What does it mean to remother yourself and why is it so critical for our growth as women?

INNER CHILD WORK • May 14, 2017

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

At the heart of the work of therapy, at least the way I practice it, is the idea that we are both wounded by relationship and yet can also be healed through a different kind of relational experience.

Let me explain: We don’t arrive into this world pre-programmed like a computer or piece of software. We form our patterns, our beliefs, our ways of being in the world in response to the environment and the relationships around us.

And sometimes this may mean being wounded because of our early environments and relationships. Including with our father and our mother.

Specifically, when it comes to being wounded in our mother relationship, this can often arise when we have/had a mother in our childhood and adolescence who couldn’t meet most or any of our mental, emotional, or physical needs.

Perhaps she was neglectful, or avoidant, or dealing with mental health challenges and emotional limitations of her own. Perhaps she passed away when we were young and still growing up into adulthood. Or perhaps she was outright abusive in some way.

Perhaps she was dealing with her own overwhelming inherited pain of being a woman born into a time when it was even harder to be female in a patriarchal, largely still female-denigrating world. Or perhaps she was like so many women out there, struggling to do the best she could in what is largely regarded as the world’s hardest job and sometimes (or often) fell short despite her best efforts.

Whatever the case was for you, almost ALL of us have places inside of us that need to be remothered. Or, in other words, healed through reparative experiences of relationship that we simply couldn’t get from our family-of-origin, flesh-and-blood mother.

What is the opportunity to heal that becoming a woman holds?

And the good news is that with awareness and a different kind of relational experience, whether that’s with yourself or with others, there’s opportunity to heal and strengthen any of the gaps. Wounds you may have unconsciously or consciously developed in response to your childhood experience.

So this post is not meant to lambast or denigrate mothers out there — far from it!

It’s simply an acknowledgment of our mother’s humanity. (in other words, her limitations.) And the reality that many of us could benefit from more conscious, active psychological re-mothering work in our lives.

And it’s our responsibility now as adults to do this work for ourselves. To grow, to heal, and to show up for our lives as fully as we can.

(And please note: Men can possess the qualities of an archetypal mother, too. So while I use the feminine pronoun throughout this article, this post still applies to you. If you grew up with a single or multiple fathers and no female-identified or female-gendered figure(s) in your life.)

Why is remothering work so important for women’s growth and healing?

The point of remothering work is to have different experiences with yourself and with others. To help you fill in any developmental gaps or unmet needs from childhood that are getting in your way as an adult and sabotaging your ability to engage with and enjoy life.

The way that mothering wounds manifest for each of us is going to be unique and complex.

Growing up, we each develop myriad and usually unconscious coping skills in order to process and tolerate the pain that can come from having a neglectful, absent, or unequipped mother.

So while I can’t personally tell you how your own mothering wounds will manifest, for some, mother wounds can show up in the following ways:

• Unrealistic expectations in relationship.
• An inability to practice foundational self-care.
• Emotionally care-taking others to the point of your own exhaustion and resentment.
• Unconscious self-sabotage in work and in love.
• An inability to ask for and receive support.
• Disordered eating – binge, bulimia, or restriction – or other addictions or numbing coping mechanisms.
• Allowing and accepting poor or abusive treatment from others.
• Living out the unlived lives of our mothers and not being true to ourselves and our own dreams.
• Shame, believing that something is fundamentally wrong with you or that you’re not worthy of love.
• Keeping yourself small – physically, emotionally, or mentally – for fear of stepping fully into your power.
• Feeling relentlessly needy in your relationships.
• Feeling resentful and bitter at your own children or what it means to be a woman in this world.
• Never, ever feeling good enough no matter what you seem to do.

And while these are just some of the many, many ways mothering wounds may manifest, if you find yourself nodding as you read through this list and clearly feel that remothering work may benefit you, good. I invite you to scroll down to the next section of this article.

We can be the same.

You don’t know what you don’t know and, in this case, you may not even be aware that remothering yourself is a healing task facing you because you’re not even aware that something else – something potentially better and healthier – may exist for you as an option in moving through the world.

If this is the case for you, if you find yourself feeling stuck imagining what your own remothering work might be, if you don’t see yourself in the list above but you have a niggling sense that something’s just not right, you may want to consider working with a therapist for a brief stretch of time to even begin to explore what this may look like for you and what might be possible instead.

You may also want to consider learning how to set healthy boundaries when interacting with difficult family members, in order to support yourself and create a thriving adulthood.

Because the reality is, there is so much you stand to gain from conscious remothering work!

And, again, while the benefits of this work may look different for all of us, essentially at the core of more conscious, active remothering work is the possibility of a more cohesive, integrated and grounded sense of self which can immeasurably contribute to our ability to show up for and more consciously engage with our own lives.

What does it actually look like to remother yourself?

So we’ve talked quite a bit about what remothering work is in theory and how and why this may be needed in our lives and what, fundamentally, we stand to gain by doing this work, now I want to dive more deeply into what remothering work actually looks like and provide some creative examples for you that you could imagine weaving into your own life.

So to begin this work, I want you to consider what qualities or characteristics “mother” and “mothering” may mean to you. And while we all have different ideas of what it means to mother, some common characteristics attributed to mothering may include:

• Caring
• Nurturing
• Safe
• Warm
• Protective
• Gentle
• Welcoming
• Embracing
• Soothing
• Supportive
• Loving
• Kind
• Helpful

Take a moment and consider what else you might add to this list.

What comes up for you when you consider what it truly means to mother yourself?

Now, I want you to consider what actions, thoughts, or beliefs would be in alignment with qualities like these. What actions, thoughts, or beliefs did you not receive from your mother (or did receive but could use/want more of) that they you may cultivate?

Because it is with acts and thoughts both large and small that we consciously and actively re-mother ourselves.

And, given this, the opportunities to actively re-mother yourself and to embody the qualities and characteristics of a “good-enough” inner mother are endlessly creative and absolutely unique to each of us.

For example, perhaps each time you turned to your mom for support as a kid she was emotionally unavailable and you learned to stop turning to people for support. And now as an adult, you feel isolated, burdened, longing for connection but afraid of and not knowing how to receive it from others because you’re still scared of that rejection you experienced with your mom.

Remothering yourself, in this case, might look like actively working to learn how to reach out again, tolerating the discomfort that comes up for you when you do this, and seeking out more constructive sources of help so that you can increase your odds of feeling received and supported when you’re struggling.

What are creative ways you can actively remother yourself right now?

• Learning to expose yourself to more examples of healthy, functional mothers — whether this is in real life or in reading books and stories that feature good-enough mothers — and then beginning to internalize and embody their supportive ways of being inside of you.
• Spending time with girlfriends or neighbors who are mothering little children – letting yourself observe and soak up the kindness and love that they show their children.
• Making a list of all the things that you imagine a good, stable, loving mother might do for her child — taking them to medical appointments, making sure they have good clothes that fit, making sure they’re having playdates with friends, etc. — and then doing some of these things for yourself.
• Finding pictures of yourself at different ages and asking that child inside of you what she needs from you.
• Seeking help when you need it (medical, dental, therapy, legal, etc.) and then giving it to yourself.
• Honoring your emotions. Listening to them for the information and wisdom they contain. And then meeting any needs within you that arise.
• Working with a therapist, perhaps one who embodies some motherly characteristics or one who even has children, so that you can have reparative relational experiences with someone warm, caring, and present.
• Creating a soothing, comforting bedtime routine for yourself.
• Reading parenting books (even if you don’t have children!) which can yield some terrific insight into the developmental needs of children at different ages and what’s appropriate/needed from parents at that time.
• Asking for and allowing yourself to receive supports – whether from your therapist, your friends, spiritual guidance, etc.
• Reflecting on what you DID receive from your flesh and blood mother. Celebrating this. Seeing the mothering acts you learned from her that you already do or want to incorporate more into your life.
• Reflecting on what you didn’t receive in childhood. Grieving this. Understanding that grieving the losses and hurts in your childhood may take some time. Seeking out support for this process if you need it.

As you can imagine, this list of examples is but the tip of the iceberg!

Open up a Google doc or your journal and spend some time with this. And then, if you really want to deepen this work, bring that list of insights to your next appointment with your therapist to discuss it.

In closing:

Hopefully, you’re understanding by now that active remothering work is endlessly creative. And can be customized specifically to you. And what you personally need and want in your own healing and personal growth journey. It can have tremendous benefits for you if you engage in it.

And if you’re in doubt about what you need and want or what your own remothering work may entail, please consider working with a therapist to gain some clarity and some support around this. It’s one of the best and biggest gifts and investments you can ever make in yourself.

I truly believe we all do what we know and when we know better we do better. And so on and so forth it goes down the generations. Until someone in the family lineage learns and practices something different with her children. Thus passing on different ways of being.

And so this post today is meant a support in helping you learn something different. The concept of active remothering work. Not only for you but for the generations that may come after you. If you choose to have children.

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

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

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

Warmly,

Annie

Additional resources:

• How To Take Care Of Yourself If Mother’s Day Feels Hard For You.
• Yes, sweetheart, you DO actually get to grieve this.
• A digital “Care Package” of soothing, supportive resources and articles.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: The Complete Guide to Relational Trauma.

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

References

• Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
• Herman, J. L. (1997). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
• Perry, B. D., & Szalavitz, M. (2006). The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook. Basic Books.
• Bassett, R. L., & Perry, B. D. (2019). Mother Wounds: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
• Benjamin, J. (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. Yale University Press.
• Brazelton, T. B., & Sparrow, J. D. (2006). Touchpoints: Birth to Three: Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development. Da Capo Lifelong Books.

Both/And: Holding the Complexity of Your Experience

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. (PMID: 36340842)

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived life.

The driven, ambitious women I work with often struggle with this because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives.

What I see consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is this: the moment you begin to name what happened — without minimizing it, without qualifying it, without adding “but it wasn’t that bad” — something shifts. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But the ground beneath you starts to feel different. More solid. More yours.

That shift doesn’t require you to have it all figured out. It requires you to stop abandoning your own experience in favor of someone else’s comfort. It requires you to trust that your body’s responses — the tension, the hypervigilance, the exhaustion — are not overreactions. They’re data. They’re your nervous system telling you the truth about what it learned early on.

And you deserve a relationship with that truth. Not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s the foundation everything else gets built on. The career you’ve built, the relationships you’ve chosen, the way you parent — all of it benefits when you stop running from what happened and start turning toward it with the right support.

The Systemic Lens: Seeing Beyond the Individual

When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual — “What’s wrong with me?” — we miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which your personal struggle plays out.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt — these aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me — and what systems made it possible?”

What Remothering Actually Looks Like in Practice

The concept of remothering can sound abstract until it becomes embodied — until it’s something you’re actually doing in the specific moments that call for it. In my work with clients, I’ve found that remothering tends to show up most powerfully in three domains: in the relationship you have with your own distress, in the permissions you give yourself, and in the quality of relationships you seek out and maintain.

In the domain of distress, remothering means learning to meet your own pain with the response a good-enough mother would have offered: not fixing it immediately, not minimizing it, not shaming you for having it, but simply being present with it. It means developing the capacity to say to yourself, when you’re struggling, something like: “This is hard. Of course it’s hard. I’m here.” That sounds simple. For many women who learned early that their distress was inconvenient or dangerous or shameful, it’s actually radical.

Camille, a 39-year-old corporate attorney, described her remothering practice this way: “I started noticing that whenever I made a mistake — even a small one, like missing a meeting or forgetting something on my list — I would immediately go into this harsh internal voice. Really cruel. And I started asking: would I speak to a child this way? Would I speak to anyone I loved this way? The answer was obviously no. And slowly I started to interrupt the harsh voice and replace it with something my therapist had modeled — just curiosity. ‘Huh, what happened there? What did you need that you didn’t get?’”

In the domain of permissions, remothering means giving yourself access to things your mother may never have explicitly permitted: rest without earning it, pleasure without guilt, ambition without apology, needs without shame. Many driven women carry a deeply internalized maternal voice that says, in various forms, “that’s not for you” or “you’re being too much” or “who do you think you are?” Remothering involves recognizing that voice as borrowed, not true — and slowly replacing it with something kinder.

In the domain of relationships, remothering involves consciously seeking out and staying in contact with people who offer some version of maternal warmth and wisdom — therapists, mentors, wise older friends, communities of women doing similar healing work. It also involves learning to receive care, which can itself be deeply uncomfortable for women who learned early that accepting care meant becoming vulnerable in dangerous ways. Learning to let support in is part of the work.

There is no end point to remothering — no moment when you’ve finished and can declare yourself fully reparented. But there are unmistakable markers of progress: a gentler inner voice, a greater capacity to rest, an ability to receive care without immediately deflecting it, a sense that your needs are legitimate rather than shameful. These markers don’t appear all at once. They accumulate over time, in the small daily acts of treating yourself the way you deserved to be treated from the beginning.

If you’re drawn to this work and want structured support, Annie’s Fixing the Foundations course was designed specifically for women navigating this terrain. Individual therapy can also provide the reparative relational experience that makes remothering possible at a deeper level. You might also find community and weekly support in Strong & Stable, Annie’s Sunday newsletter for driven women healing relational trauma.

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