There’s a massive difference between growing from a place of wholeness and trying to fix yourself from a place of brokenness — and most Catholic moms don’t realize they’re doing the latter.

You read the books. You listen to the podcasts. You set the goals. But nothing sticks because you’re trying to build on a cracked foundation.

In this episode, I explain why self-help without healing actually makes things worse.

We talk about:
* The difference between genuine growth and running from pain
* How to tell if you’re growing from wholeness or striving from brokenness
* Why bringing your wounds to Christ first changes everything
* What healing actually looks like for a Catholic mom (it’s not what you think)

If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
 What Is Breakthrough Coaching? Transform Your Motherhood
 Catholic Finishing School: Becoming Who God Made You
 Healing Your Wounds
 
If this hits home — if you know you’ve been striving instead of healing — Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order is a safe place to bring your whole self and begin again. Come heal with us at catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart

But then this morning I woke up and I was like, oh shoot, I really should just cut all of these berries. I had them all in these packages and I was like, yeah, I should really cut and wash them. So this morning. I cut 25 pounds of strawberries and took the tops off and rinsed them and then put them in gallon baggies.

And I remember doing it just thinking, gosh, I have so much love for this kid and supporting their dreams and the activities that they’re part of. Like it wasn’t like intrinsically, I wanted to cut the tops of a bajillion strawberries so that these kids could have, I don’t know what they do with the berries on their camping trip.

But I just told myself that I was proud of myself. I was like, Hey, I love you and I see you and I see that you’re doing this, and it’s so well intentioned and it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to serve others. 

I think it’s so important that when we do those things, that we speak about it like that instead of like, Ugh, I have to do this, and this is so annoying, and why, and blah blah, which is really what your default brain will do. Your default brain is gonna tell you that this extra work is terrible and you don’t wanna be doing it. 

But probably you’re gonna do it anyway. And so why wouldn’t you just be proud of yourself while you were doing it? And that kind of leads me to what we’re gonna talk about in this episode, which is not doing self-help from a place where you think that something is wrong with you.

So often we buy a book or we listen to a podcast and there’s this kind of clawing, desperate feeling that something is wrong with us. They were screwing up our lives, that we’re screwing up the kids, that our body is a mess. Something’s not working in our finances or our marriage. And then we grasp for these tools outside of us, again in this clawing, desperate way to try to find the answer to fix us.

And when we talk about. How we are whole in Christ. I wanna break this down because I was listening to this, Protestant song. I can’t remember what it was, but she was singing and it was a beautiful song. I was with her for almost all of it, but then one part of it, she says, and you see me and you love me, and you wouldn’t change a thing.

And this is where the paradox of God comes up. Because in one sense, we. Are broken. We do have concupiscence, we do have original sin, and we’re gonna sin every single day. Okay? But the way I think about it is, I think about how the core of us is made in the image and likeness of God, and then we just put this like black tar on top of us.

And so the reason I actually don’t like the word broken is because that suggests a permanent state. When something is broken, especially in the culture that we have right now, we just throw it away. Right? Previously, we put a great deal more effort into repairing things and restoring them, and even sometimes making them stronger than they originally were.

But in our modern day culture, we really think that things are broken or kind of worthless and we throw them away. That is just embedded subconsciously in your brain. 

So I much prefer to think about ourselves as, you know, a child of God made in the image and likeness of God, and that part of you is just like perfect and completely worthy of love. It’s the inside. And then on the outside we layer this like slime, this black tar. And that is the sin that God does not like. He has righteous anger over our sinfulness. 

But then the blood of Christ. Perfectly washes away the sin. If we repent and we go to confession and we ask for forgiveness, right? If you’ve ever seen, you know, like a really strong soap break through grease, it’s like we can’t get the grease off. It’s there, but then the soap, perfectly like, breaks it up and then all of a sudden it comes off and it’s squeaky clean. That’s what the blood of Christ does to our sinfulness. 

So we’re not broken. It’s not a permanent state, and this is how we both can be. Like beautiful, lovable, perfect. This part of us that was made in the image and likeness of God, but then we’ve covered it with this kind of yuck.

This is a pretty advanced theological concept, I think, and one that I don’t even really think you need to fully understand. I was just coaching in Catholic mom calm and we were talking about how one of the beautiful things about Catholicism is that it was designed to be transmuted to be transferred to peasants who couldn’t read.

And the symbolism in the mass and the stained glass windows were enough to teach anyone the truth of the gospel. So anytime I come up against something that I don’t theologically understand, I don’t let that make me feel bad about myself because I try to come to the Lord like a peasant who just sees the beauty in a same stained glass window and just understands. The mysteries of God.

If I wanna learn more about it, I can, but not from this place of oh my gosh, something’s wrong with me. And it’s a huge problem that I don’t understand, the history and the theology behind what we believe. 

And so this is to me one of those concepts where I’m sure we don’t even have perfect human language to describe this idea that we are both perfect, lovely whole in Christ, and then also sinful. And that we’re always gonna be sinful, this sludge that’s on top of us, our littleness, our weakness, our nothingness.

And so in Catholicism you’ll hear both of those things. You’ll hear, you know, I’m a beloved child of God and I was created in the image and likeness of Christ and, and fearfully and wonderfully made and more beautiful. And then at the same time, we kind of read books like searching for and Maintaining Peace or. The interior castle and we are aware so much of our littleness and our falling short of who we could be.

So obviously I’m here and my job is really all about helping people become a better version of themselves, right? My goal is to lead people to the Holy Spirit, to what God wants them to do for their lives and to live with more peace. 

And so I’m really a self-help person. It’s my job. I’m a self-help person and you can label that a lot of different ways, you know, life coach podcaster or author, but really I’m trying to help people improve themselves. 

But it’s really, really important. Hear this, that we are not improving ourselves from a panicky feeling that something is wrong, and we must very quickly find the answer. To save ourselves. 

To give you a visual, I want you to imagine that there is a leak in your house. Maybe water starts coming dripping through the ceiling, and we are so desperate in that moment to go upstairs, rip up a floor, figure out where this leak is, and plug it as quickly as we can because the water dripping around is going to create big and permanent damage. That is a great reason to drop everything and to figure this thing out. 

But we treat self-development that way where we almost, like take this gasp of error, like I have to go figure out inner child work or how my thoughts create my results, or EMDR therapy. I’ve gotta rewire something. I’ve gotta figure out what my personality type is, or what my love language is and how that relates to all the other people in my family.

Right? There’s this like, gripping, panicky sense that something is wrong in such a timely way that you feel pressure and urgency around solving it. But if you’ve been hanging around here for any amount of time, you know. That when your brain goes into a stress state, your ability to solve problems well goes down.

There’s an inverse relationship there, okay? The more stressed you are, the dumber you are. I love you. You’re kind of a dumb dumb in a stress state, and of course it feels stressful if you think that you need to work on yourself with the same urgency of a leak in your ceiling. Now the good news about a leak in your ceiling is that solving that is generally pretty straightforward.

And so it’s okay that you drop into the most simplistic form of your brain because it’s like, must rip up the floor and find the leak and plug it. And you can do that even without the highest level of thinking in your brain. Or it might be called a plumber or get my husband or something. Right. 

But to solve something complex like who you are and what your subconscious programming is, and what your inner child desires or you know, parts work, all of that kind of psychological stuff, this is not urgent and you’re not gonna solve it well if you come from desperation and panic.

So I just want everybody to just take a collective deep breath. Let’s do it again. One more. I want you to drop your shoulders, maybe roll them out a little bit. And I want you just to have this thought. I’m okay right now. Nothing is wrong. There is no urgent thing about me that needs to be fixed.

If we want to improve ourselves, and I think we should, I think we should have a deep desire to grow in virtue, let it come from the desire to please the Lord. To thank him for this life that he’s given us, that we want to show up even better in it, but we do not need to be stressed about it, and we do not need to feel a sense of urgency about it.

Think of a time that you wanted to do something nice for your kids or your husband or your mom. Maybe you were planning a dinner. And you’re lovingly preparing the food and while you’re doing it, you feel this yumminess in your body of just feeling like so pleased, like, ugh, I’m so excited to make this beautiful meal and to serve this person. ’cause I love this person. 

But it feels slow. It feels yummy, it feels rooted in peace. I want you to have those feelings when you decide to work on yourself and to grow in virtue. And maybe we approach it with curiosity, openness, playfulness, even, oh, I just learned about inner child work. What’s that? Maybe I’ll read about that a little bit.

I am using that as an example because I was listening to a business podcast and they ended up talking about inner child work and I’ve heard about that, but I hadn’t really looked into it deeply. But I remembered that I bought a Catholic book about that. So I go to my bookcase and I pull it out, befriending Your Inner Child by Bria or Bria Hannan. I’ll put the link in the show notes 

And I thought, you know what? I’m just gonna read this book maybe five minutes a day. I’m just gonna slowly start going through this book. I’m not gonna try to read it in a weekend. I can read quickly, but I don’t always like to read quickly. I like to kind of just read a couple paragraphs and sit with it.

And I’m gonna do this with this book. I also think we’re gonna do it in a Catholic mom calm. I’m thinking June and July, but maybe after the first week of June. ’cause I’m not sure I can pull all of that off in one week. We’re almost to June, so it’ll be the next week. 

So. If you’re in catholic mom calm, I’m gonna outline a reading schedule and it’s gonna be slow. We’re gonna do it so slowly over the summer, and I’m gonna do it in such a way that when we talk about it, even if you didn’t read the book, you can just come and listen to my thoughts about what I read and how we can implement it. 

But I want you to notice that I’m not reading this because I’m so desperate to solve like something big and broken inside of me. I don’t think we need to do that. 

Now, do I think that there might be something for my childhood that’s causing me to behave in some sort of toxic reactionary pattern in my life right now? Yeah, probably. And I probably should work on that, but I know that working on it from a stress state is not going to be effective, 

And I really want you to trust. The Holy Spirit to lead you to the work that he wants you to do. And I think the way that he brings things to us feels slow and calm. For example, I hadn’t listened to this particular podcast for a long time, and then I threw a random episode on, and then it happened to mention all this inner child work, and I thought, oh yeah, I did buy that book. I bought that book almost a year ago and I didn’t read it.

And I didn’t need to read it then now is the time that I need to read it. And so there’s something God wants me to know right now, but I’m just gonna unfold it slowly.

So obviously here, I really encourage you to grow. I hope that I give you a sense of conviction around things like not yelling at your kids and using your phone less. I think these are good in holy pursuits. 

But I wanna make sure that you are doing them not from a place of urgent brokenness, but from a place of awe and wonder like, wow, it’s so incredible that we are alive, that we are on this planet, that God wanted us to be alive in 2025 and he’s blessed us so much, and how beautiful would it be for us to. Give back to him by trying to grow in virtue to be more like him. 

I don’t yet have the age of children really, where I get to see that they have learned some of the beautiful things that our family values and that they then choose to espouse those values in their own lives. I haven’t seen that in a really big way, but I did just see a post recently, I think it was Pam Bar Barnhill who posted about her oldest daughter.

Who like never wanted to clean anything, but now I don’t know. I got the impression she was maybe like 19. She now kind of like moves through the house and tidies things up because it’s now a value of hers to have things to be tidy. And she was just saying like, keep training them, keep planting those seeds, they will bloom later.

I thought that was so beautiful. I haven’t seen that. None of my kids are willingly cleaning the house yet, but I do imagine that they are going to want to tidy things up. That they’re gonna protect their prayer time, that they’re gonna wanna listen to beautiful music probably. 

And how wonderful and satisfying that would be as a parent to see that you have given them this knowledge and that they have chosen to pick up the knowledge and to live it out. And that is the gift that we can give the Lord where he has given us the Bible and the writings of the church and the saints. 

And they’ve modeled for us how we can grow in virtue. And how special is it that we take that knowledge and we choose to grow in virtue just as a gift for him. That is a totally different field then, oh no, something’s wrong with me and I’m screwing up these kids and I gotta figure something out.

And of course the punchline is, I think we need to teach this to the children as well. They have to be old enough to understand all of these things that I just said, but I will be teaching them this like, Hey, I want you to grow, but not because anything is wrong with you, because it is a gift to the Lord to grow.

So we have a lot of things coming up. We’re gonna be launching several courses in the next month. So I hope you’re on my email list. That’s where we’re gonna do it first, and then I’ll probably. Do some podcasts about each of the topics. 

One is on ai, one is on boundaries, one is on money. We’re gonna relaunch Keep Your Cool, which is really about making memories with your kids and not yelling at them over the summer and my Back to school course, which will just give you so much peace around whatever you end up deciding to do for school with your kids, and then being prepared for that in the fall.

And I don’t want you to do all of them in a weekend or a month. I’m making all of them because God put it on my heart to make all of them. And I wanted to start making, you know, individual digital courses where you could just like buy them and experience them and improve your life. But I don’t want you doing it from a place, a brokenness or thinking that something is wrong with you.

I want you to think, oh my goodness, I do wanna be a better steward of my money. I’m so curious about what that could look like. I am gonna dip my toes into that and work on that, and maybe you choose to work on two things at the same time.

But my goal is to really help Catholic moms draw closer to the Holy Spirit, so he’s really driving you for what you are doing, what you are learning, how you are growing. Ask him. And then the second thing is that you have more peace in your day-to-day life, that you are not beating yourself up in your mind and you’re just proud of yourself. You’re doing so much. 

We think that encouraging ourselves or being proud of ourselves means we’re gonna get lazy. And I’ve never met a Catholic mom who was lazy, so I think it’s silly that we have this fear about that. So more information is coming about all of those things. 

But I’m glad that we got to have this little talk first because you may discern that now isn’t a good time for you to learn anything, and then you have something else that God is calling you to do. Let that always be the reason to do something or not do something, ’cause you feel that the Holy Spirit is leading you in that direction. 

All right, my friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.