't want to go, and allow me to make the decision. That can be a conversation that you have with your friend or your family. Even if you choose not to go, you can let them know that you'd like to be invited. And then the second thing is to shift the meaning. Change your mindset. Shift your mindset around that and don't make it mean something about you, because more often than not it means something about them.

Speaker 1: 22:41

So that's number two is blaming or placing your, your feelings of hurt on other people. They're not causing your pain, they're simply reminding you of it. They're pressing on a wound that's already there. Okay, number three trying to handle your grief all by yourself. This looks like crying behind closed doors, never sharing with others how you feel, maybe being afraid that you're going to rain on their parade or that they're not going to understand, and so you grieve by yourself, and maybe you also don't know other people who might understand or who might who you know will be able to empathize. But what this leads to is that your friends and your family the people who are close to you and want to support you don't actually know that you're struggling, and so then they don't even know to comfort you, let alone how to comfort you, and they don't even try to understand you because they don't know that there's something going on that they need to understand. So in this case, this what to do here is also going to feel really uncomfortable, because you're basically exposing an open wound, and that can feel really vulnerable. You're taking your shirt off and showing them this wound, and that can feel very vulnerable and uncomfortable.

Speaker 1: 24:29

But in order to heal, you actually need to ask for support. If you want support, sometimes you need to ask for it. People don't know how to give it and they don't know what you need. And, by the way, when you don't ask for help, it may also be a sign that you've deemed either your grief or yourself unworthy of receiving help or support. So I invite you to just check in with yourself and ask yourself why you're not asking for help. So that's number three handling your grief by yourself. Number four trying to be strong. And I say be strong in quotations, because I'm going to explain why that is a mistake and what that even means.

Speaker 1: 25:29

Being strong we think of as putting on a happy face, pretending that you're fine, telling people that you're fine when you're not. Maybe it's going to the baby shower and choking down your emotion behind a forced smile, or it's going to the bathroom to cry when and coming back as though everything is hunky dory. When people say you're so strong, which they often do we hear this all the time. I see it in comments whenever someone posts about their physical healing journey they're working through cancer or they are dealing with the death of a loved one and people say you're the strongest woman I know or you're the strongest person I know it makes us think that we need to be stoic, we need to not show our emotions, and that's what is going to make people think we're strong, and what that means to me is that you're so good at when someone says this to me, you're so good at putting on the armor that I don't have to see your pain at all.

Speaker 1: 26:45

When someone says be strong, which they also say that be strong, like be strong for your mother, or your mother needs your strength, or be strong for your brother, or whatever, that means like shove down your emotions so that others don't have to see it, and what that's doing is hiding your true self. It's hiding your true emotions. It's not being able to be your true self. So what to do? Instead? Show more of your true self.

Speaker 1: 27:24

When someone asks you how you are, maybe respond with the truth and say something like you know, I'm actually really struggling right now. It's actually not a great time for me. Right now. I'm going through something really tough and, of course, this is going to depend on who you're talking to. You know, maybe you're not going to say that to the stranger on the street or to the person who works at the post office or someone you don't know very well, but when your mom asks you, or your best friend or someone who's close to you that you trust. Maybe the answer is that you're not doing so great and you need support. So this actually really sort of ties into the third one.

Speaker 1: 28:14

Handling grief by yourself, trying to be strong, is closely linked to that, because being strong sometimes means retreating and grieving on our own. So, again, all of these things take some vulnerability. They're going to feel uncomfortable and they're also so rewarding when you muster up the courage to actually say what's truthful for you, what's authentic for you. And it gets easier the more that you practice Number five and the fifth. The fifth mistake is burying your emotions, and this is a little bit different. So let me distinguish between number four, which is putting on a happy face, pretending that you're fine, trying to be strong. That is what you do out in the open. It's not necessarily the same thing. It's covering up when you're out and about this. Number five, burying emotions, is about what you do, about how you feel inside.

Speaker 1: 29:28

So examples of how we bury emotions and we don't just bury them, we think of burying emotions, shoving them under the carpet, distracting ourselves from them, avoiding them. Those are all basically the same thing and we do plenty of actions to bury emotions. To bury emotions, to try to escape them. And, by the way, this is also your brain trying to keep you safe. We do these things because we are hardwired to avoid pain, both physical and emotional. So this is just your brain trying to keep you safe and you might not even realize that you're doing this.

Speaker 1: 30:12

But what we tend to do is opt for things that make us feel good, in an attempt to hide or cover up what doesn't feel good. So that can be food, maybe it's alcohol, drugs, it could be Netflix, it could be keeping yourself busy. So there's socially acceptable ways of doing this as well, and things that are less acceptable. So keeping yourself busy is also something that we hear all the time. I'll just keep yourself busy until you feel better. Keep yourself busy, distract yourself from the pain. So we fill up our social calendars. We get busy at work, take on extra stuff at work. We maybe do more at home, so we get busy cleaning the house from top to bottom or getting out in the garden and weeding the entire thing.

Speaker 1: 31:15

We find ways to keep ourselves busy in order to avoid feeling, because if we're busy, it's hard to be present and really feel into what's going on inside your body, avoiding triggers or anywhere that you might be triggered is another way that we avoid pain. It's another way that we bury emotions and when you bury or distract or avoid, all of these emotions will get buried in your physical body. There's actually emotions have a. There's actually a chemical thing going on in your brain and your body when you experience an emotion and if that physical part of the emotion does not dissipate, it doesn't have a chance to be released. It will get buried in your physical body and it will come back, causes, illness, fatigue, all kinds of things that will show up in your life that are linked to grief or other emotions that you're bearing inside your body. And what happens is that emotion will eke out in other ways. They can become a trigger point and triggers just will shape shift. They'll come out in the form of anger or irritation or emotions later on in another point.

Speaker 1: 32:45

It's like patterns that keep showing up in your life, hot buttons that show up in your life. Those are former, those are triggers, those are former. It's former pain. It's a little bit like my belonging story where I made it mean something about me when I didn't get invited to the ski vacation that took me right back to, you know, earlier in my life, when I was 12, 13. I wanted to be a part of the popular crowd. I feel like age 12 and 13 were kind of those years where I really struggled. Middle school, grade seven, eight if you're Canadian those were the toughest years, when you want to belong and I had some issues where I was made to not feel like I belonged and that just kept showing up in my life.

Speaker 1: 33:55

So the original wound or the grief or the hurt they can shape, shift and just keep showing up over and over. So if you don't actually allow those emotions to be released, they can come back and someone will press on that wound and it will become a hot button and suddenly you're angry for a reason you don't even really know why. So what to do in this case? Instead of bearing emotions, you need to feel the emotion, and this one's again. All the things that I've talked about today, they all are uncomfortable. They're the opposite of what your brain wants you to do, and yet none of them are going to kill you. They're just going to feel a little uncomfortable. Emotion is uncomfortable. Feeling emotion can be uncomfortable when they are painful emotions, but the more that you feel them, the more you will release, and the more you release, the better you're going to feel. So there you have it, the five biggest mistakes that I see in my childless clientele. I'll just recap them for you really quickly Waiting for time to heal, blaming feelings of blaming your, your pain on others instead of owning that yourself and them just pressing on that wound.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Number three handling your grief on your own. Trying to grieve alone Grief, by the way, something I forgot to mention. Brene Brown talks about this in Atlas of the Heart, which is a book that I absolutely recommend. She talks about grief. We release grief or we heal grief by connecting. So when you try to handle it on your own, it's much more difficult to heal. It's in the connection with other people that you can begin to heal your grief, to get through it, to navigate it, to process it.

Speaker 1: 36:10

However you want to describe that, okay. Number four trying to be strong. And then number five burying your emotions. And then, for each one, I've told you what to do instead. If you're ready to start learning how to implement some of these things, I invite you to download my free secret podcast series Three Secrets to Processing Grief, so that you can reimagine your future with purpose and excitement. You'll find that at shareyjohnsonca. I'm going to link that up in the show notes and I invite you to download that and have a listen and move the needle on your own grief. So that's it for today. I will see you back next week.