What Your Mother Would Say To You (If She Could)…

Family Dynamics & Boundaries • April 18, 2021

The maternal wound is the deep emotional injury caused by a mother’s inability to provide the consistent love, attunement, and emotional presence you needed as a child—whether due to her struggles, limitations, or circumstances beyond her control. It is not a label of blame toward your mother or a sign that she was intentionally cruel; rather, it names the real experience of missing a reliable safety net that affects your sense of self, your body relationship, and your capacity for intimacy today. This matters here because the absence or inconsistency of mothering you needed still echoes in your adult life, influencing how you seek comfort and how safe you feel asking for it. Facing this wound directly allows you to begin imagining the kind of care you deserved—starting the work of healing from within and beyond what you were given.

• You still carry the aching absence of a mother’s consistent, emotionally available love—the safety net you needed then and often crave now when life feels overwhelming and you feel like you just can’t adult anymore.
• Relational trauma, especially the maternal wound, deeply impacts your sense of self-worth and your ability to trust others because the parenting you received was inconsistent, unavailable, or emotionally neglectful in ways that continue to echo through your close relationships.
• Healing begins when you imagine what a loving, attuned mother would say to you—an internal act of repair that helps you create an inner good-enough mother who can offer the support and care your real mother couldn’t provide.

One of the most painful pieces of coming from a relational trauma background is the absence of having had and still not having the kind of parenting that felt and feels adequate, supportive, and like a safety net you can turn to when life feels hard and overwhelming (which, in adulthood, it often does).

The very natural and normal impulse to call your mother (or father or other guardian) when life feels hard and challenging, for many, doesn’t ever fully fade. 

But, even though the longing lingers, you may increasingly know that, if you do reach out looking for support, you’ll likely just get hurt, disappointed, and even angry when presented with the reality of your parent – a parent who simply can’t meet your needs because they don’t have the emotional and psychological capacity to do so.

You know this. Intellectually you get it. 

1. But still, naturally, you hunger for support. For comfort.
2. What your mother would say to you (if she could)…
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. What does therapy offer when what you really need is a mother who says, “I see you”?

Why do you still hunger for your mother’s support and comfort even as an adult?

For your mom or dad to be on the other end of the phone as a source of solace when life feels hard and you feel like you just can’t adult anymore.

So what is there to do when you’re in this space? 

When you’re hungry for support but you know you can’t and won’t get it from your mother or father figure?

You absorb the support, guidance, and uplifting of psychologically healthy others who can meet your needs in ways that your family-of-origin cannot. 

Ideally, we have flesh-and-blood others, second-chance-family-of-choice, around us who can offer this to us.

And in addition to this (or instead of this), we can draw comfort and solace from pen and paper mentors, the written word, a random essay posted on the internet. 

Helpful words from mothers can be a balm to weary hearts. 

And so, today’s essay is a sort of a pep talk, a letter of encouragement and comfort, written as though a good enough mother might say it to her overwhelmed and exhausted adult daughter. 

If you’re struggling, feeling overwhelmed, burned out, exhausted, lost, and scared, if you long for comfort but cannot get it from your actual mother, today’s essay is written for you.

(And please note: while this essay is written from mother to daughter and assumes the daughter has children, you can of course substitute any gender of parental figure and your own gender expression into this essay as well as edit out any parts about having children. Use this as a mental, imaginal exercise and personalize it to your life and your needs.)

What your mother would say to you (if she could)…

Oh, honey. You’re really having a hard time right now, aren’t you?

Tell me all about it. I want to hear what’s going on with you. 

It’s a lot, isn’t it? 

Working full-time, trying to raise children, trying to run a household and keep up with everything, let alone trying to be a good partner and a good friend.

I remember those days. How exhausting, how draining it could feel. 

And I didn’t have to deal with a global pandemic on top of it all!

You’re doing such an incredible job, honey. Truly. 

I know it doesn’t feel like you’re doing a great job.

I’ll bet that most of the time it feels like you’re failing in some way or letting one part of your life fall apart while you tend to another.

I get it. It’s so, so hard.

And I want you to know: you’re doing an amazing job.

I see how hard you work.

I know how tired you are and yet how you show up for everyone in your life with grace and strength.

Even though it doesn’t feel that way.

I know it feels like toddlers destroy the house faster than you can clean up.

I know it feels like if you’re being a good mom, you’re letting work down.

And I know it feels like if you’re giving all you have to work. And to your kids, your home is a mess, your marriage takes the backseat, and there never seems to be time to work out.

I know it feels like a double bind sometimes.

The pressure you feel as the primary breadwinner. And how expensive life can be!

I know it feels like all you want to do is hide under the covers and watch Netflix all weekend. And eat takeout and have the world go away.

I know that feeling where you feel like you have it all under control some days, and then you feel like a failure and like a scared little kid trapped in an adult body the next day.

I know how desperate you are just for five minutes alone – alone from everyone no matter how much you love them.

To go to the bathroom in peace. To lay on the couch without being grabbed.

I remember how I used to fantasize about a break – no one needing me, no responsibilities, the ability to just hide away from it all. I remember those days well.

And I want you to know that it’s okay to feel this way.

It’s okay to be totally overwhelmed and exhausted and burned out.

It makes sense that you would feel that way given all that you’re holding.

It’s okay to sometimes wish you never became a parent. Got married. Or took on those grad school loans. Or put yourself out there in such a big way with your work life.

It makes sense you would have those thoughts given all that you’re holding.

It’s okay to wish life were easier. Truly.

It makes sense that you would wish that.

It’s okay to feel grumpy. It’s okay to feel resentful.

It makes sense that you would feel that way.

Because it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human.

I know you love your child.

I know you don’t really want to throw away your career and move to Mongolia.

But that impulse to hide, to run away, to wish things were easier, that makes so. much. sense.

It’s okay to feel that way, honey. Really.

Life isn’t easy.

It’s especially not easy right now.

Not in the grind years of being a working mother, a working parent to young children under five.

I look at all that you do, all the ways you love other people and work so hard every day to be a good person and a kind, helpful presence in the world and I’m so, so proud of you.

Actually, I’m beyond proud of you. I’m amazed by you.

You are so resilient. So strong. So capable. Such a good parent. Such a good person.

You have so many responsibilities, so many people counting on you, and you don’t let them down.

Your character is incredible.

I know those Marvel movies are popular and everyone puts superheroes on pedestals.

But I think full-time, working moms who are responsible for their family’s income and well-being are the real superheroes of the world. You’re one of them.

And I wish your mother could make it all so much easier on you, honey.

I wish I could shoulder all the work for you, all the sleep deprivation, the emails, the bills, the drudgery.

I wish I could take it all on and you could have a break. A long one. A really long one.

I can’t do that exactly. But I can listen to you. I can love you through it.

I can listen to anything you want to say, anything you want me to know. And I want to listen to you.

I won’t judge you harshly – I remember feeling burned out beyond words myself and just wanting some safe space to vent into.

Someone I could say the dark and embarrassing things to.

Sometimes that’s all we need.

So tell me, honey, what do you want me to know? What’s on your heart? What are you wishing for?

Tell me whatever you want. I’ll listen to you, honey.

And here’s something else I want you to know: even though the days feel interminable right now, even though you sometimes hate your spouse and you’re completely overwhelmed as a mother in a pandemic, even though it feels like you’ll never make traction on your goals, even though it feels like you’ll never sleep through the night again, I promise you: YOU WILL.

Time will pass, the kids will grow up and become more independent, work will get easier because you’ll have more time to exercise and sleep and be with your girlfriends.

You’ll have a chance to get nourished again and that will make everything else easier.

And these years are always, always hard on a marriage.

If you two can just hang in there, it will probably get easier.

Of course, if you do want to change your life – separate from them, change jobs, move home – I’ll support you no matter what.

I don’t need you to stay married or stay where you live or be in that fancy career.

I don’t need you to do anything that doesn’t ultimately work for you.

I’ll love you and support you no matter what.

AND, I’m holding the hope for you that things will get easier.

