The Grief of Parenting Differently Than You Were Parented

Parenting • May 10, 2026

The Ache That Shows Up After the Good Days

Cheri is standing at her kitchen counter at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, a mug of chamomile tea gone lukewarm in her hands, still wearing the blazer she had on for her 7 a.m. deposition. The dishwasher is running. Through the window she can see the porch light throwing a soft yellow circle over the driveway, and behind her, upstairs, both kids are finally asleep after a bedtime that actually went well: books, backrubs, the youngest one laughing so hard at her own joke she had the hiccups. It was a good night. Cheri did what she set out to do twenty years ago, when she decided her house would sound different than the one she grew up in.

And she is crying into a mug of tea she doesn’t even want anymore.

Not because anything went wrong. Because nothing did. Because the ordinary sweetness of that bedtime, the ease of it, the fact that her daughter looked at her without flinching, landed somewhere old and tender. I didn’t have this. The thought arrives without her permission, uninvited, and it does not feel like gratitude. It feels like grief wearing gratitude’s clothes.

This is the paradox at the center of parenting differently than you were parented: the better you do it, the more clearly you can see what you didn’t get. Relief and loss don’t take turns. They show up in the same breath.

What Cheri is grieving isn’t the bedtime itself. It’s the proverbial foundation, the family of origin, the early architecture of care that was supposed to be poured before she ever needed to ask for it, and wasn’t. The upper floors of her life look remarkable: the career, the marriage, the two children who fall asleep laughing. The proverbial house of life she’s built as an adult is genuinely beautiful. It’s the foundation beneath it that she’s still, quietly, mourning.

What Is Parenting Differently Than You Were Parented?

Parenting differently than you were parented means consciously choosing to interrupt the patterns, reflexes, and emotional inheritances passed down from your own caregivers, and building something else in their place, often without a template for what that something else should look like. It is repair work and disruption work at the same time. For women like Cheri, a litigator, and Mariah, a hospital administrator, the drive to do this is inseparable from their own history of emotional neglect or inconsistent caregiving. You cannot give your child what you never watched modeled without first learning it yourself, usually the hard way, usually mid-parenthood.

I think about Bowlby’s original case notes sometimes when a client describes this exact moment, the good bedtime that somehow breaks her open. He wasn’t writing about grief when he mapped attachment; he was writing about survival systems. But every clinician who has sat with a mother mid-sob over a peaceful Tuesday night knows that survival systems and grief live in the same nervous system, often in the same five minutes.

Here is what therapists mean, in plain terms, when we talk about an internal working model. Think of it as the operating manual a child writes for herself before she has any words, based entirely on how her caregivers responded to her needs. If a caregiver showed up reliably, the manual says: needs are safe to have, help is coming. If a caregiver was distracted, harsh, or simply not there, the manual says something closer to: needs are dangerous, handle this yourself. That manual doesn’t get revised just because the child grows up and becomes competent. It runs quietly in the background of every bedtime, every school pickup, every moment a woman’s own child asks her for something. Which is why in practice, so many of the driven, capable women I work with can run a department, close a deal, or manage a household with total competence, and still feel eleven years old the instant their child cries for them at 2 a.m. The competence is real. So is the old manual underneath it.

This grief is rarely announced. It shows up sideways: in the extra minute a woman spends staring at her child’s sleeping face, in the tightness in her throat during a school assembly, in the way she has to leave the room after her son says “I love you, Mom” without being asked. Grief about childhood doesn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like a woman standing very still in her own kitchen, holding a mug she’s forgotten she’s holding.

The Neuroscience of Parenting Grief

Dr. Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of The Developing Mind, has spent decades documenting how early relational experience literally shapes the architecture of the brain, not metaphorically, but in measurable patterns of neural integration. When a woman parents in a way that contradicts what her own nervous system learned to expect, she is not just making a behavioral choice. She is asking her brain to override a wiring diagram laid down before she had language for what was happening to her.

