The Self-Doubt Habit in Parenting

One of the clearest memories I have from early childhood is of me finding my mom sobbing in the utility closet of our bungalow basement. I was barely five years old, but I can still remember how small her body looked in that moment as she lay curled in the fetal position next to the water heater—and how big her emotional dysregulation felt.

I also remember how I instinctively went to comfort her. Even at this young age, I knew she desperately needed my reassurance. I didn’t know that she was struggling under a crumbling pile of self-doubt, or that it was borne out of significant attachment trauma. But I could’ve told you that my mommy was really sad, and that I was going to help her feel better.

Cue the career in therapy—and years of my own therapy, which helped me uncover why I’d spent much of my childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood feeling responsible for everyone around me: I’d been parentified as a child.

Eventually, my mom went to therapy too, and she made leaps and bounds in healing her trauma, finally learning to trust and take care of herself. When she turned 60, she even became a therapist.
But even though my family eventually healed, I still can’t help but wonder what life might’ve been like if someone had helped my mother—and me—deal with the crushing self-doubt much earlier.
Cue the career writing books for parents—a snippet of which you’re about to read. I hope this selection, on dealing with self-doubt, gives you and your clients some of the clarity, hope, and courage I wish someone had slipped under the closet door to my sweet mama so many years ago.

How to Deal with a Self-Doubt Habit

We all doubt ourselves at times. Life is too messy and complex to always believe in ourselves and our perspectives, choices, and desires. Plus, having moments of self-doubt is essential to being a connected parent. Our children need us to have navigated self-doubt enough that we’ve gained the skills necessary to help them when it visits them.

But a self-doubt habit is another thing entirely. When we constantly or consistently doubt ourselves, we’re not able to be sturdy and reliable for our children. If we don’t trust ourselves, how can we expect them to trust us?

There are many signs of a self-doubt habit, like mostly or always crowd-sourcing decisions out of fear of messing up, rarely or never feeling confident in our choices or ideas, often second-guessing everything we do with a large helping of panic, frequent internal or external negative self-talk, quickly changing our minds when someone doesn’t agree with us, regularly locking onto advice without first consulting our own feelings about an issue, and frequently working overtime to be liked by other people instead of working to be known.

Distorted Mirrors: The Roots of Self-Doubt

We all need positive relational mirrors in our lives, people who can accurately reflect our worthiness and capability back to us so we can believe in ourselves. When our early caregivers are accurate mirrors for us, they respond to our joy with delight, to our mistakes with support, and to our tenderness and emotions with calm empathy.

If our caregivers couldn’t relate to us in those ways, the reflections we saw of ourselves were distorted, especially if our caregivers were cruel, critical, or overly harsh with us.

Without accurate mirroring from childhood caregivers, we were denied an essential ingredient for believing in ourselves. Chronic self-doubt is an internal model developed as a result of insecure attachment experiences in childhood. Human children need to know that they’re seen, heard, understood, and validated in their internal experiences and external presence.

If we constantly question our perspectives, choices, and worthiness to belong, we should look back and acknowledge that our childhood experiences made it hard for us to trust ourselves and feel worthy.

Perhaps our caregivers couldn’t give us the validation and confidence we needed because they were knee-deep in their own insecurities. Or maybe they were overly critical or harsh with us because they had an ingrained control habit. Perhaps our parents were so busy trying to launch our family out of poverty that they had little or no energy left to respond to our emotional needs. Maybe our parents were so wounded that they were threatened by us and denied our capacity or worthiness in order to feel better about themselves.

Whatever the reason, we need to be honest with ourselves about the nature of those early relationships and how they impacted our self-confidence. Then we need to find people in our lives who can help us feel encouraged, validated, and understood, and then work to learn how to offer those same things to ourselves. We’re editing our inner voices by changing the external voices we hold inside.

We don’t get to decide what kind of caregiving we receive in childhood, but we do get to decide whether we hold onto the messages we received about ourselves as a result.

How Our Self-Doubt Habits Affect Our Children

When we chronically doubt ourselves, it makes it far harder for our children to trust in our reliability. If we’re stuck in a pattern of denying our worthiness or second-guessing our desires or boundaries, our children can’t rest in our presence or rely on us to offer them confidence in times when they feel wobbly or unsure.

This habit compromises our ability to show our children that we can handle what they feel, because we’re clearly struggling to handle what we feel. We haven’t yet learned how to shut down shame gremlins, and are instead entertaining them in our sense of ourselves.

It also compromises our ability to show our children that we accept them for their full, authentic selves. Why? Because if we can’t accept our full, authentic selves, it makes it much harder for them to trust that we can accept theirs. Even if we can.

Become Your Own BFF

The opposite of self-doubt is self-assurance. Feeling self-assured is, of course, easier said than done when we’ve spent many years questioning ourselves. Luckily there are things we can do to change the tides in our relationships with ourselves in the same way we can change the tides in any relationship we care about. The two most important aspects to work on are how we relate to ourselves and our decision-making processes.

One of the most profound ways we can deal with our self-doubt is to actively change the way that we relate to ourselves. This happens in two ways: the way we treat our bodies and the way we talk to ourselves (in our heads and out loud).

If no one responded to your needs with nurture or spoke compassionately to you growing up, then making these changes might feel extra cheesy at first. You had to adapt to a world without close, compassionate responses, which means that you also had to tell yourself a story about not wanting or needing that type of care. This means you’ll probably cringe now when a therapist tells you to start treating yourself with compassion. That’s to be expected, but please don’t let it derail you. This is one of the most important things you can do for your children.

When we develop a habit of showing ourselves respect and care by speaking to ourselves with compassion, it changes us. We become calmer and more receptive, and less fragile, prickly, and defensive in our relationships with our children.

When we change our self-talk, we tend to take better care of ourselves because we’re speaking to ourselves with kindness. There are three forms of positive self-talk: affirmations, reassurance, and encouragement. Affirmations involve saying positive things to ourselves about who we are (“You’re an incredibly caring human”) and about what we do (“You work so hard and show up so fully”).

Reassurance means responding to feelings of tenderness or insecurity with gentle care and understanding (“It makes sense you’re feeling this way, but it’s not true about who you are or what you’re capable of”). And encouragement means reminding ourselves that we’re capable of doing things, even when we’re worried or uncertain. It’s a beautiful way to decrease self-doubt.

Practicing Self-Care

The more we treat ourselves with kindness and care, the more we trust ourselves. Self-doubt is, in essence, a lack of trust in ourselves, so when we become our own personal trustworthy caretakers, it becomes much easier to kick a self-doubt habit and replace it with a self-trust habit. One way to do this is to start with the small stuff and work your way up. It can look like brushing your teeth or taking showers, getting ample rest, nutrition, and sunlight, moving your body in ways that help you feel strong and alive, filling your mind with things that give you hope and inspiration, like great art, film, and novels, letting go of people who don’t treat you well, making a budget for financial well-being, or creating art in whatever form suits your fancy.

The steps you take to show your body and soul that you matter to you will help you be a better ally to yourself and clearer on what you feel, need, and want. All things that will make it easier to give your children the five gifts of a secure parent.

Decision Precision

One of the painful parts of being in a self-doubt habit is the constant feeling of indecision. And if you’ve struggled to trust yourself, I’m guessing you struggle to understand how other people seem to make decisions quickly and with little emotional fanfare. Let’s dig into how to make a confident decision when you’ve spent years in decision paralysis.

I find it relevant that the prefix of the word “decide” means “to cut off.” The process of choosing something always involves not choosing something else. Whether we have strong self-trust or we struggle with self-doubt, decisions, especially big ones, involve a fair amount of loss.

I share this because I think self-assurance can feel impossible to grasp when you’ve been shrouded in a cloud of self-doubt for a long time. The expectation is that when you stop doubting yourself, you’ll feel completely confident in your choices without any uncertainty or doubt. But the reality is that no one gets to know the future before they make a decision. We learn about the impact of our choices in hindsight, not foresight.

If you’ve spent years in a self-doubt spiral, healing will look like making choices even though they might be wrong or lead to negative outcomes, not knowing for certain that all the choices you make are right. The goal is to learn how to make choices that feel right for you and let fate handle the rest. Sometimes the things you choose will be fantastic, and other times they’ll bite you in the butt.

Finding out what choice feels right for you is about being clear on who you are and what you’re about. For instance, if you’re asked to join a committee for the local sewage group, make sure your passion lies in waste management. If not, it’s okay that you’re not interested. Sure, you might regret saying no later on if you find out that you could have helped to stop a major toxic spill later that year, but it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It just means that something bad happened that you had no control over.

Compassionate hindsight is also a part of being self-assured. Being able to look back at a decision we made, understand why we made that decision, and honor that it was our best choice at the time. We’re much more likely to learn and grow from our past mistakes if we can look at them with compassion.

Is It Truly Self-Doubt?

So many of us have learned painfully that our talents, capacity, lovability, sparkle, and shine are threats to the deeply insecure people in our lives. This “lesson” is especially disorienting when the people we learn it from are attachment figures in our lives, including our parents, siblings, friends, and sweethearts. We might not be struggling with self-doubt but with finding people who can handle our self-assurance.

Self-doubt can be a masking strategy that keeps us looking less threatening to people with narcissistic wounds. When important people in our lives feel threatened by our freedom or confidence, we forgo those precious gifts to preserve the relationships and avoid retribution.
When we’re raising our children, it’s our job to reclaim our self-alliance and let go of relationships that require us to shrink ourselves. If we don’t, our children will learn to shrink themselves too. Self-doubt is learned and inherited, not innate.

If people dislike your health, success, clear vision, ability to be silly and fun, capacity to build relationships, generosity, creativity, or whatever other jewels you possess, remember that the problem isn’t your sunshine; it’s their sensitivity to the sun.

If you’re struggling with compassionate self-talk, here are some scripts you can use.

• “It’s sad that no one was able to help me feel confident in myself as a child, but it doesn’t mean I’m not capable of learning how to feel confident in myself now.”
• “It’s not possible to know the future, but I can learn to know myself and make my best guesses by listening closely when I am faced with a decision.”
• “Just because someone disagrees with me doesn’t mean they’re right about what I feel or need.”
• “I’m the greatest expert on myself and can trust myself when something feels right or wrong, regardless of what other people think.”

The Deal with Dealing Onward

Learning how to avoid the goombas that get in the way of our relationships with our children is no small feat. It’s an uphill hike, and you may get blisters or lose a toenail along the way. But at the end, the breathtaking sight of a deeply positive relationship with your offspring comes into view and gives us the inspiration we need to become a regular hiker. Most importantly, it helps us gain more compassion toward ourselves.

Because of course our quest is ongoing; we’re not finished after working on ourselves for a bit. We continue to face new mountains and obstacles. Sometimes we even get lost and have to go back and rescale a mountain we’ve already climbed. But we keep going. Not only for our children but also for ourselves.

***

Excerpted from “How to Deal with Your ____ So Your Kids Don’t Have To” by Eli Harwood, published by Blue Star Press, Sasquatch Books. Used with permission.