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

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • May 3, 2015

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. (PMID: 15729320)

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. (PMID: 27893131)

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.

What I want to add to the conversation about Mother’s Day is something that often goes unnamed: the specific grief of the woman who is herself a mother now, navigating her own complicated feelings about her mother while trying to be the mother she wishes she’d had. The double-layered experience of this is enormous and rarely acknowledged. You’re holding your own childhood grief while simultaneously working to show up differently for your children. You’re doing the hardest possible version of this work while also being exhausted and depleted in the ways that parenting exhausts and depletes everyone.

This is not a failure. This is extraordinary. The fact that you’re thinking about this at all — questioning the patterns, trying to understand what happened to you, attempting to make different choices — is evidence of a level of psychological consciousness that is genuinely transformative. Intergenerational trauma doesn’t break without someone choosing to break it. If you’re that person in your family line, that is one of the most important things you will ever do. If you’re navigating this, I’d encourage you to explore individual therapy with a clinician who understands relational trauma — not because something is wrong with you, but because you deserve support that matches the scale of what you’re taking on.

Both/And: You Can Miss the Mother You Deserved and Still Love Who You Had

One of the most important things I want to offer on Mother’s Day is permission to hold contradictions. You can love your mother and also be honest about the ways she hurt you. You can grieve the relationship you didn’t have and still find genuine appreciation for what was present. You can be glad to honor her in some ways and also decide that today, a particular form of honoring isn’t available to you. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the full, complicated truth of most mother-daughter relationships.

Nadia is a 41-year-old attorney who came to me several years after her mother’s death, carrying what she described as “inexplicable guilt” about the fact that she hadn’t cried at the funeral. What we uncovered was not a lack of love — it was grief that had been frozen for decades, unable to move because it was so tangled up with anger, longing, and the complicated wish for a mother who could have been different. The grief finally came, much later. But it came differently: it came for the relationship that had been possible, not the one that had been wished for. That distinction made all the difference.

Both/And on Mother’s Day might sound like: I’m acknowledging the day without celebrating it the way the culture expects. Or: I’m calling my mother even though it’s complicated, because some connection is better than none, and I’ll process the aftermath later. Or: I’m not contacting her at all today, because my nervous system needs the rest — and that’s not betrayal, that’s self-preservation. All of these are valid. All of them are grief in different forms.

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.

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.

The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.

How to Take Care of Yourself When Mother’s Day Feels Hard

In my work with clients for whom Mother’s Day is not a Hallmark holiday but a genuinely painful day — whether because of a mother who wasn’t what they needed, a complicated grief, an estrangement, a loss, or the absence of children they’d hoped for — I want to say something directly: you’re not required to perform cheerfulness about this day. You’re not obligated to push through the brunch, post the throwback photo, or smile through the complicated feelings. Your experience of this day is allowed to be what it actually is.

Taking care of yourself on a hard Mother’s Day isn’t just about survival tactics, though those matter. It’s about making deliberate, self-attuned choices rather than being swept along by a cultural narrative that assumes everyone has a simple, warm relationship with motherhood and mothers. The goal for the day isn’t to feel happy. It’s to feel cared for — by yourself, and ideally by at least one other person who understands.

One concrete thing I’d encourage you to do: in the days before Mother’s Day, sit with the question of what the day is actually activating. Is it grief for the mother you had who couldn’t offer what you needed? Loss of a mother who’s died? Your own complicated feelings about motherhood? The ache of infertility or child loss? Each of those has its own texture, and knowing specifically what you’re navigating helps you tend to it with more precision than a generic “this day is hard.”

If you’re in therapy, bring this day explicitly into your session in the week before or after. Don’t wait for your therapist to ask. Mother’s Day activates attachment material — often profoundly — and a trauma-informed therapist can help you process what surfaces rather than simply endure it. If you’re not yet in therapy and this day reliably undoes you, that might be valuable information about the kind of support you’re ready for.

From a somatic standpoint, I encourage clients to plan the day with their nervous system in mind rather than against it. If being around your family of origin on this day consistently dysregulates you, that’s a legitimate reason to structure the day differently. You might spend part of it doing something that genuinely nourishes you — a walk, time with a friend who understands, a ritual that honors your own experience of this day rather than the mainstream version. Your nervous system’s needs are real and worth designing around.

If you’re estranged from your mother or have made the deliberate choice to limit contact, Mother’s Day can bring up a specific and sometimes unexpected grief — not for the relationship you had, but for the one you deserved and didn’t get. That grief is legitimate. Letting yourself feel it is not weakness, and it doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong choice. Grief and clarity can coexist.

You don’t have to navigate days like this alone, and you don’t have to white-knuckle your way through them year after year. If this day signals something larger that you’re ready to address, I’d invite you to explore therapy with Annie or take a few minutes with the quiz to get a clearer sense of what kind of support fits where you are right now. However complicated your relationship to this day is, that complexity is allowed — and there’s help available for the harder feelings underneath it.

What I see consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is that the body holds the truth long before the mind catches up. By the time a client lands in my office describing what isn’t working, her nervous system has been signaling for months — sometimes years. The tightness in her jaw at 3 a.m., the way her shoulders climb toward her ears during certain conversations, the unexplained fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to touch. These aren’t separate problems. They’re a single integrated story the body is telling about an emotional terrain the conscious mind hasn’t been able to face yet.

Whatever brought you to this page — whether you’ve been in therapy for years or you’re just beginning to name what’s been happening — I want you to know that you’re not alone in this. The women I work with are extraordinary: capable, driven, and quietly carrying more than anyone around them realizes. The fact that you’re here, looking at this material, means something important. It means a part of you is ready to stop managing the weight and start putting it down. That’s not a small thing. That’s the beginning of everything.

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.

Further Reading on Childhood Trauma and Family Dynamics

Perry, Bruce D., and Oprah Winfrey. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. Flatiron Books, 2021.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2015. (PMID: 33972795)

Forward, Susan. Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life. Bantam, 2002.

Webb, Jonice. Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. Morgan James Publishing, 2012.

One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own — every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.

Medical Disclaimer