Dr. Stephen Porges, PhD, distinguished university scientist at Indiana University and originator of polyvagal theory, offers a useful map for what happens in Cheri’s body at that kitchen counter. Her nervous system is running two calculations simultaneously: this is safe and this is unfamiliar, and unfamiliar reads, at the cellular level, as a little bit dangerous. That’s why a good night can still leave a driven woman shaky. Her body isn’t malfunctioning. It’s noticing that the present doesn’t match the template, and noticing takes energy, sometimes grief-shaped energy.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and founder of the Trauma Research Foundation, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written that trauma is stored less as a story and more as a felt sense in the body, a readiness to brace that outlives the danger that created it. For women parenting past inherited neglect or narcissistic caregiving, that bracing doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly narrows the range of feelings that seem safe to have, which is part of why the grief in this piece so often gets misread as ingratitude, when it is closer to a body finally exhaling.

Dr. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, describes healing as happening in stages: safety first, then remembering and mourning, then reconnecting to a life that includes both the past and something new. Parenting differently often forces a woman through all three stages at once, in real time, while also packing school lunches.

I’ve started thinking of this as recursive healing. It doesn’t move in a straight line from wounded to whole. It loops. A woman gets the safety stage mostly settled in her twenties, feels steady for a while, and then becomes a parent, and the remembering-and-mourning stage reopens without asking permission, often triggered by something as small as her toddler reaching up for a hug. The loop isn’t a setback. It’s the nervous system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do when new information, in this case, the information that closeness can be safe, finally has somewhere to land.

How This Shows Up in Driven Women

Cheri is forty-four, a litigator at a mid-size firm, the kind of woman colleagues describe as unflappable. In session, she describes the bedtime scene and then goes quiet. “I keep waiting to just feel proud,” she says. “Instead I feel like I got robbed and I don’t know who to be angry at.” Her mother wasn’t cruel. She was simply absent in the particular way busy, anxious, undertreated parents can be absent while still occupying the room. Cheri grew up fed, clothed, and essentially alone with her feelings. Now she watches her own daughter run to her with a scraped knee, certain of comfort, and something in Cheri’s chest cracks a little wider every time.

I’ve come to call this the mirror problem: the child’s ease becomes a mirror the parent didn’t ask for, reflecting back exactly what was missing. Cheri isn’t broken by her daughter’s security. She’s finally standing close enough to her own old wound to feel its edges.

Mariah’s version looks different on the outside. She is thirty-nine, runs patient operations for a regional hospital system, and grew up with a mother whose affection was a transaction, warm when Mariah performed well, cold and punishing when she didn’t. Mariah’s fawn response, the reflexive people-pleasing that develops when appeasement is the only path to safety, still fires in her own home. She catches herself mid-sentence, softening a boundary with her son because some old part of her expects retaliation if she holds firm. Each time she catches it and holds the boundary anyway, she feels a fresh wave of loss. Not because the boundary was wrong. Because holding it means admitting, again, that her mother’s love was conditional in a way no child should have to earn.

Of course you’re exhausted. You are doing two full-time jobs at once: raising your children and re-parenting the child you used to be, usually in the same five-minute window, usually with no backup.

Both women are what I’d call over-functioning in their outer lives and under-supported in their inner ones. That combination is common among the driven women I see in my practice, women whose competence at work has taught them to solve problems fast and alone, and who then bring that same instinct to a form of grief that cannot be solved. It can only be felt, slowly, with company.

There’s a third pattern I want to name, because it doesn’t look like either Cheri’s or Mariah’s on the surface. Some women don’t cry at the good bedtime. They feel nothing at all, a flatness where the ache should be, and that flatness worries them more than tears would. If this is you, I want to be clear that numbness is not the absence of grief. It’s often grief’s oldest disguise, the one a child learns to wear when there was no safe adult around to help her feel her feelings as a kid. The nervous system, over years, gets efficient at going quiet rather than risking a big feeling with no one there to help regulate it. That efficiency served you once. It doesn’t mean the grief isn’t there. It means it’s waiting for a room safe enough to surface in.

The Role of Emotional Immaturity and Attachment

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, clinical psychologist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, describes emotionally immature caregivers as adults who struggle to tolerate their child’s emotional needs because those needs threaten the caregiver’s own fragile regulation. Children raised this way often become hyper-attuned to everyone else’s feelings and strangers to their own. That hyper-attunement doesn’t disappear at eighteen. It shows up at the school pickup line, in the boardroom, and at 9:40 on a Tuesday night at the kitchen counter.

Donald Winnicott, FRCP, British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, coined the phrase “good enough mother” to describe a parent who doesn’t need to be flawless, only reliably present and willing to repair mistakes when they happen. For women recovering from emotionally immature parenting, “good enough” can feel like a trap door. If good enough was supposed to be the standard all along, why did it never arrive for them? That question deserves an answer, and the answer is not comforting: sometimes it simply didn’t. That’s the loss. The good-enough version of childhood existed as a concept and never touched the ground in their actual house.

Attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth’s work on internal working models offers a slightly gentler frame. Those models are revisable. Slowly, imperfectly, but revisable. Every time Mariah holds a boundary without collapsing into appeasement, she is not erasing her history. She is laying new track next to the old one, and both can exist. The old track doesn’t have to be demolished for the new one to hold weight.

Both/And: Gratitude and Loss, Held Together

The grief of parenting differently rarely resolves into a clean story of loss followed by triumph. It is a both/and experience: the ache of what you didn’t receive sitting right beside the genuine hope of what you’re building, at the same time, in the same body, on the same Tuesday.

Cheri, months into this work, can now say out loud that she is proud of the mother she has become and that she still grieves the daughter she was allowed to be. Both are true. Neither cancels the other. She no longer needs the good bedtime to feel simply good; she can let it be complicated, tender and sore at once, and keep going anyway.

Clinically, holding both/and disrupts the binary a lot of driven women get stuck in, the sense that they must either feel grateful for their progress or grieve their history, as if feeling one disqualifies the other. Dr. Daniel Siegel’s concept of integration, the linking of differentiated parts of the self into a coherent whole, applies directly here. A woman doesn’t heal by resolving the contradiction. She heals by making enough room inside herself for the contradiction to sit down and stay a while.

Mariah describes it this way now: “I used to think if I felt sad about my childhood, it meant I was failing at gratitude. Now I know the sadness and the gratitude are roommates. They’re not fighting for the same chair.” That’s not a tidy resolution. It’s a livable one, which, in my experience, is usually the more honest kind.

I want to name a third piece of this both/and, because it gets skipped over often: compassion for your own parents can coexist with grief about what they didn’t give you. This is not the same as excusing harm, and it’s not a requirement. But for many women, especially those whose parents were themselves under-resourced, undertreated, or parenting inside their own unhealed history, there’s room to hold a fuller picture. Your mother’s limitations and your loss can both be true. You don’t owe anyone forgiveness on a schedule, and you’re also not required to stay angry to prove the loss was real.

The Systemic Lens: Why This Grief Stays Invisible

Individual healing matters enormously here, but it cannot be separated from the larger systems that shape how women are allowed to talk about parenting at all. Culture, gender expectations, workplace norms, and family loyalty rules all conspire, usually without anyone intending it, to keep this particular grief unspoken.

Driven women are expected to hold professional excellence and maternal warmth simultaneously, with no visible seams. There is very little cultural permission to say “I am doing well and I am grieving” in the same sentence. The expectation is to pick a lane: struggling mother or thriving professional, not both. That binary is not a personal failing. It is a structural pressure, and it falls disproportionately on women who are already managing the invisible labor of emotional translation at home and performance at work.

