(00:00) your relationship as a mother with your child is the best shot at intimacy that you have in this lifetime I will die on that hill right this is it and you have 18 Precious Years with this human in these developmental moments right so it’s like a blip in your lifescape and you have arguably the rest of your life to micromanage your space and your household however you see fit hi and welcome back to Reclamation radio I am Dr Kelly Brogan and I’m here to drop a hot take on parents telling their children to clean their room I have
(00:51) become obsessed with observing how often especially mothers feel entitled to command and micromanage their children’s space their own rooms and I have been this mother so in my master class called victimless mothering I reveal many many many humbling ways in which I was able to see the shadow of my holistic Mama spiritually evolved cycle breaking you know greenwashing of the conditional love access and control and fear-based behavior that I and so many of us were marinating in as kids right so I smoke out my own Tendencies and one
(01:44) of the ways that I was able to see I was micromanaging my children was in telling them how to eat how much to eat and also when to clean the room and uh really nagging them around um that being necessary okay so this was years ago I can barely relate to it at this point I want to tell you about a little social experiment and none of what I am saying here is to suggests that I’m doing it better than somebody else or that I’m even a better version of myself as a mom today than I was before it’s just almost Delight of the reveal right
(02:23) like oh here’s another way that we have taken the bait of this reflexive you know unconsidered habit right this way of being that’s just it’s not as fun and it doesn’t allow us to offer our children or ourselves the ultimate experience that I think we’re all longing for which is to feel like we’re on the same damn team to feel like we’re on the same team so your relationship as a mother with your child is the best shot at intimacy that you have in this lifetime I will die on that hill right this is it and you have
(03:12) 18 Precious Years with this human in these developmental moments right so it’s like a blip in your lifescape and you have arguably the rest of your life to micromanage your space and your household however you see fit but what an amazing opportunity while you have them in your space to look at the covert intentions behind the ways in which you are seemingly helping your children to become better citizens right the ways in which you are training them to be respectful and orderly the ways in which you are expecting compliance and
(03:58) obedience under the guise of of you know pitching into the family and supporting you right so I have learned thank goodness through my experience with family constellation that the energy and the giving is meant to flow from parent to child the only thing that a child owes their parent and I’m going to just speak about mothers you know the only thing that a child owes their mother is gratitude for life the end all of the giving otherwise goes from mother to child from parent to child and that child pays it forward in
(04:40) the world and through their own children so we have this quite inverted and it is the source of a lot of parentified childhoods right where the child then takes on the role of the counselor the therapist the spouse right we have things called emotional incest where the child feels that they are responsible for the mother’s unmet intimacy sometimes erotic and sensual needs and that the child is fundamentally the regulator of this mother who herself was likely an unmothered daughter right so it gets handed down in this way but the truth is
(05:25) that order comes when parents give to children I had a very humbling reminder of this at a recent birthday like my one of my recent birthdays where you know my daughters know that I have a words of affirmation love language and actually I feel like I am expanding beyond that at this point because I’ve really experienced some of the hollow of words of affirmation and I’m really getting way more into acts of service and gestures however my daughters typically write me extraordinary love notes and in fact I included one of them literally
(06:04) printed it with her permission in my book The reclaimed woman and on this particular birthday one of my daughters uh did not write me a card like she said she would at some point but it didn’t happen or like you know get me a gift or whatever that’s usually not something I’m expecting or consciously wanting anyway and for days after my birthday there was a part of me that felt preoccupied by the fact that I had not received this card or any equivalent you know gesture or gift and this little part of me this sweet little
(06:46) part of me that has learned Ledger what I call ledger-based love that has learned that everything needs to be transactional and that keeps account right that is like this this inner broker who is always monitoring you know how many times I’ve done this and how many times somebody else has done that this part of me even thought and this is like would be humiliating to admit if I didn’t value and honor all of my parts even thought well I’m not going to get her something for her birthday okay I am a grown ass woman and a mother
(07:27) okay and this little Girl part of me is in like playground mentality still arrested in development and I am in a family constellation training with omly centenno and we happen to have a session where we were talking about this kind of hierarchy right like the the directionality of this flow of giving and I snapped out of it immediately okay so it only went on this only went on for like maybe 72 hours and I snapped out of it because I remembered oh right if my daughters never give me a thing never acknowledge any aspect right like they
(08:09) never read my books they never you know do the thing like one of my requests of my daughter’s for years has been that I want to learn like a three-part Harmony and like sing a song together okay they don’t want to do that with me so there’s I like so excited when one of them wants to learn like a Tik Tock dance with me that I’ll take you know I’ll take the no I’m kiding but I was able to remember that if they never give me a thing again if they never acknowledge anything if they never thank me for the extravagant
(08:42) trips that I take them on or whatever that is 1,000% in order that is 1,00% fine and then my role and even my money has been infused now with this greater purpose is to spoil them is to bring them happiness and pleasure and to support their own free will and choice and moreover their alignment with their own yes and their own no which I have really prioritized as my you know primary ethos as a mother is you know how to recognize when you’re doing something for a covert exchange so I’ll suggest to one of my daughters like you
(09:31) know don’t do that for your sister unless you would do it if she didn’t say thank you if she didn’t appreciate it at all right which means that you’re doing it for yourself for the satisfaction and fulfillment so this uh intrinsic motivation is something that I like so many of the kids in my generation was systematically divorced from through schooling and you know family culture and the Reclamation of that intrinsic motivation that creative spark that inspiration that Divine impulse isn’t necessary when you’re not fundamentally
(10:08) disconnected from it so when we Source our regulation as mothers through control of our environment so we’re not even talking about control of our man okay it’s not the subject of this hot take uh but when we source that sense of inner ESS through the neurotic management of our environment in the home we are unlikely to be experiencing cleanliness in the home and order from the Marie condo spaces of Joy right and the pleasure that cleaning a home right the pleasure that devoting yourself to the beautification of a space that you
(10:56) live in and that you share with your loved ones can offer we are exercising an externalization of old habits of validation right so I wonder how many of you listening grew up with moms who got very anxious whenever company would come over right and needed you to keep the house clean and parents who would punish you if you didn’t clean your room or nag you and push you and push you and push you I believe the recording I recommend more than any other is my victimless mothering Workshop which is is the product of 14 years of motherhood where
(11:32) I help smoke out the reflexive control-based habits of unconscious parenting and specifically the way that conditional love hides in the well-meaning ballistic Mama Vibes of a woman like me who is so convinced that she’s ending all the abuse of her motherline by imposing rules meant to protect her kids against toxic food Tech and Pharma I have been humbled and I’ve seen some darkness in my own righteousness and in the holistic health mothering world so I want to open the conversation and I think it went really
(12:07) well so I’d love to share these recordings with you and attendee said I was pretty emotional during the call I journaled like 10 pages afterwards my husband told me I looked happier already and I feel lighter that call with Kelly felt like 10 years of therapy in 1 hour it cut through to the core so I hope you’ll check it out and commit with me to truly ending victim Consciousness and fear-based parenting in all of the places that it hides the link is in show notes several years ago I actually at the beginning of the the plandemic when
(12:38) I did this deep Shadow dive and looked at how I was embodying and expressing totalitarian and tyrannical energy that I was judging on the outside I on a dime stopped telling my children to ever clean their room I stopped telling them how or what to eat okay and they were I guess like tween at this point and their dad’s household is different where there is an expectation around cleanliness and Order and pitching in and that kind of thing what we’ve observed right across households is that my daughter’s rooms
(13:17) in my house are clean right that they like each of them has their own schedule of when they clean and I literally never say a word and they do it why because they want to experience the Delight of going from you know socks and underwear on the floor to an ordered space that intrinsic motivation is something that they will take forward you know into into their lives and so we can see that when we are commanding children to manage their own space assuming they have their own room so that we feel okay we are entraining
(14:01) their systems into not only a kind of appeasement and a disconnection from their own intrinsic motivation so we are en culturing extrinsic motivation but we are also in training in them a kind of entitlement right like when I need this to be done so that I feel okay it should be done right and and those kids can become entitled adults who imagine that somebody else owes them something right so this is ultimately all victim threads right that we are weaving in these simple and culturally normalized expectations of our children and we
(14:40) might say well I want to teach them discipline I want to teach them you know the power of an orderly room the thing is it’s for you you want it because you want it right it’s like if there’s a sock on the floor and it bothers you that there’s a sock on the floor how about pick up the sock like if it bothers you that much that their room is unkempt how about you ask them if you can go clean it which I I actually in my transition did like can I help you can I help you right and that’s to leads me to another point which is that often we
(15:16) will set forth these top down demands and expectations and we won’t ever actually take the time to like teach a man to fish kind of a thing right we won’t ever take the time time to teach them how to do what it is that we’re barking at them to do right so that would be a step in the right direction is like here’s a lesson in how one cleans a room right what does that even mean right here is how you might order right like Marie condo’s entire Enterprise is founded on the instruction to adults who have never learned how to
(15:54) do these things right so here’s how you do it maybe you could impart inspiration that way and maybe you know your child could experience the Delight of an ordered space but the most you can do is show them how it looks how to do it and then leave it up to them to see if that’s something that they want to do if it’s bothering you otherwise you can do it you can take care of it so the martyrdom that we love to cloak ourselves in at as mothers is something that I feel stems from a fundamental confusion about our
(16:37) priorities so I recorded a solo called choosing motherhood where I talk about this cataclysmic moment in my experience where I recognize that I have not prioritized my role as mother for any of the 15 years since I became one and have been prioritizing chiefly my career and then also a man who was not their father when I entered into you know my second marriage relationship and what it is to finally align with this choice that I made so many years ago instead of gaslighting myself into imagining that I would ever feel
(17:19) fulfilled in the fundamental misalignment with my Essence as a woman right so I remember the lengths that I went to this was even in in somewhat recent years but I remember the the lengths that I went to to avoid like driving my children to school like I decided that and you know they were going to a school after I had my um year and a half of unschooling experience so lovely and amazing um I enjoyed it so much and uh they decided that they would rather be in school so they went back to school and they uh were at a school that was like a good
(18:02) hour or so away and so I decided that that was so loome a commitment to sit in the car my body does not love the car but regardless to sit in the car for what you know total like three hours a day that I you know spent all of this time and energy and money like vetting drivers and sourcing car pools and all this stuff and I remember that I would uh pay my girls like $5 here and there to like help me take out the and this is as a single bum take out the garbage or do the dishes uh because I were already was at the point where I knew that it
(18:39) wouldn’t make sense for me to tell them to do those things so then I was like okay well maybe I’ll pay them to do those things but I still had this this sense of martyrdom right this self-pity that said I have to do all of this myself no fair and the truth is that I have made choices that have consequences and there is not a victim in sight right and that if I Orient as I had you know a reconnection to in this Epiphany moment in my life if I Orient towards my role as mother as a devotional practice and the opportunity of my life literal
(19:17) lifetime to experience true intimacy because never are two people more invested in the health of a relationship and never will you be uh more vulnerably asked to remain open and on the same team as this little person in front of you who might present as your op okay uh then then in this relationship so when I reoriented devotionally towards my children I stopped seeing my experience of driving them of doing the dishes of taking out the garbage I stopped seeing all of that as unit of productivity that I was wasting right so I stopped Feeling
(20:03) burdened by these mundane tasks I stopped feeling like too good for them I stopped ultimately prioritizing my work right over my role as mother and reoriented my role as mother first and it shocks me actually that I now take out the garbage I do the dishes and I drive them every they laugh about it now like that I just turned on a dime as I want to do that I drive them from a place of I get to do this for you I get to do this for you and it’s a pleasure actually it’s a pleasure actually to do this for you now my daughters are
(20:45) teenagers they are Beyond epic and amazing and so it’s easy and I understand that you know in a more challenging Dynamic this is harder to access and what an extraordinary chnal ground for your development as an alchemical vessel right as a woman than if you do have a challenging Dynamic and you can still access that devotional comportment you can still be in true service not martyrdom not that covert exchange that ultimately then you know decades later says after all I’ve done for you so when we Orient in this way we can also see
(21:28) that there are a lot of edicts and rules and things that we imagine are for our children’s benefit that it’s like our job to teach them uh whether it’s you know in my case around you know Tech or food whether it’s around sex and sexuality whether it’s around sleepovers and whatever it is you’ll be better able to feel in your body when you’re just bullshitting right like when you’re literally just making up risks and making up things so that you can have it your way right instead of adopting the tell me more you know comportment
(22:09) towards this child in front of you so that you can actually enter into their experience and give a about their experience and not default to the ways that we have kept ourselves safe as women which is I’m going to get you to see I’m going to get you to see and I’m going to manipulate and strategize so that you ultimately do what it is that I want you to do so that I feel okay so here’s two children owing us nothing but gratitude for life and here is to picking up the damn sock if you want it picked up until next time
(22:56) [Music] you [Music]
