“I feel guilty complaining about my mother.”

“I feel guilty complaining about my mother.”

“I feel guilty complaining about my mother.”

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • August 16, 2020

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

You’re in your weekly video therapy session with your therapist. You start telling her about what your friend shared with you over the weekend. Your friend told you how her mother is planning to drive cross country to social isolation with her and her baby indefinitely to help them through the Fall and Winter as her maternity leave ends and she returns to work online. 

Your friend was elated. Relieved. Gushing about how much she loves her mom and how her mom is like a best friend.

As you recount the news, you feel the tears in your eyes and your throat tightening thinking about complaining about your mother. You tell your therapist, “I just wish… no, never mind.”

“Go on,” your therapist prompts.

“No, it’s just that, I don’t know. I just wish I could count on my mother for the same thing. God, I can’t even imagine what that would feel like! But, ugh, I hate feeling this way. I feel so guilty for complaining about her. I feel guilty about feeling so disappointed with our relationship. Because I mean, she tries her best.”

1. “Why do I still feel so sad?”
2. Therapy is not about parent bashing.
3. Let’s unpack “guilt” and “complaining.”
4. You get to be upset with your mother.
5. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.
6. We arrive at a more moderate, realistic view of our mothers and of reality.
7. Why holding both views matter.
8. Now, a caveat.
9. Processing Mother Ambivalence Through Integration-Focused Therapy
10. Wrapping this up.

“Why do I still feel so sad?”

You feel so torn. You feel conflicted.

On the one hand, she grew you.

She literally gave you life.

She held you when you were a baby.

And she stayed up late at night with you when you were sick.

Each August in elementary school she bought you new school clothes, a backpack, and three-ring Lisa Frank binders.

You know she loves you in her own way. And you feel guilt complaining about your mother.

And you hold these memories, this knowledge of what she sacrificed, alongside painful memories. Vivid memories.

Memories of being criticized for your weight and stockiness. Jokingly, yes, but still…

Memories, too, where you were shamed for your feelings – “Why are you so angry all the time? What’s wrong with you?”

Of being slapped when you talked back as a teen.

Memories of not having her emotional support when you needed it most and the reality of your brittle, surface-level relationship today as adults.

The kind of relationship that will never look like her driving cross country to help you out in your hour of need.

And you struggle with this.

You struggle to reconcile what you know you “should” be grateful for (and what you are grateful for, in some ways), alongside the pain and anger you hold in your heart towards this one very important person in your life.

If you – like so many people – struggle to reconcile your care and appreciation for your mom alongside your pain and anger with her, if you particularly struggle with this when trying to talk or “complain” about your mother in therapy or in any other context, today’s post is for you.

Is therapy just about bashing your parents?

No — therapy is not about bashing your parents. It’s about telling the truth of your experience so the truth can be metabolized. Naming what hurt you isn’t blame; it’s accuracy. Real therapy moves toward integration — seeing your parents as fully human, holding both their love and their limits, without erasing what was actually painful.

I want to go on the record and say something: therapy is not about parent bashing.

Therapy and therapists so often get a bad rap for making our clients exhume the past simply for the sake of complaining and “making mom and dad” wrong.

“Shrinks! All they want to do is talk about your childhood!”

I don’t think conflated generalizations like this are ever that helpful.

While therapy absolutely does invite you to turn backward, to look at what was, there is intentionality and clinical reasoning to that.

When we’re able to recall our memories, to make sense of them, and to feel all of our attendant feelings about those memories in the presence of a kind, compassionate witness, we’re able to support our nervous systems and psyches in healing.

So yes, while therapy and therapists will invite our clients to turn backward, to reflect on early life experiences, particularly with our primary caregivers and attachment figures, the goal here is not to “parent bash.”

The idea is to help you see your past, your history, more realistically and more cohesively.

We will invite you to talk about your mother (and father, or mother and mother, or father and father or grandparents – whatever iteration of family raised you) in order so that you can see things more clearly so you can integrate your experiences and get the support you need.

* And, for the intents and purposes of this article, while I use the term mother and birthing language, adoptive mothers and/or any parental or guardian-figure can and should be substituted throughout.

What does it actually mean to feel guilt about complaining about your mother?

Feeling guilt about complaining about your mother usually means a part of you still believes that loving her requires protecting her — even from your own honest experience. The guilt often masks deeper grief, unmet needs, and a child-self who learned that her feelings were dangerous. The guilt isn’t proof you’re wrong. It’s proof of how loyal you’ve had to be.

But now, let’s unpack and explore what it means to feel guilty and to complain.

Guilt is a signal, an emotional sign that says, “I have done something wrong.”

When we feel guilt rise up in us as we talk about our parents in anything less than positive ways, there’s a clue there for you to pay attention to.

Some part of you thinks you are doing something wrong.

What do you know about this part of you?

What did you learn was okay or not okay when it came to talking about your parents growing up?

Was it okay to ever have negative thoughts about them?

To express your displeasure with them to them?

Please hear me: You are not “bad” or “wrong” for sharing your painful memories about your mom (or parents or anyone) with your therapist.

You may feel like you’re doing something “wrong” or “bad” but that doesn’t mean that you actually are doing something “wrong” or “bad.”

If guilt emerges when you talk about your mom it means that, most likely, that some part of you is conflicted.

You’re likely conflicted because, at some point, whether this lesson came from your parents directly, or from your church or community at large, you learned that speaking about your parents in anything less than positive ways is wrong.

Regardless of when, where, or who you learned this from, it’s simply not the case.

You get to be upset with your parents.

You get to be upset with your mother.

And you get to recall, express, and feel your feelings about painful moments and memories with her.

Doing so does not make you “guilty.”

You have done nothing wrong.

And, moreover, sharing your feelings and memories of the past is not “complaining.”

Sure, technically, complaining is the expression of dissatisfaction or annoyance about something.

But aside from Dictionary definitions, the personal use of complaining in this instance is usually a pejorative, not a neutral definition.

When used as a pejorative, you’re essentially judging yourself for expressing your dissatisfaction or annoyance with your mom.

So let me ask you a question: Could you release that judgment?

Could you allow yourself to simply have your experience talking about her?

What would it feel like to allow yourself permission and space to share your experiences and memories about your mother without an added layer of judgment and guilt?

What would that feel like?

Both Loving Your Mother AND Grieving What She Couldn’t Give You

So, now that we’ve established that there is a clinical reason to reflect on your memories of your mother and that doing so does not make you wrong or bad, it’s important to understand that your experience with your mom was not either/or.

Your experience with your mother was both/and.

What do I mean by this?

Your mom was not fully bad. Nor was she fully perfect.

You may have many memories of her when she showed up as a good, loving, caring mother. A good enough mother.

And you may have memories, too, where she failed you. Possibly egregiously due to her own limitations and circumstances.

When we can hold both of these realities together – the mother who was good enough and the mother you sometimes (or often) failed you – we arrive at a more integrated view of your mother.

Both/And: Loving Your Mother and Naming What Happened

In my work with clients, the guilt around speaking honestly about a mother’s impact is often the last barrier to authentic healing. The cultural script is powerful: mothers are sacred, maternal love is unconditional, and to criticize your mother is to reveal yourself as ungrateful.

Jenny, a 36-year-old attending physician at a Stanford-affiliated hospital, kept a running tally of her mother’s sacrifices — the double shifts, the immigration paperwork, the meals cooked after twelve-hour days. “How can I sit in therapy and complain about a woman who gave up everything for me?” she asked during our third session. And yet Jenny’s body told a different story: chronic migraines, an inability to receive compliments, and a pattern of choosing partners who withheld affection.

The both/and is this: your mother can have made real sacrifices and real mistakes. She can have loved you in the ways she knew how and still have left you with wounds that shape your adult life. Naming the harm isn’t betrayal. It’s the beginning of a more honest relationship — with her, with yourself, and with the story you’ve been carrying.

The Systemic Lens: Why Women Bear the Guilt of Naming What Hurt Them

The guilt you feel about speaking honestly about your mother didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped by cultural and systemic forces that have been operating long before you were born.

In most cultures, mothers are sacrosanct. The institution of motherhood — distinct from the individual woman doing the mothering — is protected by a web of social, religious, and familial expectations that make any critique feel like heresy. When a driven, ambitious woman begins to name the ways her mother harmed her, she isn’t just confronting a personal history. She’s pushing against a system that has always told women to be grateful, to forgive, to protect the family narrative at all costs.

Harriet Lerner, PhD, psychologist and author of The Dance of Anger, has written extensively about how family systems recruit certain members — often daughters — to carry the emotional labor of loyalty. The “good daughter” role isn’t just a personal identity; it’s a systemic assignment. And guilt is the enforcement mechanism.

This is compounded by the reality that many driven women were raised in families where emotional labor was gendered. Boys were allowed to individuate, to push back, to leave. Girls were expected to stay close, to manage feelings, to keep the peace. When you feel guilty for “complaining” about your mother, you may be enacting a script that was written for you by a system that benefits from your silence.

Recognizing this doesn’t erase the complexity of your feelings. But it does mean that the guilt you carry isn’t evidence of disloyalty. It’s evidence of a system that was never designed to hold your truth.

How do you arrive at a more balanced, realistic view of your mother?

You arrive at a more balanced view of your mother through integration — moving past the split of all-good or all-bad and learning to hold complexity. She loved you and limited you. She showed up and let you down. Both can be true. Integration is slow, grief-soaked work, but it’s where adult relational freedom actually begins.

You move away from idealizing and demonizing her – seeing her as only good or only bad – and instead towards integration.

In psychotherapeutic terms, when we fail to hold this integrative view, when we find ourselves thinking only in black and white, or all-or-nothing thinking, we’re engaging in a psychological defense known as splitting.

Splitting is an inability in someone’s thinking to hold the dichotomy of both the positive and negative aspects of someone else (or ourselves or the world) into a cohesive whole.

If you do have this tendency to “split” in your thinking, please know you probably come by it very honestly and that there’s room for this kind of thinking to grow and to change.

But, for that change to happen, you’ll need to practice doing precisely what feels uncomfortable: challenging yourself to see and hold and accept both the positive and negative aspects of another person.

Such as with your mother.

Why does holding both positive and negative views of your mother matter?

Now, it may go without saying but the ability to hold both positive and negative aspects of another person – such as with your mother – is a healthy, positive thing.

First, it allows you to actually have your feelings if you’ve been resisting acknowledging the painful memories or experiences you have with someone.

When we can name that, even though we love someone, they caused and are still causing us pain, it opens up the possibility for us to feel more fully, to make more sense of our experiences, to seek out the right supports, and to decide more clearly what, if anything, we may need or want to do in that relationship.

As the old therapy saying goes: “We cannot heal what we cannot feel.”

Allow yourself the opportunity to heal by acknowledging your full spectrum of feelings about your mother.

Second, when we can hold both views – both the painful and the positive aspects of our mothers – it can help you grow more accustomed to holding integrated views of others, and with yourself.

And when we can do this – hold more integrated views of others and ourselves – we deepen our capacity for more stability and flexibility in our relationship patterns.

We give others and ourselves permission to be imperfect, to fail, to have ruptures with us, and for there to be space for this imperfection and human reality in our relationships.

The Cultural Pressure to Be Grateful (Even When Nothing Terrible Happened)

Here is something that rarely gets named: the guilt you feel when talking about your mother isn’t only coming from inside you. It’s also coming from the culture you were raised in.

There is a powerful, mostly unspoken cultural script that daughters — especially daughters of mothers who “did their best” — are supposed to feel grateful. Full stop. Not complicated. Not ambivalent. Grateful.

This message comes from everywhere: from religion, which tells us to honor our fathers and mothers. From extended family, who say things like “she sacrificed so much for you.” From social media, flooded with tributes about how mothers are everything. And perhaps most painfully, from the absence of language for what happened in families where nothing overtly terrible occurred — no abuse, no addiction, no abandonment — but where the emotional connection you needed simply was not there.

When there is no dramatic story to tell — when you can’t point to anything that would look bad in a court of law — the cultural messaging becomes even louder: What do you even have to complain about?

Emotional neglect, in these families, is almost invisible. It is defined not by what happened but by what didn’t happen. The attunement that was missing. The curiosity about your inner world that was never quite there. The feeling that you were loved in a transactional, logistical way — kept fed and clothed and educated — but not truly known.

And because emotional neglect leaves no visible marks, because it is largely a story of absence rather than presence, it is extraordinarily easy to dismiss. To minimize. To feel guilty for even mentioning.

The systemic pressure to be a grateful daughter — particularly in families where “nothing terrible happened” — is one of the primary reasons women sit in my office and preface every honest sentence about their mother with “but I know she tried her best.” The guilt isn’t irrational. It has been trained into you, carefully, over many years. And part of the healing work is learning to recognize cultural conditioning for what it is — not the truth of your experience.

What important caveat should you know before processing mother ambivalence?

Just because your mother was imperfect and just because it’s good to hold integrated views of others, does not mean that I’m suggesting that you love her, stay in a relationship, or resume a relationship with her if that contradicts your own intuition and your boundaries.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: having a relationship with an adult child is a privilege, not a right.

If it doesn’t feel safe, and healthy, and supportive for you to be in touch with your mother, then you don’t have to.

You’re always in control of your boundaries and who you let into your life as an adult.

This, I think, is one of the greatest things about being an adult: having a choice about who gets to enter your life. It’s something most of us didn’t have as children.

So even as we work to hold the dichotomy of both aspects of your mother, even as we work to undo the “guilt” you feel for talking about her in anything less than a positive light, please know you don’t have to be in a relationship with her if that doesn’t support you.

How does integration-focused therapy help you process mother ambivalence?

Integration-focused therapy helps you metabolize ambivalence about your mother by giving you space to feel contradictory truths without forcing resolution. A trained relational therapist holds the both/and — your love and your anger, her efforts and her failures — until your nervous system can hold it too. That’s when the guilt loosens and a more honest, less reactive relationship becomes possible.

When you struggle to tell your therapist about your mother’s failures, prefacing every criticism with “but she tried her best,” suffocating under guilt for having any negative feelings about the woman who gave you life, you’re wrestling with what makes mother wounds uniquely complex—the impossibility of reconciling feeling guilty about complaining about your mother with the legitimate pain she caused, whether intentionally or through her own limitations.

Your trauma-informed therapist understands that mother ambivalence creates particular suffering because society, religion, and family systems often demand pure gratitude toward mothers while denying the reality of maternal harm. They recognize how “splitting”—seeing mother as all-good or all-bad—protects you from the overwhelming grief of accepting that the person who should have loved you best also failed you significantly. The guilt isn’t about actual wrongdoing but about breaking powerful taboos against acknowledging maternal imperfection.

The therapeutic work involves developing capacity for integration—holding both truths simultaneously without splitting. Your therapist helps you practice: “My mother bought me school supplies AND criticized my body.” “She stayed up when I was sick AND couldn’t tolerate my emotions.” “She loved me in her limited way AND that way wasn’t enough for what I needed.” Each both/and statement challenges the either/or thinking that keeps you stuck between inappropriate guilt and unexpressed rage.

Together, you explore what you learned about criticizing your mother—perhaps that it meant you were ungrateful, bad, or would lose her love entirely. Your therapist helps you understand that sharing painful memories isn’t complaining or betrayal but necessary truth-telling for integration. They validate that you can appreciate what your mother did provide while grieving what she couldn’t, that understanding her limitations doesn’t obligate you to accept ongoing harm.

Most importantly, therapy provides the relational safety to feel the full spectrum of your mother feelings—the love, disappointment, rage, grief, and longing—without judgment or rushing toward forgiveness. Your therapist models what your mother perhaps couldn’t: the ability to hold complexity, tolerate difficult emotions, and see you as whole even when you’re expressing “negative” feelings that were never allowed before.

Wrapping this up.

As I wrap up this essay I want to reiterate one more time: you get to have your feelings and thoughts about your mother.

All of them.

She was not perfect and she may have failed you and, in her own way, she likely tried to do her best (though sometimes people’s “best” is, frankly, awful).

No matter the unique context of your own childhood and your present adulthood, please allow it to be okay for you to recall and express your full spectrum of memories about your mother.

Now, I’d love to hear from you in the comments:

What’s one way that holding both the positive and negative aspects of your own mother has supported you and your own healing as an adult?

