Fleabag’s Godmother: The Stepmother as Symbol

POP CULTURE & TRAUMA • May 20, 2026

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

What Makes the Stepmother’s Introduction So Uncomfortable?

Silverware clinks against porcelain. Smiles hold a half-second too long. A joke lands with just enough edge that no one’s sure whether to laugh. The family dinners in Fleabag are a case study in relational tension, and the moment Olivia Colman’s stepmother character enters a scene, the temperature in the room visibly drops. She isn’t simply a new wife. She’s a living embodiment of the “new normal” that Fleabag never consented to and never got to grieve properly before it arrived.

Her presence functions less like an annoyance and more like a chronic, low-grade injury: a constant reminder of everything that’s been lost and can’t be recovered. That’s not about personality clash, even though the show plays much of it for comedy. It’s about what happens, psychologically, when a parent moves forward while a child is still actively reeling from loss no one around her has fully named.

You may recognize a version of this from your own life, or from a client’s story you’ve heard secondhand. A new partner doesn’t always arrive as overt hostility. More often it shows up as quiet erasure: a shared joke retold as though it originated with the new person, a family photo quietly swapped out, a tradition subtly rewritten. These moments get dismissed as “just family drama” constantly. They are not trivial. They’re the texture of a real emotional injury that rarely gets named as one.

The stepmother’s character works as a potent symbol of disenfranchised grief specifically because Fleabag’s pain, first about her mother’s death and later about her best friend Boo’s suicide, is repeatedly minimized by her father and, by extension, his new wife. This goes well past sadness going unaddressed. It’s watching a profound loss get treated as an inconvenience to someone else’s forward motion, which makes the loss almost impossible to process cleanly.

What Is Disenfranchised Grief, and Why Does It Matter Here?

There’s a specific, useful clinical term for what Fleabag is carrying, and naming it changes how the whole family dynamic reads.

Society has an unspoken script for grief timelines, and that script gets especially rigid once a parent starts dating again. There’s pressure to be “happy for them,” even while your own complex feelings about the loss underneath the new relationship are actively unresolved. That pressure forces a kind of compartmentalization that doesn’t actually make the grief disappear. It just relocates it, usually into whatever relationship is closest and safest to direct it toward, which in Fleabag’s case is her stepmother.

Consider Rhonda, a composite client, a 50-year-old chief operating officer whose father remarried eighteen months after her mother’s death. Rhonda described feeling, at the time, like she wasn’t allowed to be upset, because everyone around her framed her father’s new relationship as a triumph over grief rather than a complicated development sitting on top of unprocessed loss. She smiled through two years of family gatherings before she let herself admit, in our work together, that she’d never actually grieved her mother at all. The grief had been quietly rerouted into low-grade resentment toward a stepmother who, in Rhonda’s own words, “did nothing wrong except exist at the wrong time.”

That reroute is the mechanism worth naming clearly. Disenfranchised grief doesn’t vanish for lack of permission. It finds the nearest available target and lands there instead, usually a person who had no part in causing the original loss but ends up absorbing the emotional debt anyway.

What made the actual turning point for Rhonda wasn’t a single confrontation or a dramatic scene. It was a quieter recognition, in a session roughly eight months into our work together, that the resentment she’d been carrying toward her stepmother had almost nothing to do with anything her stepmother had actually done. Once she could see the target had been misplaced, she was able to grieve her mother directly for what felt, to her, like the first time in years, and the resentment toward her stepmother softened considerably without either of them needing to have a single conversation about it.

This is worth naming as a general pattern that reaches beyond Rhonda’s specific story: disenfranchised grief often resolves faster once it’s correctly located than it does through years of managing its misplaced symptoms. You can spend a decade trying to fix a relationship with a stepparent that was never actually the source of the pain, when the real work was always the grief sitting one layer beneath it, waiting for permission to exist.

Why Is the Art-Show Episode the Clinical Peak of the Series?

The art-show episode is, clinically, the sharpest moment in the entire series for understanding the stepmother’s symbolic function. She displays a portrait of Fleabag’s deceased mother, an intimate, deeply personal image, and then claims the piece as her own work, altering it just enough to make the theft technically defensible. This isn’t simple plagiarism. It’s a genuine betrayal trauma, an appropriation of Fleabag’s mother, her memory, and by extension Fleabag’s own identity.