Family systems add another layer. Salvador Minuchin, MD, Argentine-American psychiatrist and founder of structural family therapy, taught that individual distress often reflects the organization of the whole family system, not just one person’s private struggle. When a woman starts parenting differently than her family of origin’s norm, she isn’t only healing herself. She is renegotiating the unspoken rules of an entire system that may not welcome the change. Extended family can read her new boundaries as rejection rather than repair, which adds a second, quieter grief: the loss of easy belonging in the family she came from.

This is where community becomes clinically necessary, not optional. Structured spaces where this grief can be spoken aloud and witnessed, whether in therapy, in executive coaching, or in a program built specifically around this experience, interrupt the isolation that makes disenfranchised grief so corrosive. Naming a loss in front of another person who understands it changes its shape. It doesn’t erase the loss. It makes it bearable.

bell hooks, cultural critic and author of All About Love, wrote that a culture of domination teaches people to confuse care with control, and that unlearning this confusion is generational work, not individual work alone. I think about that framing often with clients like Cheri and Mariah, both of whom were raised in households shaped, at least in part, by generations of financial precarity and racial stress that their own parents carried into the family system without language or support to process it. The grief in this piece is personal. It is also, quietly, structural. A parent who is under-resourced by a system that doesn’t protect her time, her healthcare, or her safety has less capacity left over for attunement, no matter how much she loves her child. Naming that doesn’t excuse harm. It locates the harm more accurately, which is usually the first step toward not repeating it.

A Path Through the Grief

There is no single technique that resolves this grief, and I want to be direct about that rather than promise a shortcut that doesn’t exist. What I have seen work, consistently, across more than fifteen years in practice, is a sequence: safety in the body first, then naming the loss out loud to a witness, then slowly building new relational habits that don’t require perfection to count as real.

For Cheri, that meant learning to notice the tightness in her chest at bedtime as information rather than a problem to fix immediately. For Mariah, it meant practicing the physical sensation of holding a boundary without apologizing three times afterward, and tracking, with a coach, what her body did each time she managed it.

Neither woman “finished” grieving. That’s not how disenfranchised grief works. It softened. It became something they could carry alongside the parenting they were proud of, rather than something that ambushed them every time a bedtime went well.

If you’re early in this work, here is a smaller, more practical starting point than “heal your childhood.” Notice the moment. The tea gone cold. The tightness in the chest during the school assembly. The urge to apologize after holding a boundary. Don’t rush past it and don’t diagnose yourself in the moment. Just notice, and if you can, say it out loud to someone safe later: “Something old came up for me today.” That single sentence, said consistently over months, is often where disenfranchised grief starts to become less disenfranchised. It stops living only in your body and starts living, a little, in relationship.

Peter Levine, PhD, biophysicist and founder of Somatic Experiencing, has written that trauma resolution happens not through reliving the story in detail but through small, tolerable increments of bodily sensation, noticed and released a little at a time. That’s a useful corrective for driven women who tend to want to understand their way out of a feeling. You don’t have to fully explain the grief of parenting differently to start metabolizing it. You have to notice it, in small doses, more often than once.

If you recognize yourself in Cheri or Mariah, in the tea gone cold, in the boundary held with a shaking voice, I want you to know that grief is not evidence you’re doing it wrong. It’s often evidence you’re finally close enough to your own history to feel its edges, which usually means you’re doing something right. You don’t have to grieve alone, and you don’t have to finish grieving before you’re allowed to feel proud of the parent you’re becoming. Both can sit at your kitchen counter with you. Most nights, they already are.

Warmly, Annie.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: retrospect and prospect. Am J Orthopsychiatry. 1982;52(4):664-678. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1982.tb01456.x. PMID: 7148988.
2. 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.
3. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
4. 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)

• Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. Patterns of Attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978.
• Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London: Penguin, 1971.
• Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Oakland: New Harbinger, 2015.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

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