No bad mothers: answering Autistic mother guilt

CONTENT WARNING: This post discusses self injury, emotional dysregulation and suicidal thinking. If these discussions may dysregulate you, please consider navigating away until you are able to read them safely, with support. I will link to support and counseling services at the end of the article.

“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.” Maya Angelou

In April of this year, I am celebrating 5 years of remission from self-harming behaviour. 

I am incredibly proud of this milestone because it is hard-won. I have worked my ass off, often with not enough help, to achieve this. There have been times when it didn’t seem possible that I would ever have the peace I have now. 

Previous to this, during times of profound emotional distress and overload, I would hurt myself to try to feel better. It didn’t help, but it was the best tool I had at the time, and I’ve set it down now that I have other, better tools. 

To get here, I’ve put in an enormous amount of therapy hours; let go of unhelpful people and worked relentlessly to better my external conditions; turned up to almost a full year of a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy group; persisted with medication adjustments until I found the sweet spot; threw myself into self-education; built a supportive community around my child and myself, and pursued that even when doors closed to me; navigated the NDIS for us both and plugged into support services; found work I love; and found more community support for my child and myself.

It hasn’t been easy, or brief. It hasn’t been one thing, either - there’s been no magic bullet or cure-all. 

One thing I’ve done in therapy that I’ll focus on today: I’ve become skillful in resisting thinking patterns that harmed me immensely. One of the thinking patterns I’ve worked to let go of is the sticky toxic mess that is the phenomenon of Mother Guilt. It’s not all the way gone, but it’s about 85 percent improved. 

Here, I want to explore why Mother Guilt is worse for Autistic women: how it magnifies on the basis of adverse conditions I was always more likely to experience due to inaccessibility and how it is influenced by my Autistic tendency towards ‘black and white thinking’. I’ll also discuss ways out of it.

I see Mother Guilt in every Autistic mother I meet

As a Disability Advocate, I am honoured to be received most days into the innermost worlds of Neurodivergent mothers. I hear their view of their lives, and it is often both highly perceptive, and rife with distress. I feel their distress - because it once was mine, too (and sometimes still is).

Despite being such stunning advocates for themselves and their children, all of them - without exception - tell me at some point that they see themselves as a Bad Mother. Underneath their mask is a deep conviction that the harms their families are enduring at the hands of our ableist society are somehow their fault.

This is clearly untrue, but it doesn’t matter. Those feelings shout at them, scream at them, attack them as they try to parent. 

Mother guilt in all mothers is toxic. But in Autistic mothers, without the right support, it can be deadly. I really believe it is louder, more persistent, and much more painful.

But first - what is ‘mother guilt’ and where does it come from?

Mother Guilt and Mother Blaming 

Mother guilt is the pervasive feeling experienced by women, that they are bad mothers, and getting it wrong. Their choices, their behaviours, their circumstances - and those of their children - are their fault. 

It is mother specific. I’ve never encountered it in men to the same depth and frequency.

Nothing in the world matters more to the average mother than her child. I know I’d step in front of a moving bus for my kid, without a pause - and so, feeling that we are failing the person we love most in the world, is searingly painful. 

Mother guilt is intense. If you’ve experienced it, you know. It is unrelenting, unforgiving, and loud. The sense of despair one feels over even the smallest decision can be profound. Big or little - it’s all the same.

Drinking a cup of coffee alone and saying no to reading a book for five minutes? Bad mother. Choosing not to co-sleep, for your mental health? Bad mother. Putting your child into daycare because you’re not coping? Bad mother. Losing your temper and raising your voice? Bad mother. Letting your kid have your phone so you can have an uninterrupted conversation with a friend? Bad mother. Enjoying paid employment? Bad mother. Homeless? Shut out from services? Bad mother. 

I remember these spirals and how much it hurt to be in them. I cried in the shower a lot, and after he was asleep. Mother guilt and deep shame was the key trigger for self-harm, which I hid in places he would never see. I felt like a bad mother for being so upset, for hurting myself. I felt like a bad mother for feeling like a bad mother. It never ended.

 All I wanted was to be good. 

Of course, I had no idea what ‘good’ was - the standard is amorphous, undefined. I didn’t know any mothers who knew they were good and could model this confidence to me. 

Mothers do not feel this way naturally, and it does not arrive in us from nowhere. 

Mother guilt is a product of the social phenomenon of mother blaming. 

Mother blaming is the dominant way in which our society relates to us at every level. It is the tendency to attribute all struggles a child may have to their mother and a deep belief that if something has gone wrong for a kid it must be mum’s fault. 

Mother blaming comes from the media, health providers, schools, and child protection; it comes from co-parents, family members, community services; child psychologists, disability support workers, friends, and our own parents. Sometimes it comes from our children themselves when they’ve been exposed to these messages for long enough. Our children learn to blame us, too - and this can be the most painful of all when it comes.

Mother Blaming is a studied phenomenon

Dr Debra Jackson and Judy Mannix published a brilliant study in 2004 that examined women’s experiences of mother blaming by health providers. A study led by women’s first-person narratives, it showed just how harmful this practice is to us. 

In this study they found that women are heavily burdened by this messaging:

Mother blaming has been identified as a pervasive and serious problem and it is known that the professional literature has strong and entrenched mother-blaming messages. Using a feminist approach, this paper explores mother blaming as it has been experienced by a group of mothers themselves. Analysis of narrative exposes mother blaming as a burden that complicates the already-complex responsibilities that comprise mothering. Health providers are among those identified by women as being particularly likely to attribute problems with (even grown) children to maternal fault.

(D. Jackson and J. Mannix, 2004, International Journal of Nursing Practice, 2004).

What I love about this study is that it identifies the way that mother blaming makes an already difficult job far harder. When women absorb and internalize this messaging, it can become a tarry mantra that dogs them day in and out. 

Mother blaming denies structuralism - and is everywhere

Mother blaming conveniently avoids the reality that the fabric of our lives is determined, largely, at the policy and cultural level - and that individual women are living lives shaped by these things, as are their children. 

A concrete example of this is the way that poverty is written into existence by policy-makers and legislators. The insufficiency of Newstart and Jobseeker, and the ridiculous restrictions placed on mothers on parenting payments and Disability support pensions create poverty. The way that these systems require incredible levels of executive function to navigate and access specifically creates poverty in Neurodivergent mothers.

Poverty happens because services are impossible to access and sparse; poverty happens because of bad decisions, higher up. A woman who can’t find her keys is going to struggle with filling forms and remembering appointments, and that situation spirals very quickly. Suddenly cupboards are empty of food, rent piles up, families are evicted, and electricity is cut off. 

None of it is inevitable, though people will tell you it is. I find that thinking from people in government and services incredibly lazy. Here is the kicker though: it is cheaper to blame Disabled mums for the ways their lives spiral out of control than to accept that the problem is systemic. 

Autistic Mums have it worse and blame themselves for it

We need to talk about Mother Blaming in the context of mothering as an Autistic person - it is just not the same as non-Autistic mothering. 

Neurodivergent mothers are much more likely to experience adverse circumstances, as are women with psychosocial disabilities in general.

We are over-represented in statistics around poverty, institutionalisation, child removal, substance abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, and we are more likely to be the victims of crime. We are more likely to be excluded from the community, from services, schools, and health care.

This doesn’t change when we become parents - in fact, it worsens. None of this is caused by having a Disability - it is caused by how inaccessible every system around us is. There is little understanding of our invisible access needs, and there’s little understanding at a policy or practice level of the trauma and fallout for us of this lack of access.

What this means for us, is that we experience worse outcomes - and we blame ourselves for this. 

The role of Black and White Thinking and ‘Strong thoughts’ in Autistic Mums

Autistic people can think in absolute categories. Not always - but often, and how this works for us is a lot more complicated than Neurotypical people understand. 

Black-and-white thinking is said by many in psychology to be a part of the way we can sort the world in our heads. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it can be a heavy advantage in many contexts (Greta Thunberg, anyone?). It can underpin social justice work, and reform - work for which you must be guided by a strong sense of purpose and morality.

Black and White Thinking, or Splitting, is a term coined by psychotherapist Ronald Fairbairn, who practiced psychotherapy and taught in the field from the 1930s to the 1950s. He was interested in Object Relations, and like all psychotherapists, had problematic ideas about Neurodivergent people - as well as overturning many problematic ideas, too. 

The basic idea is that when we think in black and whites, we reduce things to either good or bad. In or out. Correct or incorrect. 

I want to push against the idea that all Autistic people do this always, in all situations. I’m not sure that’s actually true. 

I have seen Autistics around me practice incredibly flexible, adaptive thinking, and in particular, I have seen Autistic mothers do this. I believe the way that Autistic mothers adapt so well is because we are often forced to - because more than other mothers, we find ourselves in survival conditions with our kids.

Based on lived experience, I can say though that we tend to have very strong thoughts and definite ideas. We also tend towards emotional dysregulation, which can intensify these strong thoughts, which influence our feelings. Almost all of us carry substantial trauma too, and this further complicates matters. 

So when a thought like “I am a bad mother” works it’s way into us (and this begins from our birth, when we begin to learn about gender roles - see the brilliant Dr Cordelia Fine on this point) it can be loud. It can also feel very strong - or absolute. 

For those of us who have grown up being told quite loudly that how we behave is deeply wrong, it stands to reason that we would feel this way about our parenting too. We experience far more shaming and correction than the non Autistic mother, across her lifespan, and it begins in childhood. This too, we carry with us when we become parents.

It’s just so complex, how this plays out. This absolutism about bad mothering is not just a product of the Autistic mind in my view - it is absolutely encouraged by our environment, and because of how deeply we feel, and how strongly we think, we tend to be more internally punished by it. 

We are much more heavily scrutinised in all of our systems when we become parents, diagnosed or not, so the thoughts and feelings are reinforced in us.

So we’ve described the problem…how do we get ourselves to some kind of safety?

There must be some kind of way out of here: on the role of rage, love, and pride

I am a fan of saying to my clients “don’t individualise a structural problem”. I believe this, and radical solidarity with other Autistic mothers is the way out of toxic mother guilt for us.

Part of my work practice is to empower women to understand that the problem is not them but a systemic lack of support. There is nothing we have done to create our conditions - but with the help of Advocates and services, we can find ways out.

Anger is a great way of externalising what you’ve always been told is your fault as a Mum. Please note, I’m not suggesting that it’s a good idea to get angry with your service providers - it’s a really bad idea, and I’ll cover this in a separate post sometime. 

However, anger at the system that is victimising you and your children is a stunningly effective daily practice in combatting mother guilt. 

In some ways, I think of it as like exiting the Matrix.

What if I told you, that every bad thing you think about yourself as a mother, was put there by someone else? What if I told you, that you didn’t have to feel that way? What if I told you that there’s a difference between accountability as a mother (which is important) and toxic shame?

And what if we replaced this shame with rage? What if we replaced it with love for other mothers, and finally - yourself?

One comes easier than the other does, I have found. When I began to bear witness to myself with the same compassion and tenderness that I was extending to other mothers, I began to feel much more gentle towards myself. 

I also felt much more incandescent, gripping fury at the places I had found myself due to unmet needs. It doesn't have to be this way, you see. We can redesign the world - co-design it. 

I’m getting goosebumps as I write these words, because for me, they have been life saving thoughts. 

When I began to turn my mind (a concept from DBT!) towards the thought that my bad feelings about myself were a product of social conditioning, I began to feel deep rage. It was hot and burning, and it has lit a fire in me that has made me reach outside of myself to connect to better, healthier things.

Rage at how I’ve been treated. Rage at the rights I’ve been denied. Rage at the way society locks us out, and locks us in to poverty, DV, and early death. Rage at what I was seeing play out in the lives of ND mothers around me.

Again, I’m not saying this rage is appropriate in a paediatrician appointment. It’s not. 

But when we convene with other mothers, and strategise change, it is the most vital tool we have to lift ourselves up into something transformative: love for community, and ourselves.

I can say with absolute certainty that I love every member of the community of ND mothers I have found myself in. I see their strength, capacity, work and wit. I see their diligence and their analysis, their accountability and creativity. I see their survival, and I want them to thrive with me.

Rage and love, when combined over time, effectively shut down Mother Guilt and transform into the most precious trait we can hold as Disabled mothers: Pride.

Laura Hershey, a well known Disability Rights Activist, wrote the famous poem Proud by Practicing, and one of the powers of this poem is the way it encourages us to externalise our anger and point it back to where it has come from: the ableist systems around us. 

I truly believe that this is the way we move forwards from mother guilt. Rage, love, and finally - pride. Because you cannot hate and harm someone you are angry for, who you love and are proud of. 

I hope today, if you are reading this, you can begin to find the anger in yourself at who you have been taught you are - a bad mother - and challenge it. You are more than this, and in fact, you are not this at all.

Out there, in the world, waits a community of women who will fight alongside you as you develop and hone this anger, and lean into it. It is a tool that will propel you, and together, using these three tools - rage, love, and pride - we can begin to re-shape the world so it is much, much fairer.

Join us. 

If you need support you can contact Lifeline:

https://www.lifeline.org.au/

Sane Australia https://www.sane.org/counselling-support

And Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380