Picture the specific violation: someone takes a cherished image of your dead parent and repurposes it for their own social gain. That goes well past disrespect. It’s an assault on your internal world, on the small handful of physical objects that still connect you to someone you lost. The scene illustrates, with unusual precision, how the stepmother functions less as an annoying rival and more as a mechanism for the systemic invalidation of Fleabag’s grief and her right to her own mother’s legacy.

There’s also a quieter “replacement” narrative running underneath the plagiarism itself. By stepping into the role of mother figure, the stepmother seems to believe she can step into the emotional space of the deceased mother too, as though the two roles were interchangeable. That belief, conscious or not, is genuinely painful for children to absorb, because it implies their original parent, and the entire bond they shared, can simply be swapped out for a newer model.

The episode is also a quiet masterclass in how gaslighting operates inside families. The stepmother’s calm demeanor and the father’s passive complicity make Fleabag’s outrage look disproportionate to outside observers, even though the audience has been given full access to the depth of her pain the whole time. That’s a precise illustration of how people harmed inside a family system get coded as the overreactors, which isolates them even further from the validation they actually need.

I want to name the specific mechanism at work here, because it recurs constantly outside the show too. When one family member consistently appears calm and reasonable while another appears volatile and difficult, observers default to trusting the calm person’s account, regardless of who actually caused the underlying harm. Composure gets mistaken for credibility. That default is exactly what lets a genuine betrayal, like appropriating a dead woman’s portrait, get reframed as an overreaction on the part of the person who was actually wronged.

This dynamic shows up in family therapy sessions constantly, usually in a much less dramatic form than a stolen painting. A stepparent who never raises their voice gets read as the reasonable one by default, while a grieving child whose emotions are, understandably, closer to the surface gets read as the problem needing management. Recognizing that this is a pattern about presentation rather than about who’s actually right is often the first step toward correcting the family’s entire read of the situation.

How Does the Stepmother Function as a Mirror?

The stepmother acts, in a distorted way, as a mirror for Fleabag, reflecting back exaggerated versions of traits Fleabag herself struggles with, particularly around her own mother. The stepmother’s superficiality, her hunger for external validation, and her subtle aggressions read as amplified echoes of patterns Fleabag carries in different, quieter forms. That’s not equivalence. It’s a catalyst. The stepmother’s presence forces Fleabag to confront parts of her own internal landscape she’d otherwise keep avoiding indefinitely.

Consider Marcia, a composite client who struggled intensely when her father remarried in her late thirties. Marcia described her own stepmother, much like Fleabag’s, as a constant, low-grade threat to her cherished memories of her mother. She used the word “erased” to describe her sense of place inside her own family history, as though her stepmother were quietly displacing her mother’s memory and Marcia’s own role as the eldest daughter both at once. That’s a specific attack on belonging and identity within a family system, and it’s the kind of injury that tends to go completely unacknowledged because nothing about it looks like conventional harm from the outside.

These dynamics highlight how a stepmother figure can become a container for anger, grief, and frustration a daughter doesn’t feel safe directing straight at her father. By virtue of position alone, the stepmother often becomes cast as the antagonist, whether or not her intentions were ever malicious. That triangulation blocks genuine communication and keeps cycles of resentment running underneath a surface of polite, strained pleasantries.

This is why trauma scholars such as Judith Herman, MD, and Bessel van der Kolk, MD, are useful companions for reading pop culture this way. Both make clear, in different registers, that trauma extends past a single past event into a present-tense pattern living in the body, relationships, memory, and agency. Their work keeps this kind of analysis grounded in clinical humility rather than turning a television character into a diagnostic parlor game.

Who Actually Gets to Be Seen in This Family?

Fleabag’s direct address to the camera is doing real clinical work well beyond its comedic function. In a family system where her grief is disenfranchised and her emotional reality is routinely dismissed, breaking the fourth wall becomes her only dependable outlet for validation. Those asides let the audience see her internal monologue, her unfiltered reaction to the absurdity and pain of her family life, in a way no one inside the show is willing to witness for her.

Who actually gets to be seen, truly seen, in this family? Fleabag often feels invisible, her pain unacknowledged, her voice functionally unheard. The stepmother, meanwhile, thrives on being seen and admired, meticulously curating both her image and her art. That contrast reveals a real power imbalance: whoever controls the family’s dominant narrative tends to control its emotional reality too. Fleabag’s address to us, the audience, becomes her only real outlet, a plea to be witnessed in her truth even when her own family refuses to offer that witnessing.

This being-seen-versus-unseen dynamic shows up constantly in families where grief and trauma go unaddressed. When a parent moves on quickly, or a new partner enters mid-crisis, a child’s emotional needs frequently get pushed to the margins. Attention shifts toward the new couple’s happiness and future, leaving the child feeling like a relic of a past everyone else is quietly eager to move past. That produces a specific, compounding form of abandonment: not being left, but being deprioritized in real time while everyone insists nothing has actually changed.

The stepmother, in this reading, becomes a stand-in for a broader societal expectation that grief should be tidy, contained, and quickly resolved, especially once a new relationship is blooming. Her presence forces Fleabag, and by extension the audience, to interrogate that expectation directly. What happens when your grief refuses to fit the box society hands you? What happens when the people meant to support you are, actively or passively, undermining the healing you’re trying to do? Those are urgent questions for anyone navigating complicated family dynamics after a loss.

In one composite clinical vignette, Rhonda noticed that Fleabag’s story stayed with her because it mirrored a pattern she’d normalized for years: staying articulate, useful, and composed while her body kept quietly registering an old threat underneath the calm. The goal was never to diagnose the stepmother, or herself, from a distance. It was to use the show as a safer third object, a way to say, “Something about this feels familiar,” before she was ready to name the whole thing directly.

Both/And: Empathy for the Stepmother, Validation for Fleabag

While the stepmother is undeniably a difficult character, a trauma-informed reading asks for a more nuanced view than pure villainy. She’s a product of her own experiences and, likely, her own unmet needs. Her hunger for acceptance, for a stable family, for artistic recognition, while often self-serving and badly executed, comes from a genuinely human place. None of that excuses her actions. It does allow for a more complete picture of the family system she’s now part of.

Real healing tends to require acknowledging the humanity in everyone involved, including the people who caused you pain, without that acknowledgment functioning as forgiveness you’re not ready to offer. The stepmother could reasonably be seen as another self-absorbed mother figure, and even self-absorption this pronounced usually masks a deeper insecurity underneath it. Holding space for her potential vulnerability, while fully validating Fleabag’s very real suffering, moves the story past a simplistic good-versus-evil frame into something closer to how families actually work.

This is a delicate balance to strike in real life, every bit as much as on screen: validating your own pain and anger while staying open to the possibility that the person who caused it is themselves wounded and repeating a pattern they learned somewhere else. That openness doesn’t erase anyone’s responsibility. It can, though, help you detach from the personal sting long enough to see the systemic pattern underneath it, which is often the actual key to breaking the pattern rather than just surviving inside it.

The show never actually asks viewers to forgive the stepmother. It does ask us to sit with the complexity of even the most difficult relationships rather than resolving them into a tidy verdict. That kind of sustained ambiguity is harder to hold than a clean judgment, and it’s also closer to the truth of how most real families actually function.

I think about this often with Marcia specifically, because her stepmother, unlike the character in the show, eventually did real, unglamorous work to repair the relationship over several years, apologizing directly for the specific ways she’d contributed to Marcia’s sense of erasure. That repair didn’t erase the original harm or make the early years retroactively fine. It did prove something worth naming: the both/and stance does more than make peace with a relationship that will never change. Sometimes it’s also the necessary posture that keeps a door open long enough for a real repair to actually happen on the other end.

The Systemic Lens: Family Trauma and the New Normal

Zoom out from the stepmother as an individual, and Fleabag reveals how an entire family system gets reorganized by a death and a remarriage, reaching past the individuals most directly involved. Fleabag isn’t the only one struggling. Her sister Claire, her father, and even the stepmother herself are all navigating a new, unstable equilibrium that nobody in the family has openly named or grieved together.

The family attempts to manufacture a “new normal” without processing the old losses first, which produces a brittle facade that cracks under any real pressure. That’s a common pattern in families experiencing significant unprocessed loss: everyone agrees, tacitly, to move forward at the pace of whoever is most eager to leave the grief behind, which is rarely the person still most affected by it.

When a new partner enters a family system that hasn’t finished grieving, they typically step into a pre-existing void and, unknowingly, into a minefield of unspoken expectations. The stepmother, in this frame, becomes a visible symptom of the family’s collective inability to address its own grief directly. She absorbs the pain of the past because the family projects it onto her rather than doing the harder, slower work of naming it themselves.

The father’s passive role in all of this deserves specific attention. His inability to truly see or validate Fleabag’s pain, and his prioritizing of his own comfort and his new relationship over his daughter’s emotional needs, perpetuates the disenfranchisement even without any single dramatic act of neglect. That kind of passive parental failure is a genuine, underrecognized source of harm, and it’s worth naming precisely because it rarely looks like the more obvious forms of neglect people are trained to recognize.

How Do You Reclaim Your Narrative?

Reclaiming your story after a loss like this means asserting your right to your own memories and experiences, even when the people around you would prefer a tidier version of events. It’s an act of fierce self-advocacy, and it usually requires confronting uncomfortable truths and challenging family dynamics that have gone unquestioned for years. It sounds like: this is my truth, and it matters, even when the room doesn’t want to hear it.

Your story, your memories, and your feelings remain valid whether or not anyone else chooses to acknowledge them. The stepmother in Fleabag is a stark reminder of what happens when those fundamental needs go unmet inside a family. Understanding her symbolic role can offer real insight into your own family dynamics, and the courageous work of naming and healing them.

Reclaiming a narrative like this rarely happens through a single confrontation, however satisfying that might be to imagine. More often it’s a slow accumulation of smaller moments: correcting the family record once, out loud, even if no one fully receives it. Declining to laugh at a joke that retells your history wrong. Naming, privately or in therapy, exactly what you lost and exactly when the loss stopped being acknowledged by the people around you. None of these moments looks dramatic from the outside. All of them are load-bearing.

Rhonda eventually had a version of this moment with her own father, years after our work together had ended, when she finally told him directly that she’d never actually grieved her mother in front of the family, because there had never been room made for it. He didn’t respond perfectly. He also, for the first time, acknowledged that the timeline had moved faster than it should have. That imperfect acknowledgment was enough. It didn’t rewrite the past, but it gave the present a slightly firmer floor to stand on.

In my work with clients carrying this exact pattern, it rarely arrives with a neat label attached. It shows up as exhaustion, chronic over-responsibility, a body that can’t quite settle, and a life that reads as more functional from the outside than it feels to actually live. Clinically, a story like Fleabag’s Godmother becomes useful precisely because it gives clients language for something that had, until then, no name at all.

When I sit with driven women who recognize themselves in this dynamic, the work is rarely about deciding whether a character, or a real stepmother, was good or bad. The more useful question is what your body learned to do in the presence of love, loss, obligation, and shame, and that question belongs beside deeper resources like my guides on family trauma in prestige television, maternal wounds in pop culture, and emotionally engulfing parents, because the cultural text is only the doorway. The real work is learning what your own nervous system has been quietly carrying the whole time.

I want to name the two composite threads running through this piece directly. Rhonda is the client who can describe everyone else’s pain with striking precision and loses language the moment her own need enters the room. Marcia is the client who’s built an impressive life around never asking too directly for care. Neither woman is broken. Both adapted intelligently to relational conditions that made direct wanting feel dangerous, selfish, or too costly to risk. If any part of that description lands close to home, you’re welcome to take my attachment-style quiz or connect with me directly. Your journey toward a handmade and meaningful life is waiting to unfold, whenever you’re ready for it.

Related Reading

• Waller-Bridge, Phoebe. (Creator). (2016-2019). Fleabag [TV series]. Two Brothers Pictures.
• Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. (1992). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
• Herman, Judith Lewis. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
• Doka, Kenneth J. (2002). Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice. Research Press.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
2. Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
3. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.

Medical Disclaimer