Even if you can’t find that hope right now, especially since you can’t find that hope right now, let me hold that for you.

Let me hold the faith that things will get easier in time.

When this pandemic ends, when the kids grow, when you get more sleep, when you can see your friends again, when I can fly out to babysit…

I really do trust that things will get easier, honey.

But in the meantime, I’m here to listen to you.

Gosh, I wish I could hold and hug you right now and just hold you in my arms while you have a long cry. I miss you so much.

You’re such an incredible person and you are doing a wonderful job, honey.

Being an adult is not easy.

Being a good parent isn’t easy.

And being the primary breadwinner of your family isn’t easy.

Doing that job you have, being in that career of yours, I know for a fact that’s not easy!

Keeping a family’s life revolving and functional, especially in a pandemic, isn’t easy.

None of this is easy.

And despite how you feel like you’re failing, I see how wonderful of a job you actually are doing.

I think you’re a great mom. A great spouse. A great worker. And a great person.

I know it doesn’t feel like it honey, but you’re doing a truly wonderful job.

And I’m so, so proud of you.

I love you so much and I’m here for you in whatever way you need, in whatever way feels good to you.

I love you.

How can internalization therapy help you create your own inner good-enough mother?

When you tell your therapist you spent an hour crying over a blog post written like a mother’s letter, describing how you’ve read it twenty times because no one has ever said “I’m proud of you” without conditions attached, you’re experiencing why understanding how Mother’s Day may not feel easy for you extends beyond one calendar day—the hunger for maternal comfort remains a year-round ache that therapeutic work can help address through active internalization practices.

Your trauma-informed therapist understands that the hunger for maternal comfort doesn’t end at eighteen or diminish with intellectual understanding of your mother’s limitations—it remains a visceral need that surfaces during overwhelming moments when you most need someone to say you’re doing okay. They recognize that reading, writing, or hearing supportive maternal messages isn’t childish regression but necessary reparative work, filling gaps where unconditional support should have lived.

The therapeutic process might involve writing letters from your imagined good-enough mother to yourself, voicing what you needed to hear during specific moments of struggle. Your therapist might speak these words to you directly, lending their voice to help you internalize maternal support, or guide you through imagery exercises where you receive comfort from an archetypal mother figure who sees your strength when you only see failure.

Together, you work through resistance to receiving this comfort—the part that says you’re too old to need this, that you should be over it by now, that accepting substitute mothering somehow betrays your actual mother. Your therapist helps you understand that creating an inner supportive mother doesn’t require forgiving or forgetting what your actual mother couldn’t provide; it’s about giving yourself what you need to thrive.

Most powerfully, therapy teaches you to gradually become your own good-enough mother, internalizing the voice that says “this is temporary,” “you’re doing amazingly given what you’re holding,” and “I love you no matter what.” Through repetition and practice, these external supports become internal resources, available whenever life feels overwhelming and the child in you needs to hear that someone sees how hard you’re trying.

Both/And: You Can Love Your Mother and Mourn What She Couldn’t Give

One of the most painful Both/Ands in relational trauma work is this: you can love your mother — genuinely, with real warmth and real gratitude for what she did provide — and simultaneously mourn, with real grief and real legitimacy, what she could not give you. These things do not cancel each other out. They coexist. And holding both, rather than collapsing into one or the other, is where the deepest healing becomes available.

Many women come to therapy with this particular internal impasse: they feel guilty for acknowledging the ways their mother couldn’t meet their needs, because acknowledging the gap feels like a betrayal of the love that was genuinely present. “She did her best.” “She had it so much harder than I did.” “She sacrificed everything for me.” These things can all be true — and the child who needed consistent emotional attunement, who needed to be seen and celebrated and not just managed or survived, can still have experienced a real absence. A real wound.

The both/and doesn’t require adjudicating who was right or wrong, who suffered more, whether the mother “deserves” forgiveness. It simply requires holding complexity: that love and inadequacy coexist, that goodness and harm can come from the same source, that a person can be doing their genuine best and still be falling critically short of what their child required.

Elena had spent years in a kind of loyalty paralysis — unable to examine her relationship with her mother because examining it felt like abandoning her. Her mother had been a single parent who worked two jobs and had kept the lights on and the children fed. These were real, significant acts of love. They were also accompanied by an emotional unavailability that had left Elena, now forty, still searching for a kind of maternal warmth she had never fully received. Both things were true. Her mother was a loving woman who had given what she could give. And Elena had needed something her mother could not provide. The therapeutic work was to hold both — to honor the genuine love and to grieve the genuine absence — without requiring one truth to erase the other.

The Systemic Lens: Your Mother Was Also a Daughter

The relational wound between a mother and daughter does not begin with the mother. It begins further back — in the family system that shaped her, in the social and cultural conditions that defined what mothering looked like in her generation, in the intergenerational patterns of emotional expression (or suppression) that were handed down long before she entered the picture.

This is the systemic lens: to see your mother not only as the woman who did or didn’t meet your needs, but as a person who was herself shaped by forces she didn’t choose and may never have fully examined. The emotionally unavailable mother was often the daughter of an emotionally unavailable mother. The mother who valued achievement over emotional presence was often raised in a system — familial, cultural, economic — that told her that love was demonstrated through provision, not through presence.

None of this is meant to erase your experience or to recast harm as something you simply need to reframe. Your needs as a child were real and legitimate. The ways they weren’t met had real consequences that are present in your life today. And: your mother was also a person with her own history, her own unhealed wounds, her own limited access to the emotional vocabulary and relational capacity that might have allowed her to give you what you needed.

For many of my clients, this systemic understanding is not a consolation — at least not at first. It can feel like another demand on already-overtaxed compassion: you’ve been accommodating and understanding your whole life, and now you’re being asked to extend understanding to the very relationship that wounded you most. I want to be clear that this is not a requirement. You can heal without forgiving. You can understand systemically without excusing personally.

But for the women who find genuine movement in the systemic lens, what often shifts is the self-blame. When Sarah began to see her mother’s emotional limitations not as a verdict on Sarah’s own lovability, but as the expression of patterns that had been in motion long before Sarah was born — something in her began to breathe more freely. The wound was still real. The loss was still real. But it was no longer evidence of her own unworthiness. It was the echo of a longer story, and she was not the ending of it.

Creating Your Own Inner Good-Enough Mother

One of the most powerful and counterintuitive pieces of therapeutic work available to those who carry a maternal wound is the development of what object relations theory calls the “internalized good-enough mother” — an internal resource, built through therapy, through intentional re-parenting, and through experiences of genuine care, that provides from within something that was insufficiently provided from without.

The concept of the “good-enough mother” comes from the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who argued, usefully, that the goal of early parenting was not perfection but good-enough-ness: consistent-enough attunement, repair of ruptures when they occurred, and the gradual, appropriate frustration that allowed the child to develop their own internal resources. What many women I work with received was something considerably below good-enough — not necessarily in the catastrophic terms of dramatic abuse, but in the quieter register of chronic emotional unavailability, inconsistent attunement, conditional love, or the kind of narcissistic parenting that made the child into an extension of the parent rather than a person in her own right.

The internalization work — building the inner good-enough mother — is not pretending your mother was someone she wasn’t. It is not creating a fantasy of a care that never existed. It is something more interesting and more demanding: developing a relationship with yourself in which you provide, as consistently as possible, what was missing. This includes validation of your own perceptions. It includes compassion for your own struggles rather than the relentless self-criticism that often steps in where maternal care was absent. It includes making choices about your life and your relationships from a place of genuine self-regard rather than from the anxious accommodation of someone who has never felt fully entitled to her own preferences.

Kira, who came to therapy after years of choosing relationships that replicated her maternal dynamic — emotionally distant, intermittently warm, ultimately unavailable — described this process as “becoming the mother I needed.” Not replacing the longing for the real relationship. Not pretending the loss wasn’t real. But discovering that the capacity for genuine self-regard, for warmth toward herself, for the kind of consistency and attunement she had hungered for from outside — these capacities could develop from within. Could become, over time, reliable. Could become home.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer