RELATIONAL TRAUMA

How to Take Care of Yourself If Mother’s Day Feels Hard for You

You Have Permission Not to Celebrate

Rachel sits in her car in the parking lot of a brunch restaurant, watching families stream past the window. She’s been sitting here for eleven minutes. Her phone has three unread texts from her sister asking where she is. She knows she should go in. She also knows that the moment she walks through that door and sees the flower arrangements and the mimosas and her mother’s practiced smile, something in her chest is going to close down entirely.

She starts the car and drives home.

Across the city, Priya is doing something she promised herself she wouldn’t do: scrolling Instagram. Every post is a variation on the same theme — glowing tributes, childhood photos, declarations of gratitude for the woman who made them who they are. Priya’s mother is alive. They speak every few weeks. And yet Priya has spent the last hour feeling something she can’t quite name, something that sits between grief and anger and a kind of hollow longing she’s never been able to explain to anyone.

If you’re reading this, you probably know what both of these women are feeling. And I want to say something clearly before we go any further: you have permission not to celebrate Mother’s Day. You have permission to feel exactly how you feel about this holiday — and to spend the day in whatever way actually supports you, rather than what you think you’re supposed to do.

That’s not a small thing to say. In a culture that treats Mother’s Day as a mandatory celebration, opting out — or even just opting for something quieter and more honest — can feel like a transgression. It isn’t. It’s an act of self-care. And for women carrying what clinicians call the maternal wound, it may be one of the most important acts of self-care available on this particular Sunday.

What Is the Maternal Wound?

Allan Schore, PhD, developmental neurobiologist and clinical psychologist at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, has spent decades documenting how the early mother-infant relationship literally shapes the developing right brain — the hemisphere responsible for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and the capacity for intimacy. When that early relationship is disrupted, inconsistent, or frightening, the effects aren’t just emotional. They’re neurological.

Laurence Heller, PhD, psychologist and founder of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), frames the maternal wound as a disruption to the most fundamental developmental need: the need for connection. When that need goes unmet in early childhood, the nervous system adapts — often in ways that look like strength from the outside and feel like exhaustion from the inside.

How the Maternal Wound Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with clients, I’ve noticed that the maternal wound rarely announces itself directly. It tends to surface in patterns — in the way a woman relates to herself, to her body, to her own needs, and to the people she loves.

Rachel, the woman in the parking lot, has built an extraordinary career. She’s decisive, competent, and well-regarded by everyone who works with her. She’s also never been able to ask for help without feeling like she’s imposing. She doesn’t know how to receive care gracefully. When her partner tries to comfort her, she stiffens. These aren’t personality traits. They’re adaptations — the nervous system’s learned response to a childhood in which needing something from her mother was more likely to produce irritation than warmth.

Priya, the woman scrolling Instagram, is a physician. She’s spent her adult life being extraordinarily attuned to other people’s needs — her patients, her colleagues, her family. She’s far less practiced at noticing her own. The hollow longing she feels on Mother’s Day isn’t weakness. It’s grief. And it’s grief for something she never fully had, which is in some ways harder to mourn than something she once had and lost.

What I see consistently in driven, ambitious women with maternal wounds: a harsh inner critic that sounds remarkably like a disappointed mother; difficulty trusting that relationships are safe; a tendency to over-function and under-receive; and a persistent, low-grade sense of not being quite enough, no matter how much they achieve.

Three Ways to Begin Mothering Yourself

No matter what your childhood mothering experience was like, part of the work of adulthood — and especially the work of relational trauma recovery — is developing what I think of as an internal mother: a steady, warm, attuned presence within yourself that can meet your needs, soothe your nervous system, and tell you the truth with kindness.

Here are three places to start.

1. Learn to Recognize and Meet Your Own Needs

A good-enough mother reads her child’s cues. She notices when her child is hungry, tired, overwhelmed, or scared — and she responds. Most women with maternal wounds never had that experience reliably modeled for them, which means they often don’t know how to do it for themselves. Learning to notice what you’re feeling — and then responding to that feeling with the same attentiveness you’d offer a child — is a foundational act of self-mothering.

2. Replace the Critical Inner Voice with Something Warmer

The inner critic that drives many accomplished women isn’t a motivational tool. It’s an internalized voice — often a mother’s voice, or the absence of a mother’s voice — that learned to demand more, criticize faster, and comfort never. One powerful practice: when you notice that voice, place your hand on your chest and say, quietly, I’m sorry you’re feeling this way. It makes sense. You don’t have to fix it right now. It sounds simple. It isn’t. It’s the beginning of re-parenting.

3. Seek Out Mothering Models and Mentors

We are not meant to do this alone. If you didn’t receive the mothering you needed as a child, it’s not too late to receive it in other forms — through a therapist who holds you with consistency and warmth, a mentor who believes in you without conditions, a friend who knows how to sit with you in the hard parts. Seeking out these relationships isn’t dependency. It’s wisdom. It’s knowing what you need and being willing to let it in.

The Both/And of Mother’s Day

Here’s what I want you to hold, if you can: you can love your mother and grieve what she couldn’t give you. You can feel genuine compassion for the ways she was limited and still acknowledge that her limitations hurt you. You can be grateful for what she did provide and still mourn what was missing. You can want a different relationship with her and accept that she may not be capable of it.

These aren’t contradictions. They’re the full, complicated truth of a complicated relationship. The Both/And isn’t a way of minimizing the pain. It’s a way of holding it without being flattened by it.

And on a day like today, when the culture is insisting on one particular story about mothers and daughters, you’re allowed to hold a more honest one.

The Systemic Lens: Why This Day Is So Loaded

Mother’s Day was commercialized within a decade of its founding — a fact that Anna Jarvis, the woman who created it, spent the rest of her life fighting. She died in a sanitarium, penniless, having spent her inheritance trying to abolish the holiday she’d started. The culture took something meant to honor the private, specific labor of individual women and turned it into a mandatory performance of gratitude, complete with flowers and brunch reservations and social media tributes.

What gets erased in that performance is everything complicated. The mothers who were absent. The mothers who were harmful. The daughters who are estranged. The women who wanted to be mothers and aren’t. The women who are grieving their mothers. The women who feel nothing on this day and feel ashamed of feeling nothing.

Driven women are particularly vulnerable to this kind of cultural pressure — not because they’re weak, but because they’ve often spent their lives performing competence and composure in environments that don’t make room for complexity. Mother’s Day asks them to perform one more thing: uncomplicated love and gratitude for a relationship that may have been anything but uncomplicated.

You don’t have to perform that. The mothering you didn’t receive left a mark. Learning to mother yourself isn’t about pretending that doesn’t matter — it’s about making sure it doesn’t have the final word. Let’s work on that together.

References

1. Edelman, H. (1994). Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss. Addison-Wesley.
2. Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. W.W. Norton & Company.
3. Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship. North Atlantic Books.
4. Woodman, M. (1992). Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity. Shambhala.
5. Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.

Medical Disclaimer