The Victim Mentality And Self-Pity In Motherhood

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. How are we doing today? I am so happy to be here with you to talk about the victim mentality and self pity. I am also so surprised I have never created a podcast on this. How is this possible? I think it’s because I talk about it so much in other areas. So I talk about it at length inside the Mom On Purpose Membership. I have coached many, many, many clients on it and I also have a lesson on it inside the Mom On Purpose free course.

So if you haven’t taken the free course, 10 outta 10, recommend that. Just go to momonpurpose.com/free course and you will be able to sign up for it there. And then I think it’s lesson number three is about the victim mentality and motherhood. So I think to me it’s just felt like I have talked about the victim mentality and self-pity so much, but I looked at the outline that I have for all of the podcasts and there isn’t one on it. So this is the one. Let’s dive in. I sometimes refer to myself as the queen of self-pity. I’m very familiar with the victim mentality. And if that is you, there’s no shame in it. These are just mindset traps. There are things that our brains do for a variety of reasons. It doesn’t really matter why. It just matters that you recognize it and that you change it for your sake, for no one else’s sake but your own.

I do wanna make a distinction at the beginning between the difference of the victim mentality and actually being a victim. So when you are actually a victim, there is some harm or wrongdoing done to you and you respond to that, you seek solutions, you heal from that. The victim mentality is very different. It keeps you stuck. You look for others to blame and you feel very powerless. So I’ll give you a quick example. When we moved into our current house a few years ago, the movers stole a check from my desk and cashed it to themselves for a few thousand dollars. And that was a big bummer And I woke up on my birthday and I found out that that had happened. So in that situation, I was actually a victim of check fraud. I felt very, you know, mad, angry, all the things. I let my emotions process and then I went to work to seek solutions.

I filed a police report, I called the moving company. I spent, you know, half a day figuring all this out. And then I moved on. That was not the victim mentality. I was not in self-pity at all. So notice there how I was an actual victim, but I sought solutions. I wasn’t looking for someone to blame. I wasn’t feeling powerless. So I just, I just want you to distinguish between the two. They’re very, very different. The victim mentality is a mindset where you feel like your life is happening to you, like you’re doing something you have to do and you don’t wanna be doing it and you feel self-pity. So the mentality are those thoughts. And then the feeling is self-pity or self-loathing in some way. Examples of how this might show up in motherhood is feeling trapped, unsupported, stuck, blaming your circumstances. You’re taking things personally, you’re reacting disproportionately.

Maybe you’re escaping with food and scrolling or wine. You feel sorry for yourself, like you have this running mindset that it’s not fair and it should be. There is also likely this framework at work where you are looking for a villain. The saying goes, every victim needs a villain. So you’re looking for someone to blame, whether it’s blaming your spouse for not helping enough, blaming your son’s night wakings for not getting enough sleep. That’s something that I did with my first son. I really made myself a victim of his sleep or lack thereof, and it just didn’t benefit me at all because he wasn’t changing his sleep. I was just making the situation worse by thinking that I had to wake up with him, that it wasn’t fair.

So every victim needs a villain and also every victim is looking for a hero to save them. And you may also find yourself in the hero/fixer role in someone else’s victim mentality. I can relate to this a lot. Like I loved being a fixer or a helper or jumping in, and I know that many of you struggle with this with respect to your kids. You kind of dance a fine line between solving your kids’ challenges for them versus just supporting them. And this is something that I did a lot of work on and I find it to be really helpful in parenting as well. Not trying to solve my kids’ challenges, but just support them and be there with them through it. So are you looking for someone to blame and are you looking for someone to save you? Those are two big indicators that you are feeling like you are in a situation that you can’t change and you want to feel sorry for yourself.

And guess what? It’s justified. I think that’s the hardest part. Other people agree with you. So it feels very valid, feels justified. And guess what it is, it is justified. I wanna give you an example. For some of you who have been around a long time, you know this already, that I started my blog used to be a blog about money when I graduated law school and had $206,000 of student loan debt. Now, at that time, it would’ve been so easy for me to blame my parents, blame the banks, blame the education system for letting me take out that much money and it would’ve been justified. There’s a lot to say about the way that we lend to kids, right? And I agree with that, but yet thinking that way in an individual circumstance like mine was not helpful. Why? Because my parents, the banks nor the education system, the schools were not coming to pay off my debt for me.

So that’s one of the key things to see about the victim mentality is that it is not helpful, it just keeps you stuck. Thankfully, I wasn’t in the victim mentality in that situation, so I just decided that no one was to blame. I wasn’t to blame, no one else was to blame. Or even if they were to blame, it wasn’t helpful for me to blame them and I was gonna figure it out. And that is one of the, best ways for you to shift out of the victim mentality into a more empowered mindset is to adopt the mindset that you can figure it out. The mindset that I repeat to myself often is that every problem has a solution. Every single problem has a solution. Isn’t that so energizing to think? Because when you feel stuck and you feel like it’s not possible to solve this solution, then you give up and you feel sorry for yourself.

And other people will validate that for you and they should. They’re your friends and your family. But when you come and get coached, when I’m your coach, when you’re listening to this podcast and you want to actually help yourself out of it, it’s a very different experience. It’s kind of like the difference between having a friend over and asking your friend what she thinks about your decor versus having an interior decorator come over and asking that professional’s opinion about your decor. You want your friend to say, your home looks amazing. You don’t want that from the interior decorator. You want the interior decorator to point out how you can make some changes to make it better. That’s the difference between going to your friends and family versus going to a coach or coming inside the Mom On Purpose membership. It’s just a different experience as it should be.

Like I still want my friends to validate me, but when I’m getting coached or I’m coaching myself, it’s a very different experience. So where are you blaming your life? Where are you thinking it’s not fair? A key point that I wanna make here is that it is a mindset. So over on Instagram, @mom.onpurpose, I asked you all who are over there where you fall into the victim mentality. And I was looking for what your thoughts are, but what I got was all of the circumstances. So it’s so interesting to think about when we think our circumstances cause us to feel sorry for ourselves. So if you think it’s the actual bedtime routine that’s making you feel self-pity, then you are stuck because you’re blaming the nighttime routine, you’re blaming your life, you’re blaming motherhood. I just wanna let you know motherhood is not happening to you.

You could walk out that door, you really could. No one is stopping you and you’ll say, Natalie, come on. I don’t wanna do that. I don’t want you to do that either. But I want you to know that it is an option because when you see it’s an option and that you have free agency to think, feel and act however you want, that means you can do whatever you want. Now there are consequences. I mean you could even go break the law. You could, but there will be consequences. So you don’t just like you actually want to stay home and do bedtime routine, it just means it’s gonna be exhausting. The difference here is everything. We think thoughts like I just want bedtime routine to be easier. But the truth is we can’t control what’s happening with our kids. We can’t control how long it takes them to go to bed.

We can’t control their meltdowns, but that’s okay. We don’t need to. All we need to do is control our mind a little bit better. Because the truth is you actually want to be a part of the chaotic, exhausting bedtime routine more than you don’t want to because you could just go in your room and close the door, say good luck kids, or you could leave or you could get in your car. You could do that. Again, I’m not suggesting you do that, but I want you to see that it is within your agency to do that. I can’t tell you how life changing this was for me when I realized that I didn’t have to go and get my son when he woke up in the middle of the night with my first son. He would wake up every time we transferred him. And I remember thinking like, he’s not sleeping and he should be, this isn’t fair.

I’m exhausted. Why won’t he sleep? I just wanna sleep. All completely disempowering mindsets that kept me in the victim mentality. I felt like I was a victim of my son’s night wakings. And what changed for me was when I got out of it and the way that I got out of it was when I realized that everything we do is what we actually want to be doing. So when I told myself that I wanted to sleep, it was a lie. You know what? I wanted more than sleep. I wanted to get up and comfort and soothe my son more than I wanted sleep. That was the truth ’cause that’s what I was doing, but I wasn’t telling myself that.

And so you have to pay attention to the stories that you’re telling yourself. If you’re telling yourself, I just want my kids to go to bed more quickly, I just want bedtime to be easier. This isn’t fair. You’re making yourself a victim of your life, of nighttime, of bedtime routines. It’s unhelpful. And it’s also not even true. It’s not true because you don’t have to do it. So tell yourself the truth. I want to be present and helping my kids during their nighttime routine. And you can also add in a thought like, and it’s just harder than I thought. That thought helped me so much with my first son. The truth was I wanted to get up with him more than I wanted sleep. And it was just harder than I thought.

So if your spouse works really late, you don’t have to be married to your spouse, you want to be married to your spouse and he wants to work late. That’s the truth. We all are doing what we want to be doing and it’s harder than we thought. And that’s okay. Tell yourself the truth. You are not stuck. I don’t care what your circumstances are, you are not stuck when you tell yourself you’re stuck. That’s when you create stuckness. Is it fair? Definitely not. The thought it’s not fair isn’t the problem? The problem thought is it should be fair that my friend is not true. It’s not supposed to be fair. I don’t know why don’t shoot the messenger. This is just life. And you know this, right? If you pause and you take a step back, and if I just ask you, Hey, do you think life is is fair or is supposed to be fair?

The answer is no. So if you don’t have, you know the support system, if you don’t have family to help you with your little ones, if you don’t have that village, would it be easier if you had it? Definitely. But why are we spending time thinking about that? If you don’t have it? Spend time coming up with creative solutions that empower you. I said this the other day on Instagram and I got so many responses from you all and I wanna point it out here ’cause it’s really relevant. I said, what I love about circumstances that make it hard for me to manage my mind is that it’s the only way for me to get stronger. I can’t get stronger from easier circumstances. I get stronger from practicing mindset work in harder circumstances.

That is always the truth for us. Now, I am not wishing harder circumstances on you. I’m definitely not wishing harder circumstances on myself. I want it to be easy for you and for me. But when it’s not, I remind myself that it’s in the harder circumstances that I’m able to get stronger because I’m always doing what I want to be doing. It’s just harder than I thought. If I’m parenting while, Steve’s out of town. I want to be doing that. I don’t want to abandon my kids. I want to be there and it’s hard. Alright, let’s get some reps in. Let’s get stronger. I have been on this like health weight loss and fitness journey that’s kinda ongoing for me. And I think about exercising and how I’m going to be strength training soon. And I just think about wanting to get stronger. And there are so many parallels with mindset work and getting physically stronger.

To get physically stronger, I have to lift weights, I have to feel uncomfortable. I’m going to feel sore. It’s the only way. The same is true when you are in the victim mindset or in any negative mindset. The way out is to practice a more empowered mindset. And the only way you can practice is through challenging circumstances. What I want to encourage you to do is to pick one specific area of your life where you are feeling self-pity, where you’re feeling sorry for yourself, where you’re feeling stuck, and then ask yourself what your mindset is. It will be one sentence tops, three sentences, like your general overall story that you’re telling is the mindset. What? What is that mindset that is creating the self-loathing? And then here’s the the big one, my friends be willing to be wrong. You have to be willing to be wrong.

It’s the only way for you to get into empowerment. Then come up with a better feeling thought that you believe and practice it. Go from feeling sorry for yourself. Go from feeling like motherhood is happening to you, to feeling like you are empowered, inspired, and you are getting stronger every day. I am tired, my friends. I experience bedtime with toddlers and an infant as well. I am not super human, but I love this work. It’s just an everyday opportunity to get stronger. I want to feel empowered because I know that in the next season when my kids aren’t little, when it’s not so physically demanding, it’s gonna be something else and something else and something else. Just like when you go from being single to being married, you trade in your single people problems for married people problems. Just like when you have, you know, kids under five versus when you have kids over 15, right?

You’re just trading in different types of problems. I will probably be more well rested when my kids are older. I will be sleeping through the night. But I’ll have different challenges then. And I know that the reps that I’m getting in now to feel more empowered will help me. They’ll help me far beyond motherhood too. So let’s go through an example. Let’s say you realize you feel a lot of self-pity and self-loathing around having to do a majority of the housework and manage the kids’ schedules and do maybe nighttime routine. Most of the time your spouse is either working or just not that helpful in any of those areas ins. Instead of feeling self-loathing or self-pity and thinking a mindset like this isn’t fair, he should be helping. I’m exhausted. My life is happening to me. I don’t wanna be doing this. He should be different.

My kids should be different. They should listen to me. This is also exhausting and unfair. I want you to be willing to be wrong about that, wrong about all of it and tell yourself, actually, I’ve been wrong about all of this and I want to be wrong because I want to feel more empowered for my sake. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. I want to be married to this man. I want to be living in this home and I want to have the kids that I have taking care of the home, taking care of the kids bedtime routine. I got this, I’m exhausted, but let’s go. This is hard. It’s harder than I thought. And that’s okay. Hard isn’t bad. I can do hard. When you shift your mindset and kind of be your own hype girl, pump yourself up. It is everything. It makes such a difference in your attitude and your experience about life.

I think about the Navy Seals often. I don’t know why big David Goggins fan, have you read his book? Do you follow him? I know very little about the military and about the Navy Seals, but I like to think about how tough they are and how they’re not whining. Like for me, this might not be true for you, but for me, when I’m in self-pity, it’s a lot of whining. I’m like whining to myself like, poor me, this isn’t fair. No one’s coming to help me. I should have more help. Whah like, that’s kind of what’s going on in my mind, even though I might not be saying it that way. That’s really what the experience is. And what I do is I just imagine a Navy seal getting his butt kicked and working harder to get stronger. That’s who I want to be in motherhood or Simone Biles or pick your sport and pick someone excelling in that area.

It doesn’t mean it’s not hard, of course it’s hard, but that’s what we’re signing up for. Like I wanna be a mom because the alternative isn’t that motherhood’s easy, the alternative isn’t that my kids just magically listen to me and everything’s just so easy. That’s not the alternative. The alternative is that I’m not a mom and I don’t have my kids and I don’t have any of this. So if those are the options, like count me in, I’m not gonna waste my wishes and my prayers and my wants on changing their agency. I truly believe that every single day is a personal development lesson waiting for all of us. Like do you take advantage of it? Every single night during bedtime routine, there’s an opportunity for you to get stronger, for you to feel more empowered. You’re still gonna be tired, but that’s the point.

Instead of being tired and angry, it’s tired and inspired, it’s tired and empowered. It’s tired and calm. You get to pick tired and what? Don’t do tired and self-pity. Don’t do tired and angry, do tired, and something more helpful. And of course this is just one example, but as I’ve illustrated throughout this podcast, you can absolutely feel self-pity from the victim mentality in any area of motherhood and of your life. It’s when you feel like you’re stuck, there’s no options. You have to be doing what you’re doing and you don’t wanna be, you are not stuck. There are always options. Tell yourself that. Train your brain. Do this for your own sake because as we’ve all heard, the saying goes, no one is coming. And that’s the best news because it gives you an opportunity to grow. It doesn’t mean you don’t ask for help, big, big fan of asking for help, but I assume you’ve already done that and you’re still having a hard time.

Work on your mindset. Go from this is happening to me to I am figuring this out. This is the life that I want to be living. Everything that I am doing is something I want to be doing. Is it harder than I thought? Sure is. Let’s go. This is my flavor of heart. This is what I wanna be doing with my life. I can’t tell you how often, probably daily just with littles, especially at nighttime, that I use these mindsets. Like my head hits the pillow and I’m like, whew, we did it, girl. I’m giving myself some praise, some validation. You know, that’s not coming from my kids, it’s not coming from my spouse, it’s coming from me. So I don’t need it from them. I’m so proud of myself and not because I did it perfect just because I’m trying and I’m showing up.

So reframe your thoughts. Catch yourself thinking the victim mentality. Catch yourself feeling self-pity and reframe that thought into an empowering thought that shows you, you can figure it out. You’re doing exactly what you wanna be doing. Your life is happening for you. You can come up with solutions you haven’t yet thought of. I was just coaching someone on this in the Membership about weight loss. She was feeling stuck like it’s not possible for her. And kind of in a little bit of self pity victim mentality around her body and weight. And I told her, every single problem has a solution. You my friend, can lose this weight. You’ve got to believe it and you’ve got to desire it. You’ve gotta kick that self pity out the door.

You are empowered and in charge of your life. No one else is coming and it’s the best news ever. When you shift into empowerment, that’s when you create a life so much better than you ever imagined. Whether it’s with your weight, your marriage, your home, your kids, your goals, your work. Anything that your heart desires is possible. It is not possible from feeling sorry for yourself. It is not possible from the victim mentality. So all the more reason to shift out of it, notice it, reframe it. Feel capable for you my friend. You got this.

Thank you for being here and listening.Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.