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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]maybe trigger is the wrong word for her to use. But as a therapist myself, I might suggest that your reaction could be an indication that you have an unaddressed longing or that you feel dissatisfied with some aspect of your life, but only you can drill down and identify that feeling and the reasons behind the emotion. Some examples: you feel guilty or wonder if you should be spending more time with your kids, or should have spent more time with them. Or maybe you want to be home and with family more. Or don’t want to be home and feel bad about that. Perhaps you’re exhausted and want to dial back. Maybe you have conflicting values, as in you love financial independence and prioritize career success, but you also value leisure and travel and family time, or whatever. Maybe a family member imprinted on you that you should be a huge career success, or that people who stay home are lazy, and now you have some cognitive dissonance and are annoyed that your perception is changing. I personally work and would not do well staying home, but sometimes I wish I wasn’t ambitious because I’m so tired all the time. There are trade offs to everything. But I’m so grateful that others want to be home and be room parents and volunteer for nonprofits and be Girl Scout leaders or whatever, because that stuff is hard and important and benefits my kids and their education, and I don’t want to do that sort of thing. Also, I’d suck at it. Societies function best when everyone brings different skills and interests and temperaments to the table. [/quote]

Op - you are clearly an amazing therapist bc YES I feel all of those things! 
I wanted to want to stay home with the kids on some level - but then that made me really bored and unhappy and huge existential crisis. Also we had to make sacrifices financially (private school/ international travel and we live in nyc so col expensive) I wasn’t willing to make. So I went back to work and have had a couple jobs I looooved and felt like was making difference - but then felt like bad mother and like failed as mother for not enjoying staying home w them. Now have vv high paying job and better w/l balance (in the sense that wfh whenever I want so see kids all the time) but long long stressful days where I still have 8+h zoom and then more work on top of that, doing something I’m not passionate about 
Idk what would make me happy - but I do feel like I ‘owe’ it to my kids to work hard and thus feel bad to give up stressful job that is $$$ for other job that would be more fun. 
I guess I am envious of the mentality of being willing to leave dollars on the table for the sake of your own happiness. Like - my brain defaults to if your kids are in school why aren’t you using that time to make even more money? (Almost regardless of how much you already have) or at least do something impactful. Bc you should always be ‘striving’ in some way. Like I was brought up not to value ‘leisure’ as a way of life for even a few hours a day. And I actually can parent pretty effectively even w ft job - it just means zero of my own time. So cognitive dissonance. [/quote]

NP. So stop judging others to make yourself feel better. Us women are catty AF. You can place all types of fancy labels on it (cognitive dissonance) but what you originally said is basically that you judge women who stay at home. Why wasn’t the post just about YOU and YOUR decisions and YOUR feelings about YOUR decisions. Why feel the need to drag in an entire group of women to talk about when it’s really all about YOU?! I’m so tired of people (not just women) willing to use another group to justify/bolster/validate their image/decisions or just highlight their perceived superiority. GIVE IT A REST. AND BE HONEST! [/quote]

I dunno, I’m a SAHM to kids who are in school full time and I don’t see OP trying to justify it. Quite the opposite. She’s trying to figure out why she feels that way. If you don’t know why you’re doing something wrong it’s much harder to change course.

Some of these other commenters, though, not so much. They really are going to great lengths to justify dragging others. It‘s pretty sad. [/quote]

Op - this is why therapy is hard work. Would be a lot easier to just judge (that is what most ppl do) than do the work to a. Acknowledge that it’s coming from my own sh*t and b. Figure out and then deal with whatever that is. It’s tiring and annoying. Just judging everyone is a thousand times easier and why we are politically polarized as country also

Also to posters who are so defensive I would point out that wohms deal with judgement every day! We are used to it by now - it just less commonly historically happens the other way around. I try not to be defensive and think about what it triggers in me when ppl judge and whether in some cases they have a point about some of it [/quote]

Be honest poster here. I re-read the title of your post and combined with your response here, I get it. You actually are questioning yourself and your feelings. My bad, sorry. How long have tou been in therapy and do you see results? [/quote]

About 1.5 years but I had bigger more pressing things I was dealing with - now I’m working on this one. My therapist gave me the homework to start thinking about what it triggers so hence the post. I genuinely don’t know - but some of the answers here are helping. Eg the person who is a therapist who said I prob partly feel guilty about not wanting to just take care of kids/ feel like a bad mom. Also the hustle culture I was raised in - plus the fact that I was raised with a ‘lot’ - Nannies, drivers, many vacas, private school - so if I don’t get close to achieving that for my kids it feels like a ‘failure’. But we live in nyc so it’s all insanely $$$$$$$$$$. [/quote]

Mhmmm. Have you noticed other areas of your life where you have involuntary mental reactions that have you wondering why, or is it just this one thing?

[/quote]

Op - I def am triggered about some political things (gun control is a big one) and that’s actually what made me go into politics (I’m not in politics any more). I loooved it. Maybe I’ll go back but the money was not good. I wasn’t a politician - I worked in messaging/ ads etc 
The only other example I can think of is that I hate hate hate it when people travel and tag on social media from the ‘xxx biz class lounge’. I travel biz for work but would never do this. For some reason that makes me crazy. Tho in that case it’s cut and dry and I am judging them hard. 
But in these cases I am either in the persuasion business or in the judging mindset. In the Sahp situation it’s not that black and white. It’s something v complicated I feel [/quote]

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