Please feel free to share your experience in the 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

How to Heal: A Path Forward Through Mother Ambivalence

Healing the guilt that comes with complaining about your mother isn’t a matter of either forgiving her or cutting her off. Both of those framings are too clean for what’s actually happening inside you. What the women I work with — Sunita, Jenny, Lisa, and so many others — actually need is something more honest than either extreme: a way to hold the truth of what happened AND the love that still exists, without being disloyal to either. Here’s the path I walk with clients through mother ambivalence, in roughly this order.

1. Give yourself permission to have the feelings before you try to process them. Most driven women arrive in therapy with their complaints already pre-edited — softened, contextualized, balanced with disclaimers about everything their mother got right. That editing is the wound. Before any deeper work can happen, you have to let yourself say the unsoftened version out loud, at least once, in a place where it’s safe to do so. That’s what a trauma-informed therapeutic relationship offers: a witnessing container where the ambivalent truth doesn’t have to be made more palatable before it can be spoken. Start there. The processing comes after the permission, not before.

2. Name specifically what was missing, without comparison. Guilt about complaining often arrives with a silent comparison — but she worked two jobs, but she didn’t hit me, but other women have it worse. Those comparisons are how you’ve kept your own pain at arm’s length for years. In the work, we let them go temporarily. Not to erase what was good about your mother, but to let yourself name, in concrete detail, what you didn’t get. The attunement that wasn’t there. The emotional availability that wasn’t there. The sense of being genuinely known by her that wasn’t there. You cannot grieve what you haven’t first let yourself name.

3. Do inner child work to meet the younger part of you who needed more. The guilt you feel as an adult is often the defensive ghost of a much younger part of you — the child who learned, very early, that having needs made her mother disappear into overwhelm, resentment, or emotional unavailability. That child adapted by making her needs smaller, her complaints quieter, her gratitude louder. Inner child work is the practice of returning to that younger part of you and offering her, in retrospect, the full acknowledgment she never received: What you needed was reasonable. What you didn’t get was a real absence. It was not your job to make it okay. This is slow, tender work. It’s also some of the most life-changing work available.

4. Hold the Both/And as a daily practice, not a one-time decision. You will not arrive at a single moment where you’ve perfectly integrated your love for your mother and your grief for what she couldn’t give you. It’s not that kind of work. Integration is a practice you return to — sometimes daily, sometimes hourly — where you keep refusing to collapse the complexity. She loved me AND she hurt me. She did her best AND her best wasn’t enough. I’m grateful for what I got AND I’m grieving what I didn’t. Every time you hold both halves without abandoning either, the muscle strengthens. Over time, the ambivalence becomes less exhausting to carry.

5. Decide, with support, what ongoing contact actually needs to look like. This is one of the most delicate pieces of the work — and also one of the most important. Healing doesn’t require cutting your mother out, and it doesn’t require pretending the wounds don’t exist either. What it requires is that you make conscious, values-aligned decisions about the contact you have now, based on what is actually good for you. For some women that means lower-contact relationships with clearer boundaries. For some it means time apart to stabilize before re-engaging. For some it means continuing with contact as it was, but internally, on different terms. There’s no universal right answer. A good trauma therapist can help you find yours.

6. Return to the systemic lens when guilt flares up. The cultural pressure to be grateful — to protect your mother’s reputation, to not speak ill, to make peace for the family’s sake — is real, and it’s specifically heavier on women. When the old guilt rises up, remind yourself: This guilt isn’t just mine. It’s the accumulated weight of generations of women who were told to stay quiet about what happened to them. Naming the systemic dimension doesn’t erase your individual feelings. It contextualizes them. And context, for most of the women I work with, is what finally loosens the grip of the guilt.

This work does not have a finish line. It’s not the kind of thing you complete and move past. It’s more like a relationship with your own history that gets progressively more honest, more compassionate, and more integrated over time. If you’re ready to begin — or to deepen what you’ve already started — individual trauma-informed therapy is built for exactly this kind of relational trauma recovery. You can also explore Fixing the Foundations, Annie’s signature self-paced course for driven women rebuilding the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives, or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

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

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.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer