The Complexity of Mothers Day When Childhood Trauma Is at Play

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • May 7, 2024

Ambivalent attachment is a pattern that forms when a caregiver is unpredictably loving—sometimes warm and responsive, other times distant or emotionally unavailable—leading a child to feel anxious and unsure if love is stable or reliable. It’s not just being ‘needy’ or ‘clingy’ in adulthood; it’s a deep, often unconscious strategy your brain developed to keep you close to someone whose love felt like it could be taken away at any moment. For you, this means Mother’s Day can trigger a relentless hunger for reassurance that never feels fully met, leaving you caught between longing for closeness and fear of disappointment. Understanding this pattern helps you see that your anxiety around mothering and being mothered is not a personal flaw, but a complex survival response rooted in your earliest relationships.

• You may find Mother’s Day deeply triggering because it reactivates the complex emotions tied to relational trauma—the ongoing experience of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued by your mother during your most formative years.
• Your ambivalent attachment style, shaped by a caregiver who was unpredictably loving and distant, can make you feel anxious about closeness and caught in a cycle of seeking reassurance that never quite feels enough on this holiday.
• Recognizing that your grief is not just about a person but about the loving relationship and childhood you never had allows you to hold the contradictions of love and loss without needing to resolve or simplify them on Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day may feel complex in the most psychologically robust of households.

“Shoot! We forgot to make brunch reservations.”

“Oh my gosh, CVS is closed. Where do we get her flowers now?”

“Does she, like, want breakfast on a tray or something?”

But really, these are like Kindergarten-level complexities compared to the complexity those of us from childhood trauma backgrounds contend with regarding our own mothers and celebrating them, and also (sometimes) now being mothers ourselves.

That’s like black-belt level complexity on this national holiday. 

In this little essay, we’ll explore the origins of the holiday, the complexity of the day when we come from childhood trauma backgrounds, the complexity of the day when we ourselves are now mothers, and how to cope and manage with all this complexity.

1. The well-intended but triggering origins of Mother’s Day.
2. Mother’s Day can be triggering when we were the recipient of poor maternal mental health.
3. Mother’s Day can also feel complex as we now embody the role of mother coming from a trauma background.
4. Finding the right support.
5. Enlisting support to process the complexity.
6. References

What are the well-intended but triggering origins of Mother’s Day?

Because I love history, I wanted to start the essay off by sharing with you a little information on the genesis of this nationally-recognized holiday.

Mother’s Day originated in the early 20th century in the United States, primarily due to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, who intended to memorialize her mother and advocate for a day to honor all mothers. 

Although initially met with resistance (what does that tell you about how society values mothers?), it eventually gained popular approval and became an annual celebration. 

The holiday, when recognized, was meant to honor the mother-child relationship and reflect traditional American values. Especially during the Progressive era and World War I. It served to boost morale and express national loyalty, celebrating traditional roles within the family and society.

While Anna’s intent to celebrate was well intended, the DNA of this day is painful for me as a therapist. Both because the “traditional role” of mothering is shaped by the oppressive social force of Patriarchy and the result of this force is that it’s profoundly negatively impacted many mothers’ mental health, leading to their own inability to care well for their children, sometimes translating into childhood trauma experiences.

(Side note: between being a trauma therapist and lifelong feminist, you can imagine how fun I am at cocktail parties…)

Why is Mother’s Day so triggering when you were raised by a mother with poor mental health?

Now, of course, even as I hold the lens and context for why and how the oppressive social force of the Patriarch has negatively impacted maternal mental and therefore contributed to childhood trauma experiences, I’m not condoning, excusing or permitting the actions (or inactions) of mothers that may have led to childhood trauma experiences for their young.

I believe in holding the both/and of this: the pain of personal experience coupled with understanding of the broader dynamics.

So with that said, I want to honor and acknowledge that for those of us who experienced childhood trauma whether directly or indirectly related to the mental health states of our mothers, the second Sunday of May can be especially painful and triggering when it cyclically rolls around.

I’ve written before two things about Mother’s Day no one is talking about, when Mother’s Day doesn’t feel easy, what it means to remother yourself, how to remother yourself, and on having 16 mothers with ideas about how to care for yourself on this day (including extending permission to formally opt out of celebrating), the criticality of remothering ourselves as part of our childhood trauma recovery journey, and the invitation to imagine that remothering can and should extend to many and multiple “mothering figures” in our lives.

And again let me repeat: you can understand why and how your mother’s mental health was poor, how her personal, professional, and financial power was undermined by contextual, intergenerational societal forces AND you can still feel deep pain, anger, anguish, resentment, and longing for a different mother and different childhood experiences.

Why does Mother’s Day feel complex when you’re now a mother with your own trauma background?

And then, for a sub-segment of us, we may not only identify with coming from a childhood trauma background, but we may now be mothers ourselves and acutely aware of the impossibility of showing up as a perfectly attuned, perfectly regulated, ever-constant emotionally available parent (that most of us imagine would lead to a non-traumatic childhood experience).

Still though, we’re attempting to raise little humans and create a healthy family when we ourselves don’t necessarily come from one.

And yet, between our own unprocessed trauma (that we’re valiantly trying to acknowledge and work through), plus contending with those same lingering oppressive social forces (you cannot tell me the Patriarchy is not still alive and well, slightly diminished, yes, but still poison in the air we breathe), it is so. darn. Hard.

On most days but especially on Mother’s Day, we may be triggered, not only by the reality of our own childhood trauma experiences and what we did or did not receive from our mothers, but also by what we perceive as our own failures as mothers.

If this is you (and for sure it’s me), I cannot overstate how important it is to hold that compassionate duality we talked about before: understanding of the context in which we’re trying to do this impossible task and recognition and validation of all our feels.

How do you find the right support to get through a difficult Mother’s Day?

The complexity of Mother’s Day—whether you’re navigating unresolved maternal wounds, fears about your own parenting, or both—often requires more than self-help strategies and permission slips to opt out. This is where trauma-informed therapy becomes invaluable, offering a space to untangle the layered emotions that surface when a holiday designed to celebrate mothers instead triggers grief, rage, or shame.

A skilled therapist understands that your feelings about your mother aren’t simple—they’re woven through with love, longing, disappointment, and often a crushing guilt that makes you wonder if you’re allowed to have complicated feelings about someone who “did their best” or who society tells you to unconditionally honor.

In the therapeutic space, you can explore the both/and of your experience without having to choose sides or minimize your pain to protect anyone else’s feelings. This becomes especially important if you find yourself wrestling with guilt about having complex feelings toward your mother—that persistent sense that acknowledging her failures somehow makes you ungrateful or bad.

What does it look like to enlist support for processing the complexity of Mother’s Day?

There is no real thesis statement to today’s essay.

Complex issues can’t be tidied up into bento box solutions.

Complex issues can only be held with appreciation for their complexity, patience as we untangle them, and a willingness to enlist a higher level of care when and if we need.

So to that end, if you find yourself triggered by Mother’s Day, whether it’s because of your own childhood trauma experiences or because you fear you’re creating trauma for your own children now, please don’t suffer alone.

Reach out for professional support. You’ll feel less lonely, more supported, and be able to work through the triggers and fears and even expand your capacity for parenting. It would be an honor to support you.

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

Does Mother’s Day feel triggering for you because of your own childhood trauma experiences and/or your role as a mother now doing the world’s hardest job? What helps you cope with this day when it rolls around once a year?

If you feel so inclined, please leave a message so our community of 30,000 blog readers can benefit from your share and wisdom.

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

Warmly,

Annie

What to Do With the Grief That Has Nowhere to Go

One of the most painful aspects of a difficult Mother’s Day is the grief that has no socially sanctioned place to go. When a mother dies, there are rituals for mourning — funerals, condolences, cultural acknowledgment. But when you are grieving the mother you didn’t have — the attuned, safe, consistent presence that should have been there and wasn’t — there is no ritual. No one sends flowers. No one asks how you’re doing. The culture doesn’t even have a word for this kind of loss.

Psychologists who specialize in trauma and attachment call this ambiguous loss — a concept developed by Pauline Boss, PhD, emerita professor at the University of Minnesota. Ambiguous loss describes grief for what is absent rather than gone, for what should have been rather than what was. It is grief without clear boundaries, without a clear event to grieve, and without the social recognition that usually makes grief bearable.

For many driven women, this ambiguous grief is compounded by the ongoing presence of a living mother — a mother who is there, who may call on Mother’s Day, who exists in photographs and family systems, but who never was and may never be what you needed. The grief is not for her loss. It is for the relationship that wasn’t possible. And that grief, unwitnessed and unnamed, doesn’t resolve on its own.

What helps: naming the grief explicitly, ideally with a therapist who understands relational trauma and ambiguous loss. Allowing yourself to mourn not just what happened, but what didn’t happen. The childhoods you should have had. The mother who should have been there. The versions of yourself that might have developed differently with different care. This is legitimate grief work. It deserves real space.

For Those Who Are Both a Daughter and a Mother

A significant number of women navigating a complicated Mother’s Day are doing so from a double position: they are the adult daughters of mothers who hurt them, and they are also mothers themselves. This double position is one of the most emotionally complex territories in all of relational trauma work.

It brings particular forms of fear: the fear of repeating the pattern. The fear that the wound you carry is contagious — that without constant vigilance, you will do to your children what was done to you. This fear is understandable, and it is also worth examining carefully. Because the fear itself, paradoxically, is often evidence that you are not your mother.

The parents most at risk of repeating damaging relational patterns are those who carry no awareness of them. The parents who have examined their histories, who worry about the impact of their behavior, who actively seek support and reflection — these parents are doing exactly the work that interrupts generational transmission. The worry you feel about being a good enough mother is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of the very reflective capacity that makes a different outcome possible.

For mothers who are also daughters of difficult mothers, Mother’s Day can hold something else as well: a complicated grief about what motherhood means for someone who never had a model of it to trust. How do you build something you were never taught? The answer, increasingly confirmed by developmental research, is that you build it imperfectly, with support, and with the willingness to repair when you get it wrong. Perfection is not the goal. Sufficient attunement and consistent repair are what matter most for children — and both are learnable.

If this resonates with you — if you are carrying both of these griefs simultaneously on Mother’s Day — know that you don’t have to hold them alone. Trauma-informed therapy that specifically addresses the mother-daughter relational lineage, the transmission of patterns across generations, and the fear of repetition can be profoundly supportive. This is nuanced, important work, and it is work that Annie’s practice holds specific expertise in.

Mother’s Day can be held more gently when you stop requiring yourself to feel only one thing about it. You can love your children fiercely and grieve the mothering you didn’t receive. You can show up for your own children well today and also tend to the part of you that still needed more. Both of those things are true, and neither cancels the other out. That’s the Both/And that Mother’s Day — for those of us who carry complicated histories — most deserves.

Both/And: You Can Grieve the Mother You Needed and Show Up for the Day Simultaneously

Here is the Both/And I want to offer for Mother’s Day: you can grieve what you didn’t have AND find a way to move through this day with some measure of gentleness. You can hold the complexity of a complicated mother AND honor what is true and good about your own relationship to mothering, whether you are a mother yourself or not.

You are allowed to be in grief and still make it through Sunday. You are allowed to feel the sadness, the anger, the complicated mix of love and loss — and to also do something small and self-honoring with this day. These are not contradictions. They are the coexistence that most recovered people describe: not the absence of grief, but the ability to carry it without being swallowed by it.

The Both/And also applies to your parent: you can hold genuine compassion for how hard their life must have been AND acknowledge that their struggles caused you real harm. One does not cancel the other. A mother can be a person with her own deep wounds AND have wounded you. Understanding her pain does not require you to minimize yours. Both truths can be held at once, even when holding them together is uncomfortable.

The Systemic Lens: Why Mother’s Day Is Designed for a Mother You May Not Have Had

Mother’s Day, as a cultural institution, was designed to celebrate a particular kind of mother: the warm, present, unconditionally loving figure who served as the emotional center of family life. The holiday was built on an idealized template — and for millions of people, that template does not match their actual experience.

What this means is that for anyone whose mother was emotionally unavailable, abusive, absent, chronically ill, addicted, or simply not the mother the cultural script promised, Mother’s Day doesn’t just feel complicated — it can feel like a gaslit celebration of something you never had. You are surrounded by public expressions of a relationship you may have mourned your entire life, while the culture provides no container, no ritual, and no language for grieving the mother who wasn’t there.

Psychologist Adrienne Rich, author of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, wrote about the way motherhood as a cultural institution operates separately from the lived reality of individual mothers and daughters — the institution celebrates an idealized relationship while leaving no room for the complexity, ambivalence, and outright pain of real maternal bonds. That gap between ideal and real is particularly sharp on a day that insists, at societal volume, that everyone should simply be grateful.

There is also a systemic dimension to who struggles most with Mother’s Day. Women who grew up with emotionally immature, narcissistic, or trauma-affected mothers often also grew up in families that prioritized the appearance of normalcy over the honesty of pain. The cultural instruction to honor your mother on this day can reactivate that same dynamic — the pressure to perform a relationship that didn’t exist, to suppress your actual experience in favor of a story more socially acceptable than the truth.

You do not owe the cultural script your compliance. And you do not have to celebrate a relationship that harmed you just because one Sunday in May says you should. What you do owe yourself is honest acknowledgment of what Mother’s Day actually stirs in you — and the support to hold that without apology. If this day is particularly difficult, working with a therapist who specializes in the mother wound and emotional flashbacks can be deeply grounding.

Grounding Yourself Through a Difficult Mother’s Day

If you know Mother’s Day is coming and you’re already bracing — here are some approaches that I’ve seen help in my work with clients.

Plan your day rather than letting it happen to you. Social media will be relentless. If you can, limit your exposure. Have a plan for how you’ll spend the day that doesn’t involve absorbing an avalanche of #blessed content about a relationship type you’re grieving. This isn’t avoidance — it’s protective self-regulation.

Name the grief directly. Give yourself explicit time to feel the complexity of the day. Write about it. Talk to someone who can hold it without fixing it. The feelings that don’t get named tend to come out sideways — in irritability, in numbness, in the kind of low-grade exhaustion that doesn’t make sense until you recognize it’s grief you’ve been carrying all week.

Create a ritual that honors what you’ve built, not what you didn’t receive. For women who are themselves mothers, this might mean focusing on the mothering you are doing — consciously and often against the grain of what you experienced. For women who aren’t mothers, it might mean honoring the other caregiving relationships in your life, or honoring your own inner child — the one who deserved more.

Consider what contact with your mother (if she’s living) you can genuinely afford. You don’t have to go to brunch. You don’t have to pretend. A brief call, a card that feels honest rather than performative, or complete distance for the day — these are all valid choices. The question is what level of contact you can engage with while staying regulated, rather than what the cultural script demands.

Elena, a 41-year-old marketing director with a borderline mother, used to spend every Mother’s Day cycling through guilt, obligation, resentment, and collapse. Over the course of our work together, she developed a different approach: a short phone call in the morning with clear limits, a long afternoon run, and dinner with her chosen family. “I stopped trying to have the Mother’s Day relationship we don’t have,” she told me. “And I started building the day around what I actually need.” That shift — from performance to self-stewardship — is the heart of this work.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer