Reclaiming Beauty - Part One

Breaking the Spell of Generational Shame

I’ve been pulling on a thread for a while now. That thread is beauty. 🧶

I have a complex relationship with beauty. Not in a million years would I have thought my uncomfortable feelings about clothing, style, makeup, and being seen and adored were related to the thread I’m about to explore with you.

But, looking back, I see it. In pulling on this thread, I realised once again that self-reflection is the most important work we can do, and we have no idea where or how powerfully it will lead us.

It all started with an astrological tarot reading. I booked this appointment because I felt like a little lost lamb. I was constantly struggling against the grain and had zero idea who I was, what I wanted, or where I was going. I felt like I’d woken up in someone else’s life and was trying to work out the next step (having a child often does that to you).

The tarot cards, combined with the stars, pinpointed my lack of self-compassion as the roadblock of all roadblocks in my life. 🚧

I pride myself on being an outwardly kind and compassionate human. But the judgements about myself in my head? If I were to voice them out loud, you might grab a straight jacket and bundle me up for a little drive to the closest asylum. You may even think they were from Lucifer himself.

How do I know this? Well, over the years, I have voiced some of these comments aloud, and the way my husband looks at me tells me everything I need to know about how true they are and how strong my programming is. At times, I’ve stared blankly back and asked him outright, “Don’t you believe that?” And he’ll respond in a way that lets me know he certainly doesn’t.

When I realised this and enquired into these thoughts, I knew they were off-base. But that didn’t stop them from ruling my life, crushing my self-worth, and ultimately grinding my business to a halt because judgment, imposter syndrome, and paralysis told me, “Who was I to X, Y, or Z?”

After this very revealing reading, my tarot reader, also an astrologer, transpersonal psychologist, Taoist and my close friend, Francis, prescribed daily self-compassion meditation and being much kinder to myself.

I started reading Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion and exploring why I was compassionate to others and contemptuous towards myself. Neff’s book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, taught me that:

“If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation. This is the opposite of oneness, interconnection, and universal love—the ultimate goal of most spiritual paths, no matter which tradition.”

Finally, I started to take notice. I hadn’t realised that by loathing myself, I wasn’t just hurting myself; I was hurting others, too. But when I did, it was my catalyst for change.

I wanted to know, how did I cultivate such a nasty inner voice? When I read Neff saying, “The disparaging running commentary they hear inside their own head is often a reflection of parental voices—sometimes passed down and replicated throughout generations”, that was my next crumb on Hansel and Gretel’s path to self-love.

Realising that the critical voices in my mind weren’t truly mine was a big wake-up call. I began to unmask their personalities and found my Nan and her daughter, my mother, living in my mind, sharing their thoughts about me with me as I grew up. It was overwhelmingly them who I heard when I looked in the mirror to criticise myself. 🪞

As I pulled on this thread of self-contempt (it was much more than a “lack of self-compassion”), I sat up in bed at night devouring books to help me understand how to extricate them from my head.

This was—and continues to be—one of the most profound, yet shameful periods of my life. I found myself paralysed in a paradox. I felt immense guilt even picking up a book that hinted that my parents may have flaws. Because raising children is HARD, and I knew they did their very best. And I also know their parents had flaws, too. As did their parents. And theirs…

I ruminated on: “But it’s not their fault” versus “But I need to shift this programming” for months—years even. But, as Michael Tsarion says in his brilliant book, Dragon Mother (yep, there’s another title that invoked more shame):

“…personal trauma derives from parents who probably experienced trauma from their parents who were also traumatized by theirs. This vicious cycle of pain, grief, anger and defilement has a very long etiology. This is why the problem of present personal trauma cannot be considered independently of ancient collective trauma.”

Michael Tsarion, Dragon Mother: A New Look at the Female Psyche

I had many late-night, emotional conversations with Brendan about the guilt and shame I felt in working with this issue. In our society, a woman’s relationship with her mother is a sacred cow. It’s off-limits and not supposed to be questioned, but I had to go there and heal it somehow. I set out—and continue—to look at my experience from a daughter’s perspective, rather than demonise my mother’s actions or experiences.

Exploring this openly in a public environment—like I am now—amplified my fear. But I felt if I could help even one woman feel like she wasn’t alone, that it was necessary to do so.

Katherine Fabrizio helped me realise that feeling guilty doesn’t necessarily make you guilty.

Shame thrives in secrecy but heals when it is brought into the light of day. Where there’s no more secret, shame dissolves. Finding a community of others who are struggling with the same thing, whatever it may be, normalizes the struggle, helping to lift the stigma. When shame is countered with witnessing, validation, and empathy, it cannot survive.¹

Alongside authors Lindsay Gibson, Karen C.L. Anderson, Kelly McDaniel and Ramani Durvasula, Katherine was instrumental in helping me pull on the deepest programming I’ve ever unwound. 🧶

I’d built my personality and life on a foundation of lies and untruths. I had to decide whether to build up the house of cards or bravely knock it down. And so, I found myself at a crossroads with two choices:

1. Keep loathing myself to remain loyal to my parents (and their generational line), or

2. Address this programming and choose to live my life.

I chose option two and I can’t express how hard it continues to be to choose to live my life. The more I chip away at the programming that haunts me, the more guilt and shame I unravel. All my life, I’ve been so motivated to walk on eggshells and take care of my mum that many times I didn’t even consider whether I wanted to do something. Every decision was about whether or not I should.²

She has done the same with her mother.

Somewhere along the line, we both made an unconscious agreement that we were responsible for our Mother’s emotional needs. But we are meant to stand separate, whole, on our two feet.

I was 39 years old when I realised my life was mine to live. That reality was shocking for me to process. It might sound crazy to you that I didn’t realise that—as it was for my husband, who was astounded I didn’t realise my life was my own. And, even still, it’s not easy to stop betraying myself by putting her needs before mine.

I’m still wracked with guilty thoughts. I constantly remind myself with love, “I may feel guilt, but I’m not guilty.” Katherine reminds me:

“You only know life with Mom in it, so you don’t fully trust that life will go on if you live more independently. And that leads to the “crazy” part. Since your relationship has been defined by your constant struggle to make Mom okay, you may, at the unconscious level, feel responsible for keeping your mother alive.”

This explains why I have crazy thoughts like, “What if she dies and it’s my fault? I could never forgive myself.” But, even in this, I’m not alone.

“Underneath every Good Daughter’s reluctance to change her relationship with her mother—whether she’s struggling to stand up for herself, cut off contact, or simply tell her mother something she knows Mom isn’t going to like—is one terrifying question: “What if I [fill in the blank] . . . and my mother DIES???”³

Now, as I was writing this, I took a lunch break and met my husband in the kitchen. I shared with him what I’m writing about and my deepest fear in doing so (written above). He once again looked at me—in that way—with disbelief from his clear, Mother-Wound-free place and said, “Of course it wouldn’t be your fault”.

While most people go through this process of becoming in their late teens or early twenties, extracting myself to become a human who is independent of her mother is the hardest hurdle I’ve faced.

But, as Katherine Fabrizio says, “When you are willing to face the short-term pain of disappointing your mother and asserting what you want or don’t want, you set the stage to make long-term change.”

You’ve spent much of your life so far with one foot in the camp of growing up and the other in the camp of taking care of Mom. In this way, you’ve been attempting to respond to two sets of competing needs. You’ve worked diligently, walking a fine line, to avoid feeling guilty while still attempting to have a life—just one that won’t threaten Mom. To walk this fine line, you may have resorted to doing things behind her back, hiding things from her, or lying—to spare her feelings, which of course, made you feel awful. Trapped, boxed in, choosing the lesser of two evils, you felt and may still feel responsible for Mom’s happiness.

Katherine Fabrizio, Good Daughter Syndrome

When diving into my psyche and reprogramming my beliefs, I needed to infuse my being with different approaches, ideas, and methods to help me understand why I felt so lost, self-loathing, and impotent in my life. Kelly McDaniel was pivotal in diffusing the shame I felt and having me understand where my lack of self-compassion stems from. She warned me that in reading her book, Mother Hunger, that by reading it, I may vacillate between feeling angry with my mother and feeling like I’m betraying her.⁴

“As a child, if essential elements of maternal nurturance and protection were missing, you didn’t stop loving your mother—you simply didn’t learn to love yourself.”

And this is where I found myself. In a place where I couldn’t fully live my own life, for fear of hurting my mum. And at the same time in a place where I seemed to hurt her no matter what I did or said. It was a constant state of guilt.

As was Fabrizio, who told me, “Escaping the Guilt Trap means knowing with certainty that you can care about your mother without taking on her emotions as if they were your own. Full stop.”

So these are the seas that I’ve been navigating. They’re choppy. Filled with sharks. And deep, dark water with no end.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, how on earth does this all relate back to beauty? Without the context I now have, I might have said the same thing.

This article is getting a little longer than I’d planned, so next week, in part two, I’ll share how diving into my self-loathing and Mother Wound compelled me to pull on the next thread I pulled on, which was my acceptance—and later, rejection—of living an overwhelmed, overworked, and under joyed life.

My commitment to exploring the uncomfortable continues to reward me by making life richer. And I’m glad you’re alongside me diving into the deep waters of guilt, shame, and programming that holds many of us back.

---

Subscribe now to get Part Two of Reclaiming Beauty in your inbox…

We are each eternal mothers and fathers bearing scars of the past but also the means of healing them.

Michael Tsarion, Dragon Mother: A New Look at the Female Psyche

Footnotes

1. Katherine Fabrizio, Good Daughter Syndrome

2. ibid

3. ibid

4. Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger