Relational Trauma • May 13, 2018

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Mother’s Day may not feel easy for you. And you definitely aren’t alone.

Today, May 13th, is Mother’s Day and for some, this will feel like a wonderful day, perhaps filled with brunch, flowers, and time and energy spent with the woman you love – Mom.

Or maybe you’ll revel in having your own little ones bring you their homemade crayon cards and attempts at pancakes and breakfast in bed.

If this day brings you joy and gratitude, that’s lovely and I’m so glad that’s the experience for you!

But for many of us, Mother’s Day will not feel this way.

Mother’s Day, instead, may feel really quite hard and complex.

Perhaps you dearly long to be a mother. And you’re currently struggling with infertility.

Perhaps you wanted to be a mother to physical children in this lifetime and it couldn’t or didn’t happen.

Perhaps you recently or long ago lost your physical child. And you are grieving your loss deeply.

Perhaps you never wanted to be a mother. And/or are now struggling with being one.

Perhaps your mother is dead or very ill.

Perhaps you never knew your mother and wish you had.

Or, and this is very common, perhaps you are estranged from your mother or have a toxic and painful relationship with her that makes celebrating this day complex in a way that no Hallmark card could ever capture.

Whatever the reason, if you’re one of the many of us who doesn’t enjoy this day, who almost dread its cyclical return in the arc of the calendar each year, if you’re someone who actually feels sadness, challenge, and pain around this day, I want you to know that you’re not alone.

Not at all.

Being triggered by Mother’s Day is an incredibly common experience.

To be a mother oneself and to be born of one (as we all are) is deeply, unbelievably complex and I don’t think we do a good enough job in this culture acknowledging the multidimensional and often painful aspects of this.

Anecdotally, I was talking to some girlfriends who are also therapists. We were all saying that we’ve noticed a pattern across the last few years in our therapy practices. There’s always an uptick of client calls in the week or two before Mother’s Day. Also before Father’s Day and before Thanksgiving and Christmas, too.

So let’s face it: holidays centered around families can be triggering and challenging for many of us.

That’s why on this Mother’s Day, I want to speak to you if you’re one of the many who are triggered by this day.

I want to reach across the internet and give you a virtual permission slip of sorts to not feel pressured to enjoy or celebrate this day despite what the echoing cacophony of messaging all around you may say, and instead offer up a list of ways to alternatively “celebrate” Mother’s Day and a list of some great resources to do some re-mothering healing work, to grieve, and just generally take care of yourself.

What are some alternative ways to mark Mother’s Day when it doesn’t feel easy?

“To be a strong woman, to be a fierce woman, to be a true woman, to be a leader, to be truly powerful, you have to get to place where you can tolerate people not liking you. And know that when you actually do that, you have to fall back on your own moral imperative in your own moral trunk and say, ‘I don’t care, this is what I believe. This is who I am.’” – Eve Ensler

Related Reading

• What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
• Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
• Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

Whatever the reason you dislike Mother’s Day, for many of us, there may be an accompanying sense of guilt or pressure around these feelings.

All around us, between radio and TV commercials, shops and their marketing campaigns, or even attempting to make plans with friends who are unavailable on the day that Mother’s Day falls, there is a nearly pervasive unspoken sentiment: Recognize this day! Enjoy this day!

Not to mention the fact that we live in a global culture that largely puts an overwhelming amount of emphasis on honoring and prioritizing family despite the fact that this may or may not be healthy or supportive for you as an individual.

And all of this cumulative pressuring sentiment may feel hard, no matter how rooted and grounded your reasons are for not liking this day.

That’s why I personally and professionally feel very strongly about speaking up about the complexities of this day and providing a virtual permission slip of sorts for you to honor your own experience about this day, not what you feel you “should” experience.

And so my list of alternate ways to “celebrate” Mother’s Day is an attempt to help you reflect on what your authentic experience is, and to provide you with some inspiration on how to hold this day in a way that feels good and right to you based on your experience.

• Be honest with yourself. Really take the opportunity to check in with yourself and reflect if, in your heart of hearts, this day feels good or hard for you. Reflect on why this may be, what you honestly feel called to do or not do on this day, and what feelings and thoughts come up for you when you imagine doing what you want to do versus what you believe you “should” do. From a place of personal honesty, you can begin crafting a plan to take care of yourself on this day.
• Give yourself permission not to celebrate this day. At all. Period. Remember, despite the fact that I’m writing a list of ways to “celebrate” mother’s day, a big way you may want to “celebrate” is by not doing anything at all. By not celebrating the day in even one way. And this may include not calling your mother. And that’s more than okay! Please allow yourself the permission to consider not celebrating this day at all if that’s what feels good and right and true for you.
• Plan in advance how you will spend the day. If there’s a part of you that does want to celebrate, honor and acknowledge this day in some way, I encourage you to plan in advance how you will spend the day. Perhaps brainstorm with your therapist, your best friend, your partner, your kids, or a member of your support group what a good “game plan” for this day may look like for you. Sometimes the things we need and want most to do will require some advanced planning – like travel, reservations, or coordinating with others – so if it’s too late this year, allow yourself time next year to consider planning in advance how you would like to spend the day.
• Think about what would bring you comfort and solace on this day and seek out that. If Mother’s Day is something you want to honor in some way and the day still feels painful for you, I encourage you to think about what kind of celebration could bring you comfort and solace in your pain. Think about the needs and wants you may have emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually when reflecting on what could bring you solace and comfort. And then give that to yourself.
• Spend the day mothering yourself. One other creative way to think about “celebrating” Mother’s Day is to think about ways in which you could spend the day mothering yourself, giving yourself some kind of attention and care your mom may have given to you when she was alive or might have given you if she was more functional or even if you had known her at all. Perhaps this may mean booking a supportive therapy session on this day, or spending the day at the spa getting a massage or mani/pedi, or taking yourself on a shopping trip. Whatever is going to help you feel “mothered” – cared and looked out for – incorporate this into your Mother’s Day celebrations and spend the day mothering yourself.
• Disconnect if you want or need to. Take a break from social media (and all those potentially triggering “best mom ever!” posts) if you need or want to on Mother’s Day. Set your phone to airplane mode. Maybe get out of the city and into the nearby forest and mountains, away from the brunch spots that could be filled with families. Let your friends know that you’ll be offline for the day and really just disconnect in any way that you need to in order to support yourself mentally and emotionally.
• If you do spend the day with your mother and it’s a complex relationship, hold the boundaries you need and want to hold to take care of yourself. Perhaps this means limiting the amount of time you spend on the phone with her, or maybe even just sending a text versus any voice-to-voice contact at all. Or maybe it will help you to have brunch out in public but not at your house. Whatever logistical and emotional boundaries you need to set for yourself in order to have contact with your mother on this day, please set them.
• Let those closest to you know what the day brings up for you and what you need and want. For many of us who are recovering from abusive, neglectful, or dysfunctional childhoods, a personal growth task we face is to share and reach out for support with safe, functional people versus keeping our pain and suffering to ourselves. And even if you don’t come from a background like this, it still may feel helpful and supportive to reach out and connect with a safe and trusted someone – a trustworthy sibling, a dear girlfriend, a mentor or therapist – and to let them know that Mother’s Day feels hard for you.
• Spend the day with women and mentors who give you mothering energy and who feel like mothers to you. I firmly believe that if you didn’t have the mothering you wanted as a child, it’s not too late to be inspired by or receive actual mothering from mother models and mentors. These figures and mentors may be found in real-life (whether through a caring therapist, an aunt, a professional mentor, a neighbor who takes you under her wing, your best girlfriend) or even be fictional or witnessed from afar in the media. The goal is to seek out examples of what good mothering looks and feels like to you and to let this mothering energy in and to allow it to help meet some of your needs and wants and for it to inspire your own, ever-evolving self-mothering journey. So on Mother’s Day, perhaps consider spending time with those you receive mothering energy from.
• Spend the day with those that *you* mother. There are so many ways to mother others beyond bearing and raising a child! If you couldn’t have physical children in this lifetime, chances are you likely still “mothered” many along your journey. Mother’s Day can be a wonderful chance to spend time with those you “mother” such as godchildren, nieces/nephews, your Little Brother or Little Sister, etc. If it feels like a good option for you on an otherwise complex day, consider spending time with those you have mothered.
• Spend the day helping those who may also be having a hard time. I’ll say it again: Mother’s Day can be a painful, evocative holiday for many of us. And, for some, the way they choose to “celebrate” this day is to spend the day helping others who may also be having a hard time. Perhaps this looks like visiting a neighbor, a friend who also dislikes the holiday, or an assisted living home to spend time with someone who can’t be with their own children or who has none. Maybe this looks like volunteering that day or showing up to or facilitating a 12-Step Meeting.
• Incorporate a ritual into the day that is meaningful to you. Depending on your circumstances, craft a ritual that feels meaningful to you on Mother’s Day. Visit your child’s or mother’s grave, or write them a letter. Bury that letter in the yard and plant their favorite flowers over it, burn it in your sink, mail it to no address. Write a letter from your mother to you that you wish she would have been capable of writing if she was more mentally functional or still alive. Look at photo albums of your lost loved one, cook a meal of their favorite foods, say a prayer to God/Goddess/The Universe about your wishes to be a parent. Whatever feels like a meaningful ritual for you, weave it into the day.
• Cultivate a mindset of grounded empowerment. Finally, I would encourage you to work on your mindset and view of this day. Instead of feeling guilt or pressure, try to work on giving yourself the internal permission to have your experience – no matter what it looks like! – and for this to be okay. You have a right to feel whatever you want about this day. You have a right to do with your life whatever you want. And that includes how and if you celebrate this day. You can also use this day as an opportunity to open up to re-mothering healing work you need to do, explore any forgiveness or grief work that may have to be done. This day has the potential to be an opportunity for growth for you, not just a cyclical trigger in the calendar.

A list of resources if you need to do some re-mothering healing work, grieve, or just generally take care of yourself.

Again, the reasons for why Mother’s Day may feel triggering for any of us will vary wildly and widely. And the resources we need to help us with our unique triggers and pain points can be equally diverse. So I’ve included a short list of multimedia below (it’s by no means exhaustive!) in the hopes that even one of them might be just the right kind of soul medicine you need on Mother’s Day. Peruse them, and I truly hope they feel helpful to you.

• Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman. (book)*
• The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed by Jasmin Lee Cori MS LPC. (book)*
• Warming The Stone Child: Myths And Stories About Abandonment And The Unmothered Child by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD. (audiobook)*
• Mothers who regret having children are speaking up like never before. (article)
• What does it mean to remother yourself and why is it so critical for our growth as women? (article)
• The Five Healing Tasks of the Un- and Under-Parented. (article)
• Yes, sweetheart, you DO actually get to grieve this. (article)
• How boundaries impact every area of your life and what to do if yours need work. (article)
• Why you don’t “need” or “have to” forgive anyone if you don’t want or feel ready to. (article)
• Womb of Light: The work of Bethany Webster. (website and articles)
• This is to Mother You by Linda Rondstadt and Emmylou Harris. (song)
• Some “real” non-Hallmarky Mother’s Day greeting cards from Emily McDowell, like this one. (product)

Wrapping this up.

If nothing else, I hope that what you take from today’s article is this: You have permission to feel however you feel about this day. You have permission to not like and not want to celebrate Mother’s Day.

This is a complex and triggering holiday for many, many people.

If this is the case for you, I hope that you will take care of yourself on Mother’s Day in whatever way you need or want to.

And please remember that everything I shared today can also be applied to Father’s Day one short month from now.

And now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

Leave a message and your suggestions in the blog comments below so our community of readers can benefit from your wisdom.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Childhood Trauma: A Therapist’s Complete Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Bass, E., & Davis, L. (2008). The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. HarperOne.
• Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
• Callahan, J. L., & Callahan, J. L. (2010). Seasonal and Holiday-Related Increases in Psychological Distress: A Clinical Perspective. Journal of Clinical Psychology.
• Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.
• Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship. North Atlantic Books.

You Can Learn What You Were Never Taught: Earned Secure Attachment and the Corrective Emotional Experience

In my work with clients for whom Mother’s Day surfaces grief rather than celebration, one of the most important clinical distinctions I hold is this: the attachment style you developed in childhood is not a sentence. Attachment research has long distinguished between those who developed secure attachment in early life — through consistent, attuned caregiving — and those who developed insecure patterns in response to caregiving that was frightening, inconsistent, or emotionally unavailable. But there’s a third category that the research has continued to illuminate over the past three decades: earned secure attachment. This refers to individuals who did not experience a secure early attachment but who, through meaningful therapeutic or relational experiences in adulthood, develop the internal working models and regulatory capacities that characterize secure attachment. They weren’t given the foundation. They built it — stone by stone, relationship by relationship, across years of careful and often painful work. And the research, consistently and across cultures, shows this is possible. Not easy. Not quick. But genuinely, reliably possible.

Mary Main, PhD, developmental psychologist at the University of California Berkeley and a pioneer in adult attachment research, found in her landmark Adult Attachment Interview studies that what predicted a parent’s capacity to raise a securely attached child wasn’t whether they had a happy childhood — it was whether they had made sense of whatever childhood they had. Coherent narrative, she found, was more predictive than the content of early experience. The parent who could speak clearly, with feeling and without defensiveness, about what had happened to her and how it had shaped her was far more likely to offer her own children something genuinely different from what she had received. This is the work of earned security: not erasing the past, but integrating it thoroughly enough that it stops running the present on autopilot and consuming the future before it can be lived. And it almost always begins in a relationship — one in which being known doesn’t end in abandonment or shame.

Menakem’s observation illuminates why earned secure attachment can’t happen in isolation, and why Mother’s Day — for all its cultural noise and commercial insistence on uncomplicated warmth — can actually serve as an unexpected catalyst for relational healing. The pain that surfaces on this day is a signal, not a flaw. It’s the nervous system flagging an old wound and asking, still, whether anyone is there to help carry it. For driven women who have spent years managing that wound alone — intellectualizing it, minimizing it, outrunning it through busyness and achievement — the corrective emotional experience of being genuinely accompanied in the grief can feel almost disorienting. Not because it’s too much, but precisely because it’s what was always needed and never arrived. You can hold both: this hurt is real, and you are not too broken or too late to be met by someone who can actually hold it with you.

Clinically, this means that the goal isn’t to make Mother’s Day painless by feeling less — it’s to build the internal and relational resources that make the feeling survivable, and eventually, the kind of thing you can move through without losing yourself. Earned security isn’t a destination you arrive at once and keep permanently. It’s a capacity that grows through repeated experiences of reaching toward connection and finding it available — steady, non-reactive, and genuinely glad you came. Each of those experiences is a small brick in the foundation you’re building: the one you deserved from the very beginning.

Both/And: You Can Love Your Mother AND Grieve the Mother You Needed

One of the most important things I can offer you on a day like this is permission to hold the complexity. Mother’s Day does not require you to choose between love and grief, between loyalty and honesty, between gratitude for what you had and acknowledgment of what you needed but didn’t get.

You can love your mother AND have been genuinely hurt by her. You can appreciate the ways she showed up AND grieve the ways she couldn’t. You can want to honor her AND feel the specific, complicated sadness of having had a mother who wasn’t available in the ways you most needed. These are not contradictions. They are the honest terrain of imperfect human relationships — which is to say, nearly all of them.

The culture of Mother’s Day demands simplicity: roses and brunch and cheerful declarations of gratitude. It has no framework for the woman who drives to the cemetery not to visit a grave but to have a conversation she never got to have with a mother who is still alive, somewhere, but not accessible to her. You don’t have to resolve the complexity. Both/and is where the truth lives.

The Systemic Lens: What the Myth of the Good Mother Costs Us

Mother’s Day, as a cultural institution, carries with it a particular mythology: the idealized, selfless, endlessly available, perfectly attuned mother. This mythology does a specific kind of damage to women whose actual mothers fell short of that ideal — because it suggests that what they experienced was aberration rather than the predictable complexity of human beings raising other human beings under imperfect conditions.

Adrienne Rich, poet and feminist theorist, made a crucial distinction in her landmark work Of Woman Born: the difference between motherhood as experience (the lived, embodied, particular relationship between this mother and these children) and motherhood as institution (the set of cultural expectations, demands, and ideologies projected onto that relationship from the outside). Much of our pain around Mother’s Day lives in the gap between those two things — the real mother we actually had and the ideal mother the institution insisted she should have been.

Naming this doesn’t excuse genuine harm. If your mother hurt you, that hurt is real and deserves acknowledgment, processing, and space in your healing work. AND it helps to understand that she, too, was operating inside a system that made mothering very hard — with her own wounds, her own unmet needs, her own incomplete healing from her own difficult beginnings. Both things can be true. The harm was real. The context was complex. The healing requires holding both. If you need support navigating this on a difficult day, trauma-informed therapy is a place to start.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Hold Yourself on Mother’s Day When It’s Not a Simple Holiday

In my work with clients who have complicated relationships with their mothers — or with motherhood itself — Mother’s Day weekend is something we often plan for in advance. Not because it should be managed or survived, necessarily, but because it’s a concentrated cultural moment that has a way of amplifying whatever grief, ambivalence, longing, or loss is already present. If you find yourself dreading this weekend, or feeling something you can’t quite name alongside the card displays and brunch invitations, I want you to know that there’s nothing wrong with you. What you’re feeling is likely a very accurate response to a very real set of circumstances.

The first and most important thing you can do is give yourself permission to feel whatever is actually there — not the feeling you think you should have, not the performance of gratitude or celebration that the day seems to demand, but the real thing. That might be grief for the mother you didn’t have. Grief for a child you lost or aren’t able to have. Relief that a difficult mother is no longer in your life, alongside sadness that a different relationship wasn’t possible. Rage. Emptiness. All of it is allowed. Feelings that are given permission to exist tend to move through; feelings that are suppressed tend to compound.

If you’re grieving a mother wound — the kind of grief that comes from having a mother who was emotionally unavailable, abusive, or simply not able to give you what you needed — I’d gently encourage you to find a therapist who’s versed in developmental trauma and grief work. This is a particular kind of loss: the loss of something you never had, which makes it harder to mourn using the usual frameworks. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can be a useful tool here, helping to process specific memories and the emotions attached to them without requiring you to construct a tidy narrative about what happened.

For those grieving infant or pregnancy loss, or navigating infertility, the cultural loudness of Mother’s Day can feel like a direct assault. If that’s your experience, Somatic Experiencing offers a body-centered approach to grief that can be gentler than talk therapy alone — particularly for losses that are held in the body in physical ways. I also want to name that grief support groups, particularly those specific to pregnancy or infant loss, can provide a relational container that individual therapy sometimes can’t fully offer.

On a practical level, it helps to plan this day rather than let it arrive and react. What would actually feel nourishing to you on Sunday — not what you’re “supposed” to do, but what would genuinely help you get through the day feeling held? That might mean spending it with people who understand your situation and won’t ask questions. It might mean a solo ritual that honors a loss privately. It might mean a lot of walks and a lot of baths and early bedtime. Give yourself permission to build a day that serves you.

If there’s a mother in your life with whom things are complicated and you’re unsure what to do about that — whether to call, whether to go, what to say — I want to name that you’re not obligated to perform closeness you don’t feel. You can make a decision that honors both your love for her and your own limits. Those two things don’t have to be in opposition.

You’re not alone in finding this weekend hard, even if it looks from the outside like everyone else is navigating it easily. If you’re ready to do the deeper work — the grief, the healing, the sorting through what you actually want your relationships to look like — I’d be glad to support you. You can learn more about therapy with me or explore how to connect and take the next step. This complicated day is one thread in a larger story. And that story can change.

Medical Disclaimer