I professed to my husband this morning in exasperation. I had just woken up after another night of broken sleep, courtesy of my toddler’s second molars coming in, and my son had just thrown a book at me, splashing my cup of hot coffee all over my legs.

I’ve said that sentence more in the last two weeks than I have at any other point in my motherhood journey so far. My son is barely sleeping. I’m hella pregnant and barely sleeping as it is. And on top of the sleep deprivation and physical pain of this pregnancy, my son is in the throes of toddlerhood with all the big feelings, demands, and opposition to match.

This morning, he wanted milk. Then I handed him his milk cup, he threw it on the ground, cried, slipped in the milk, cried some more, and wanted his milk back. This kind of scenario happens a dozen times a day.

And while my son is behaving in a perfectly developmentally appropriate way…

And while I enjoy many sweet, playful moments with my son alongside weathering the challenging moments…

And while I do my best to take care of my nervous system so I can stay patient and calm for him when he needs me…

A part of me feels defeated and frustrated.

I’ve never had so many of my own needs go unmet while I’m attempting to meet someone else’s needs.

Scratch that — I’m actually attempting to meet two people’s needs, because I’m growing a baby inside me who is extracting all of my body’s physical reserves while my toddler is requiring more energy from me than I feel like I have to give on most days.

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The idealist in me struggles with letting my best be good enough in these hard seasons of motherhood. Like any devoted mother, I will pay any price for the well-being of my children and stretch my capacity past its breaking point if they need me.

I have a catalogue of sacrifices and scars I’ve gained on my motherhood journey, just like you. Whether it’s currently nursing through searing nipple pain during this pregnancy because my son wasn’t ready to wean, or nursing through several bouts of mastitis when he was a newborn, I put my babies first. Doesn’t any good mother?

So what happens when your child’s tricky developmental stage catches up with you, and your capacity can’t keep up?

The parentified child in me doesn’t want to admit when I’ve reached my limit. Being honest about my capacity was never an option because there was never a safety net. Maybe you can relate if you grew up in a family system where the parents were always stressed and struggling and it felt like someone always needed you. Sacrifice becomes encoded in survival. Martyrdom becomes part of the template of how you love.

One of the main problems with chronically giving past your limits is that it’s not sustainable and leads to burnout. Eventually you crash when you’ve been ignoring your needs. But engaging in self-care during a demanding season of motherhood is a precarious tight rope walk. It requires creative thinking, flexibility, and grace.

I’ve never liked those sayings about how you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you put on your child’s as a metaphor for the importance of self care, because it’s not always that simple. Sometimes it is easier to feed my son breakfast first, because once he’s satiated, he’ll give me time to enjoy mine. Or sometimes it isn’t tangible to take the full bath I just drew for myself, because he’s crying for me, and if I let my husband tend to him, it just means he’ll be harder to settle when I come in as the closer.

When we’re stretched beyond capacity as mothers, it’s not fair to blame ourselves for being so stretched as if we did something wrong. Perfectionistic parts of us can use “self-care” as a shaming tactic, an ideal poised like a carrot over our heads that we never fully fulfill because the work of motherhood is an all-consuming, never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

For me, this shows up in feeling guilty for not taking time for myself, even though my toddler’s sleep schedule doesn’t allow for it when he’s teething and going through a leap. I'm not getting the time that I need to write, recharge, and metabolize the work of mothering because I’m actively engaging in the grit of it.

Self-care isn't always available in the package we envision in motherhood. As mothers, our work isn’t just stretching our capacity to meet our children’s needs. It’s also stretching our capacity to accept our best efforts and be creative in how we meet our needs.

When tough seasons visit, we can simplify. We can try to get as much sleep as we can, even if it's broken sleep, and even if it means we're sacrificing baths that are longer than 5 minutes. We can adjust our pace and reduce the expectations we place on ourselves. Instead of thinking, “I have to do this all day” when my toddler throws the milk, I can take a deep breath and remind myself, “I can move slowly through this day when there are moments that challenge me.” We can offer to ourselves the same patience and nurture we extend to our children.

We can remember that a tough season is just one season. Seasons change and our capacity grows within them.

If you’re struggling in this season of motherhood and feeling like your nervous system is on overdrive with no end in sight, here are a few reminders to take with you.

Reminders For A Challenging Season of Motherhood:

♥ This season is allowed to be challenging without it meaning that I’m doing something wrong, I don’t love my children, or I’m a bad mother.

♥ This season is stretching my capacity and I am growing in patience and wisdom, even if I do not see the fruits just yet.

♥ Instead of approaching today with perfectionism, I give myself grace.

♥ When I feel overwhelmed, I can focus on the actions I can control and feel reassured by my best efforts, even when parts of me insist that my best isn’t good enough.

♥ I can find pockets of pleasure, joy, and peace throughout the day with my children. We can wonder at a flower together, take our time while eating, or close our eyes for an invigorating deep breath.

♥ I model flexibility, gentleness, and grace for my children and drop the mask of the mom who has it all together.

♥ I remind myself that it is just as important to connect to my needs and emotions for my children as it is to meet their needs and make space for their feelings.

♥ I can acknowledge what I need right now even if I can’t meet the need fully in the moment.

♥ I can reduce demands, lower expectations, and adjust my pace when I feel overwhelmed by what motherhood is asking of me today.

♥ I can validate how much I care about my children. I can feel good about how hard I work to keep them safe and well, even when I feel like I’m missing the mark.

♥ Instead of powering through, I slow down. Instead of pushing down emotion, I feel. Instead of insisting on the agenda, I flow.

♥ I can hold myself with the same nurture and love I offer to my children.

Wishing you the best in whatever season of motherhood you find yourself,

~Sarah

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89% said their mother-in-law was a bigger headache in the postpartum period.

They told me their mother-in-law asked fewer questions about their recovery, resisted giving the baby back when they asked, and were more likely to respond to their parenting boundaries with criticism, dismissal, or defensiveness.

There are many women who have wonderful mothers-in-law and beautiful relationships with them, both in the postpartum period and beyond. In fact, for a small portion of my followers, their relationships with their own mothers were the bigger source of difficulty after having a baby.

This is not an article intended to vilify mothers-in-law or perpetuate the “monster-in-law” narrative. I’m not interested in complicating an already complicated relationship dynamic, but I am interested in exploring it.

For many women, the relationship with their mothers-in-law becomes unexpectedly fraught during postpartum. They aren’t prepared for how their mothers-in-law react to their recovery needs and parenting boundaries, as well as how deeply these interactions affect them while they are navigating a tremendous hormone and identity shift in motherhood.

Why does the mother in law dynamic feel so different after a baby?

As I dove into this topic, these were some of the themes I started to notice.

When moms described struggling with their mothers-in-law on my Instagram platform, they said they felt invisible, disrespected, or sidelined in their early motherhood journeys. Some of the most common behaviors they described included:

• Blatantly disrespecting parenting boundaries, such as coming over uninvited for a visit or kissing the baby after being asked not to.

• Pressuring the mother for access to the baby, such as asking when they could have a sleep over or private outing.

• Ignoring the mother’s mental state or recovery needs, such as forgetting to ask her how she’s doing or expecting her to cook, host, or entertain when she’s recovering from childbirth.

• Criticizing her parenting choices, such as making comments about breastfeeding or comparing her feeding choices to their own.

• Minimizing her maternal role, such as by calling the grandchild “my baby” or insisting that they know what the baby needs better than the mother.

To be clear, not all mothers-in-law engage in these behaviors, and sometimes a new mother’s own mother does, too. But there is a difference I keep noticing in the stories women shared with me.

When these behaviors came from their mothers-in-law, they often landed differently than if they came from their own mothers. For the majority of postpartum moms, they felt more violating, distressing, and difficult to navigate.

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The Role of Attachment

This makes sense when we consider the role of attachment in the mother/daughter relationship and how different it is from the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship.

A maternal grandmother has usually spent decades cultivating an attached relationship with her daughter. When her daughter gives birth, her biological attachment instincts arise, not just for her grandchild, but for her daughter as well.

There’s a desire to caretake her daughter and an instinctive awareness of her recovery needs. In my own experience, the person who was most attuned to my recovery was my mother. She asked me about my C-section stitch, how I was sleeping, and how I was managing those terrifying postpartum 💩s in early postpartum, amongst other bodily function topics.

And while she is a nurse and my bowel movements may not be a table topic other people in my village were as comfortable discussing, her awareness of me and not just my baby in postpartum was obvious.

There is also less self -consciousness in our relationship, which makes sense given its depth and history. I’m more comfortable setting boundaries with my mom about the things that matter to me because I’ve done it before.

When my mom overstepped or did something I didn’t like with my child, I didn’t hem and haw about finding the right words or choosing the perfect delivery. I’ve had hundreds of confrontations with my mother throughout my life. I know she’ll always love me, even when I don’t take her parenting advice.

Because of the trust etched into mother/daughter attachment, boundary oversteps may not burn as badly compared to those that happen in mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationships. There’s a greater history of care and repair that can be leaned on during critical periods like postpartum compared to this new territory that exists between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Here’s another layer to the mother/daughter attachment relationship that surfaces in the postpartum period: a maternal grandmother gets to watch her daughter become a mother.

You know that saying about how a grandmother loves her grandchild so much because she sees her own child in them?

The maternal grandmother’s love for her grandchild naturally flows through her attachment to her daughter. As she watches her daughter care for her baby, she remembers caring for her daughter. She may experience nostalgia, tenderness, and a sense of continuity.

A maternal grandmother’s baby isn’t just her grandchild. The baby is a bridge that connects her more deeply to her daughter.

Her daughter’s bond with her baby isn’t a threat to her bond with the baby because her daughter’s connection with her baby enhances her connection. This is how attachment flows.

But what about when a mother-in-law doesn’t have that same history and attachment base with her daughter-in-law?

A paternal grandmother may see her son in her grandchild because that is the relationship from which her experience of motherhood and family has historically flowed.

When she sees her daughter-in-law holding her grandchild, she’s not seeing her own daughter. She’s not looking at someone who holds her mitochondrial DNA or memories. She’s not reliving the day she brought her daughter home from the hospital because that’s not part of her past.

Instead, she may be thinking about her son.

She may be excited to finally hold the baby.

She may be focused on her expectations and excitement about becoming a grandmother.

And she may not fully understand that her daughter-in-law’s needs as a mother are different from her expectations as a grandmother. She may not see that her daughter-in-law requires protection, prioritization, and centering in her baby’s care because her attachment instincts are not activated in the same way as if it were her own daughter.

This difference can create relational disconnect when it’s not met with care and curiosity. When I talk to postpartum moms who are struggling with their mothers-in-law, one dynamic becomes especially clear:

Many mothers-in-law approach their daughters-in-law like barriers to connection with their grandchild rather than bridges.

They might experience their daughter-in-law as a competitor for affection, access, or influence with the baby rather than as the person who deserves respect, support, and appreciation for creating the ability to have a relationship with the baby in the first place.

The daughter-in-law isn’t a gatekeeper standing between a grandmother and her grandchild, but many daughters-in-law feel like this role is projected onto them when they set boundaries or speak for their needs. A new mother is concerned with her baby’s well-being. This is basic biology and attachment at work. Most mothers can relate to this kind of devotion and preoccupation. Yet it seems like many mothers-in-law personalize their daughters-in-law caretaking their babies when it doesn’t align with their expectations.

The Role of Generational Differences and Cultural Attitudes

I can’t help but consider the role of generational differences and cultural attitudes toward women in this mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dynamic. Much of this conflict flows from a cultural emphasis on baby-centered postpartum care rather than mother-centered postpartum care.

In our society, the emotional labor of women is often invisible labor. We expect mothers to quietly and happily prioritize their children’s needs over their own. We expect them to nurture wider kinship networks and maintain extended family relationships, often without complaint or credit.

This expectation follows women through pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. Many mother report being “treated like a princess” during pregnancy only to suddenly feel dropped, ignored, or forgotten once the baby arrives.

And if moms of today’s generation feel like this, I wonder how mothers of our mothers’ generation felt.

They raised children before maternal mental health was understood in the way it is today and they gave birth before concepts like obstetrical violence were widely discussed. They lived in a world where certain rights and privileges were not available for women.

This was before the #MeToo movement, before marital rape was recognized as a crime, and before parenting responsibilities were as widely expected to be shared between husbands and wives.

What was normalized for our mothers and mothers-in-law as new mothers that would shock and horrify us today?

As a trauma therapist, I often think of the violations so many moms experience in the postpartum period as an expression of intergenerational trauma. A friend of mine recently had a baby and told me that her mother reminded her, “I was up and hosting family at one week postpartum," while pressuring her to do the same.

This reminded me that sometimes our mothers and mothers-in-law will give us what they received.

If they felt invisible postpartum, they may unconsciously render us invisible.

If their boundaries were violated, they may disrespect ours.

If they were taught that being a “good mother” meant suppressing their needs, they may challenge our choices when we choose something different.

I used to assume that mothers should innately understand the needs of a postpartum mom because they’ve been there, too. How could you go through something so vulnerable, so transformative, and so destabilizing and offer anything but support for someone else going through it?

What I’ve discovered through my own postpartum experience and through working with other mothers is that shared experience does not equate to shared understanding. Some women had to dissociate or suppress their emotions to survive their postpartum experiences. They didn’t know there were other options.

So when you ask your mother-in-law to respect a parenting boundary, or ask her to not make a comment that feels disrespectful to your role as the mother, she may react from a place that is very different from yours. She may react as a woman who never experienced the maternal authority and personal power you’re now standing in.

She may have been taught to people-please, prioritize everyone else’s feelings over her own, and defer to other people’s direction instead of her own wisdom.

Maybe she learned to respect her elders at all costs.

Maybe she learned that expressing her feelings is dangerous.

Maybe she learned that being a good mother meant being endlessly accommodating.

And now you are doing something that she may have never received a permission slip for. By setting boundaries, you’re claiming an option she never had the opportunity to claim. This naturally generates tension. But tension is also a pathway to change, and this is one way to transform generational cycles that keep women small and keep mothers invisible.

Dr. Tracy Dalgleish, author of You, Your Husband, and His Mother, talks about how mothers-in-law may respond differently when a daughter-in-law stands firmly in her parental authority compared to when their own daughter does the same.

Most healthy, well-adjusted mothers want their daughters to have more freedom and opportunity than they did. They feel a sense of pride when they see their daughters mothering in empowering, connected ways.

But when they see their daughters-in-law mothering in the same way, they may feel threatened and scrutinize the daughter-in-law’s role as a mother and wife, wondering:

Is she taking care of my grandchild properly?

Is she adding to my son’s stress?

Is she keeping the household tidy?

This creates a double standard. The mother-in-law may concentrate on the daughter-in-law’s role as the wife and mother instead of investing in a relationship with her as a person. This creates conflict and distance. But what if a mother-in-law stopped asking, “Is she a good enough wife and mother?” and started asking, “Who is this woman? How can I know her? How can I support her?”

What if mothers-in-law understood that becoming a grandmother wasn’t just about pouring into the baby? That it also involved supporting the mother?

And what if she allowed herself to keep growing as a mother by learning to love her son’s wife, not as an extension of her son or grandchild, but as a daughter in her own right?

Postpartum moms don’t need more people centering the baby, criticizing their parenting decisions, and competing for access. Postpartum moms need a village who will support their recovery, respect their parenting decisions, and see their gifts as a mother and as a person.

If mothers-in-law showed up for the new mother in postpartum and not just the baby, then maybe this dynamic could feel less complicated. Who wouldn’t love a mother-in-law to ask, rather than assume, or support, rather than take over, or respect them, instead of competing with them?

A relationship with a grandchild doesn't go around the mother, it goes through her. And one of the greatest gifts a grandmother can give her grandchild isn’t claiming more access to them, but nourishing, supporting, and loving their mother.

Rooting for you on your motherhood journey,

~Sarah

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Psychologically speaking, to stand at the threshold is to make contact with two places at once. You aren’t fully entering nor entirely exiting. You’re holding the tension between worlds, which requires exquisite patience and trust.

In Reclaiming Childbirth As a Rite of Passage, Rachel Reed refers to this threshold space as the “liminal space.” She writes:

“The liminal space is neither the starting point nor the destination, it is ‘betwixt and between’ and is often considered a place of ordeal and chaos… a time of ‘symbolic dismemberment’ and of internal reorganization of the self… In the childbirth rite of passage, liminality is the phase betwixt and between pregnancy and the birth. It involves a profound opening and unravelling of the body and soul in preparation for the emergence of mother and baby” (p. 164-165, Reed).

In this last leg of pregnancy, I'm noticing the presence of liminality and a quiet call to move into myself.

I have one week left of work. I'm slowing down in my commitments to the outside world. I'm doing less, letting myself rest, and reflecting on this upcoming shift from one to two children. I can feel my body preparing for birth with the presence of more frequent Braxton Hicks. The baby has moved down further in my pelvis and his kicks and movements are still seismic, even though he has less space to stretch out.

In the end of pregnancy, when you're in the clear to safely give birth, but baby isn't quite fully ready, and every day you wonder, will this be the day?, is one of my favorite parts of pregnancy. Who will this child be? What will he look like? What will his birth be like? It is a time of wonder and reflection, a time of delicious unknowing and imagination, and a time to fall in love with the questions and surrender to life’s greater mysteries.

When you're at the beginning of pregnancy, or even in the middle, you still have a grip on your old life. Your body isn't as immobile and the awareness of what's around the corner feels like it's light years away. I was still doing heavy duty garden projects and long yoga sessions every day in my second trimester. When people asked me how I felt, I answered, “amazing!” I felt eternally positive, caught in good spirits, and energized.

Fast-forward to now, where I need at least nine hours of sleep at night and a nap every day to function. I switch the side I'm sleeping on at least a dozen times a night and I struggle to keep up with my toddler who thinks it's hilarious to watch me waddle-run down the driveway after he throws something he knows he's not supposed to. My embodied awareness fully holds the anticipation of my son's birth and I've already let so much of my old pre-pregnancy body and mother-of-one lifestyle go.

I can feel that I'm moving into a new psychological space with the upcoming birth, and in some sense, I'm already in one because I'm moving there, but I haven't quite arrived, haven't transitioned into the next chapter of matrescence or the ground of the re-organized Self.

In our society, we don't always honor the sacredness and wisdom of transitions. We're often rushing to the next place instead of appreciating what we observe along the journey, or even accepting that "the next place" is simply part of the journey, not the point of it, because we're always between in some sense. When I had my son, for example, there absolutely was a sense of "I have arrived, I am now a mother,” but this fixed identity has never stayed fixed. I'm always journeying to new places as a mother, because my son is always journeying to new places in his development. I continue to re-discover what motherhood means to me as what my son needs from me changes.

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At the same time, the threshold of late pregnancy is a unique one, a particular kind of embodiment because you're standing between life and death. Even though my baby is very much alive, and I feel him kicking and tumbling in my womb, he hasn't drawn breath, he hasn't ventured into this world, and he’s tucked away in the in-between space of gestation. I’m never not conscious of the fact that my body holds a forming life and this awareness keeps me slightly apart from the world as I interact with it. I can feel that I’m within myself, that part of me is retreated, curled inward with my baby, sensing, connecting, and dreaming.

As mothers, we are portals between worlds.

Late pregnancy is a threshold. A space of becoming, the beginning before the beginning. A time to turn inwards, trust your baby’s timing, trust birth, trust your body, trust life. A time to lay your best plans at the feet of a bigger process.

We don’t know who we will become when we walk through the door of birth. Naievely, I didn’t know how much being a mother would change me when I was pregnant with my son. I envisioned my motherhood journey unfolding from the vantage point of my grandiose, excitable maiden-self who hadn’t yet died into the mother. I pictured the bright parts of motherhood — blowing bubbles with my son, sweet nursing moments, lots of cuddles — without understanding how these were entangled with the challenging parts — the sleepless nights, the postpartum rage, the psychological pressure that came with breastfeeding.

But now as a mother, I know the magnitude of what I’m going to walk through and how big the responsibility is on the other side. I have parts of me that are terrified and wonder, how the f*** am I going to do two under two? How will I ever be myself again when I have two kids pulling me apart with their needs? But the benefit of being a second-time mom is I can look back on my first experience and remember how motherhood rocked me and I survived. And not only did I survive, but I expanded. I became more soulful. I became more alive. I became more me.

We have to trust the threshold we walk through as mothers, even when it feels like death and dissolution. Wisdom always follows surrender to what is outside our understanding.

I do not know who my son will be.

I do not know what his birth will teach me.

I do not know how I will grow as a mother of two.

But I trust this mystery. I trust that I will be guided through the threshold and I am committed to bravely walking through the door.

After all, I have one son watching me and another waiting on the other side.

In the threshold with you,

~S

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Want to connect more with my work?

♥ Order my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥Order my ebook, The Protected Postpartum: An Attachment-Informed Workbook for Planning and Setting Boundaries in Postpartum.

♥ Follow me on Instagram!

♥ Don’t forget to like this post & subscribe to the journal!

♥ Take my favorite Embody Lab training (I’ve done it twice!) —> The Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Training. It starts in September — use code SARAHANNSAEGER for 10% off!

We shared our fears, dreams, and hopes for the birth. We shared our histories, from pregnancy losses to traumatic first births to marital struggles, and we shared hopes for this next season of motherhood. We cried, we laughed, and we listened to each other.

I left that women's circle feeling like another circle had completed inside of me. The doula who facilitated the session reminded us at the beginning to disengage from any rescuing, fixing, or saving of each other. We were simply to offer presence and listen deeply. In that relational space, I talked about the fears I was holding onto with my second son's upcoming birth and was received by these women without advice or judgment. My story was allowed and so were my feelings.

When I look back on my motherhood journey, I see my motherhood story as a kind of heroine’s journey, with postpartum being like the Leviathan that swallowed me whole.

There are still wounds I am tending from that period of my life, even though the freshest part of it happened a year and a half ago. My body still holds memories that haven't been processed out yet, but slowly, day by day, month by month, I can feel that I am integrating them into valuable lessons and rich medicine that I am taking with me into this next birth.

Sharing space with other mothers who are also standing in the threshold of pregnancy, preparing for another initiation after the last sent us reeling, nourished a part of me that has grown to accustomed to feeling invisible in my postpartum experience and unseen on my motherhood journey. This is the power of telling your story to other women who have been where you are, and stand there now: you experience resonance, catharsis, and connection in the expression of your story without pressure to interpret, change, or dismiss it.

Two years ago, my husband and I moved to a different state. In that time, caught up in pregnancy and postpartum, I never established roots in a community. I never made friends or found my people. Since my son turned one, I have noticed this longing arise in me for sisterhood. At first, I thought my loneliness was due to being geographically far away from my family, and not having enough logistical help for my son where my nervous system could get the reset it needed.  But in the last few months, I've realized that the issue wasn't necessarily an absence of support-people, but an absence of mothers I could relate to, who are intentional  about working on themselves and also nurturing their children.

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We live in a culture that continues to center the baby in postpartum and dismiss the mother's tremendous sacrifices, needs, and instincts.

We ask moms to suppress their feelings when our wider culture, for example, normalizes visiting a baby and not being curious about the mother's parenting boundaries or the mother's experience around her birth. After my son’s birth, I was barely able to walk due to my C-section incision, the long session of pushing that proceeded it, and a sprained ankle injury I sustained weeks before giving birth. In this state of physical pain and severe mobility restriction, I remember fielding questions about my baby ranging from, do you have him on a sleep schedule yet? What are his apgar scores? Have you thought about using bottles? Some people who visited did not ask me a single simple question about myself such as, how are you? How are you sleeping? Do you need help getting to the toilet?

I think mothers have become too accustomed to playing a backseat or peripheral role in postpartum and their child's childhood. Because baby/centered care and ignoring the contributions and impacts of women's labor  is so normalized in our society, we often reinforce this ideology to  postpartum moms, even if we are mothers ourselves. I naively assumed that women who raised babies and also had C-sections would innately understand my recovery needs in the postpartum period but sadly, it was often these women who overstepped my boundaries and criticized my decisions the most.

When women have been traumatized in their births and never thoughtfully attended to these traumas, they learn to dissociate and shut down their feelings. Unfortunately, when a new mother emerges from that radical experience of birth and moves into the vulnerable period of postpartum, other mothers can project their wounds onto her and call it support by sharing fears, offering unsolicited advice, or speaking limiting beliefs over her birth and motherhood experience.

After the mother blessing I attended, I was reminded of what actually feels like support for me as a mother: honest stories, sincere listening without an agenda, and respect for the immense love and nurture we pour into our children as mothers.

I've never met a mom who needed more unsolicited advice but I've met plenty of moms who would have appreciated more curiosity, encouragement, and thoughtful listening from their village.

Experiencing sisterhood in motherhood means you are held, witnessed, and heard for your truth as a mother without having to also hold anyone else's opinions, judgments, or agenda about it. After the circle, I attended a prenatal yoga class with two of the women, and the yoga teacher, also a mother, asked us at the end: what is it actually like to be you right now? Not how you think you should feel as a mom, but how all of you actually feel? And all of us said lonely. How synchronous!

Moms want more commonality and connection. We need to be around women who can listen without commentary, swap stories eithout judgment, and celebrate each other for who we are as women and mothers. We need more spaces where we can share the edges of motherhood, the places where we feel angry, burned out, and lonely . Too many people tell us what we're not doing right and that we shouldn't feel the way we do.

If we had a hard birth, we need to be grateful that our child is healthy.

If our child is waking through the night, a completely biologically normal feature for infants and young children, it’s because we didn't sleep train, or we are breast-feeding for too long, or we're not being firm enough. 

If we're feeling lonely, it's because we're not leaning hard enough on our village.

Almost every mother I know has experienced this kind of dismissal and blame for her internal experience. Somehow, what we struggle with is either our fault, or should be minimized because our child matters more.

When moms give permission to other moms to have their experience, and when they show curiosity and care for listening to it, everyone walks away nourished. This is the kind of sisterhood I'm craving in this season of matrescence:

I want mothers around me who aren't afraid to embody and express their truth. I want mothers around me who aren't afraid to say that they fear they've lost their spark, or they're feeling overwhelmed, or they're resenting the responsibilities of motherhood. I want mothers around me who have gone to the bottom of the Leviathan and emerged with the wisdom of connecting to their lived experience.

When we make contact with our inner worlds on honest ground, this contact enriches the community. We teach our children how to sit with their humanity and we create space for other women to do the same

If this resonates with you, I want you to think about the women in your life who make you feel a sense of sisterhood. If you haven't found this space just yet, where can you find them? I'm just starting to find these women a year and a half postpartum but I intend to participate in and create more spaces for maternal sisterhood to thrive.

If you haven’t already subscribed, subscribe to the journal and stay connected. I plan to launch some circles, courses, and support spaces in the New Year, after I conclude maternity leave. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you feel me ♥️

Always rooting for you on your motherhood journey,

~S

p.s. I want to hear from you, especially if this piece resonated. Please leave a comment or send me a message, and don’t forget to subscribe!

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The consensus seemed to be that providing therapy could potentially “traumatize” the baby and “distract” the mother. One clinician chimed that “if a mother breastfee…

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As a mom, therapist, and doula who writes about motherhood, attachment, and postpartum healing on Instagram and Substack, I receive hundreds of messages and comments a day from moms reporting disappointing and traumatizing experiences in the sacred postpartum window. These feelings often center around how their families, communities, and village treat them at a time when they should be focused on recovery and bonding with their baby.

As a trauma therapist, I understand how trauma manifests through not only the acute nature of the traumatizing event, but in what happens after. Trauma isn’t just what happened, it’s the absence of support after. This is the psychological space I see so many postpartum women navigating: after the radical, transformative experience of childbirth, whether it was traumatizing or empowering, they find themselves in the vulnerable experience of postpartum, where they have a real need for holding, attunement, and support of their village. When this support isn’t offered, or worse, in its place are expectations, demands, and pressure, vulnerabilty is met with violation. This creates stress and trauma at a time when the brain and body needs a caring space to land.

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Early postpartum is a time of recalibration, recovery, and self-discovery. Psychologically, moms are expanding their identity to encompass the role of mother. A sense of grief may permeate the postpartum period as it comes with the loss of who we were before. Our brains and hormones are changing to fuel bonding, caretaking, and protecting behaviors with our baby. Our bodies are healing, our uteruses are contracting back to normal size, and if we had a C-section or a tear, we are recovering from major abdominal surgery or trauma to our pelvic floors.

All of these factors demonstrate the weight of a postpartum mother’s recovery needs after giving birth. In an ideal world, postpartum mothers would have the full support of their village in attending to this vulnerable transition. Parents and in-laws would help cook meals, watch older children, and keep the household running. Partners, friends, and extended family would offer encouragement, gentle touch, and deep listening. Medical providers and helping professionals would provide trauma-informed care that respects the complexity of the shifting maternal brain and hormonal system.

And while the world is rarely ideal, I can’t help but think about multicultural traditions of supporting postpartum mothers. From La Cuarentena in Mexico to Zuo Yuezi in China where mothers are encouraged to rest for 40 days and eat nourishing food prepared by family, it seems that postpartum holding has been a staple throughout the world over the course of millennia when you examine the anthropological literature. It makes sense from a practical standpoint: an under-nourished mother is less likely to care for her baby well and have subsequent babies. Deeply nourishing the mother has always been the backbone of a thriving society because mothers drive the survival and future of the community.

So, where did we go wrong in a society where a postpartum mother feeling fully nourished and supported by her village is a rarity?

For starters, in American culture, we tend to celebrate the arrival of the baby rather than honor the transition of the woman into the role of mother. Baby showers are more popular than mother blessings and it’s not uncommon for postpartum visitors to bring the baby a gift and expect to hold the baby. Many moms report feeling invisible after delivery for this reason.

People ask about how the baby is sleeping, but ignore her sleep.

People ask about the baby's medical information but never ask her about her birth.

People ask about baby’s development but fail to ask her what she is learning as a mother.

It seems motherhood is an extension of another cultural phenomenon, which is that we expect women to engage in emotional labor without respecting how this labor impacts them. We expect mothers to not have their own experiences, needs, and feelings on their motherhood journey, and to focus on mothering in a way that is convenient and acceptable to us.

We render women invisible at a time in their life when they are stepping into their embodied wisdom and sovereignty as mothers.

Feeling invisible as a mother is not only challenging psychologically for mothers, it also disregards what is happening for that mother physiologically. Many researchers and experts in attachment, the maternal brain, and infant development refer to the mother and baby as “the mother-baby dyad.” Their hormones function together in a feedback loop and their proximity to each other regulates each other’s nervous systems.

Moms are highly attuned to their babies’ needs and sensitive to their distress, a phenomenon known as maternal vigilance. The brain rapidly and profoundly changes in those first few months postpartum to support the mother in investing in and bonding with her baby. There is no one more neurologically situated to caring for a newborn than that newborn’s mother, no one more responsive, relationally aware, and connected to a baby’s needs than that baby’s mother.

Yet for a lot of moms, postpartum feels like a gaslighting of our intuition and instincts when we're starting to come into our confidence and strength

We’re met with pressure, guilt trips, and expectations instead of support, encouragement, and understanding.

We’re met with unsolicited advice, criticism, and side comments instead of trust, respect, and humility.

We’re met with invasive, evaluative questions instead of open, curious questions.

And not only that, but we’re gaslit into thinking that what we’re met with is support.

Moms need freedom to find their rhythm with their babies, trust their instincts, and develop their parenting approach free from a microscope. We need support when we’re healing that actually feels like support. Dropping by uninvited when we’re cluster feeding in a diaper isn’t support, and neither is giving us advice on a parenting approach we’re not utilizing. Support shows care for our recovery needs and respect for our role as parent.

No mother should ever feel invisible postpartum. The sign that so many mothers resonate with this theme shows that our society has some work to do. When we fail to celebrate, cherish, and honor the women who nourish life, we fall out of relationship to life itself. We remain disconnected and broken from this essential relationship.

Founder of Family Constellations Therapy Bert Hellinger describes the sacrifice women make in childbirth as “soul weight”. When we give birth, we enter a threshold experience where we touch life and death at once. We exist in a liminal world where our primal brain turns on and our thinking brain turns off. We access and channel a life force in that experience that allows us to birth our babies.

When we exit childbirth, enriched with soul weight, blessed with our baby, and transformed as mothers, we deserve to be met with acknowledgement and respect for this initiation. We’re more open, grounded, and connected for it. Our babies are touched by it and our communities are benefitted by it, even when they meet us without the support we’re needing.

If you’re feeling alone or invisible in postpartum, I encourage you to find a community that can meet and see you where you are. Have the courage to connect with and express your experiences. Your experience in motherhood is central to your child's experience in childhood. Your nervous system is a jewel in the work of nurture, a treasure that becomes your baby’s treasure. Your soul weight deserves witnessing and an attentive landing space.

Here to center the mother, and remind you of your treasure,

~S

p.s. I want to hear from you! Leave me a comment and tell me if this resonated.

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Want to connect more with my work?

♥ Order my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

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“Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth.” -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Our culture is obsessed with images of maternal softness, images of mothers in reverie and gentle connection with their babies.

But it’s only recently words like mom rage and books like Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder exploring the untamed edges of motherhood have come onto the scene, weaving a picture of motherhood that honors the multidimensionality of maternal love and protection.

I’ve been noticing this trend going around on Instagram, where a mom shares a video of her tenderly holding a baby with the caption “I thought motherhood would make me softer, but here’s what it actually made me…”. The video then flashes forward to several frames of Mother Nature — think waves crashing, lions roaring, and volcanoes erupting. It’s clear with trends like these that millions of women are waking up to an archetype that hasn’t been reflected in modern day depictions of acceptable mothering.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes this best in Women Who Run With the Wolves when she writes,

“… and so it is in order to pursue further development that we exchange the hovering internal mother, which was so apt for us when we were young, for another kind of mother, one who lives even deeper in the psychic Wilderland, one who is both escort and teacher. She is a loving mother, but also fierce and demanding.”

She goes on to write that this loving mother is the archetypal wild woman,

“the one who dares, who creates as she destroys. She is a primitive and inventing soul that makes all creative acts and arts possible. She creates a forest around us and we begin to deal with life from that fraction and original perspective (Estes 110).”

Many mothers, myself included, enter motherhood with naïveté, not comprehending the profundity of the transformation or the depth of the forest we find ourselves in. I found early motherhood to be a raw, isolating place, where other women’s experiences rarely touched or guided me. It was as if I was dropped in this cave, expected to figure out my baby on my own terms. And while other women tried to be helpful by offering well-meaning advice and sharing their experiences, the responsibility of caring for this baby was all on me. I was his mother. I was his home-base and he only wanted me. His survival was my job and mine alone.

Having a baby is a massive initiation into trusting yourself and honing your intuition. Estes describes intuition as “the treasure of a woman’s psyche.” When we become mothers, we receive the fullness of this treasure as we offer it to our children through the work of nurture and attunement. I’m sure on your motherhood journey you can think of experiences or times when you had to mute the outside noise, cull outside opinions, and go within yourself to decide what was best for your child. Make no mistake, this is a profound act of rewilding, a radical reclamation of our embodied wisdom and animalistic instinct.

Motherhood is a journey of rewilding. We have to embody our fullest, most natural, intuitive self to invite our child’s expression forward.

One of the first moments I clearly remember this intuitive self stepping forth was the first week I had my son. I hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time and was growing exhausted from having to get up and down with a C-section stitch to feed him in the middle of the night, on top of tracking medication every two hours. I had my son asleep in a Moses basket next to our floor bed and even that distance begin to feel like too much. I struggled to fall asleep without touching him or being able to feel his breath against me, and I sensed he also needed this kind of proximity, especially after an overwhelming hospital stay that interrupted us bonding peacefully, without interruption.

I had a friend who coslept with her baby and was starting to learn more about cosleeping thanks to Instagram accounts like The Happy Cosleeper, Good Night Moon Child, and Cosleepy, as well as researchers like Dr. James McKenna who wrote a book I fell in love with, Safe Infant Sleep. One night, I told my husband I would like to try bringing my son into the floor bed where I planned to sleep w him in the Cuddle Curl. Here, he had easy access to the breast and I could sleep safely on my side without disturbing my stitch or worrying about rolling onto him. I remember falling asleep with a sense of anticipation, like I was doing something labeled “forbidden” that actually felt completely natural and right.

To my delight, I was awakened a few hours later by my son, gently nibbling at my breast. The little stinker had breast-crawled for a feed without crying or needing any assistance! That first night was not only the beginning of a beautiful cosleeping and breast-feeding relationship, it was the beginning of me fully trusting my intuition as a mother.

In the early weeks of the postpartum period, sleeping with my son tucked in my nook while my hormones crashed through my body in massive waves of mood swings and perspiration, I felt like a wild animal. I was a wild animal, completely feral and all instinct.

In the first few weeks of cosleeping, I had some mothers in my village react with confusion or control. Their experiences were different, and while I understood they were reacting out of fear due to safety concerns, I felt reassured by the research and information I had read, as well as my own experience with my son. I felt both of our nervous systems settle into a trusting, restful rhythm with each other when we coslept. Cosleeping was right for us and no one could tell me otherwise.

The wildness of mothers embodying their natural selves and trusting their instincts is often inconvenient for other people.

It defies the parts of them that want to control or feel self-righteous in their own parenting approaches. I have learned that when women are cut off from their instinctual selves, often because of their own birth trauma or cultural conditioning, they will unknowingly try to cut you off from yours. They will feel threatened by you doing things differently because they see it as a rejection of their experiences. Rather than seeing these experiences as right for them, they simply see them as right for everybody because they bought into a narrative that there is one way to parent and one standard for how children should be.

I’ve encountered this several times on my motherhood journey, whether it was refusing to give my son tummy time and trusting his ability to put himself in positions when he was ready (he was walking confidently by nine months, so I know it paid off) or following a nutritional protocol called GAPS and using baby-led weaning to heal his C-section induced eczema. At this point, I’m used to fielding criticism or unsolicited advice because of other people’s ignorance or insecurity . The difference now as a pregnant mom with a toddler is that I don’t take these comments as personally.

I will continue to protect my child’s well-being and the goodness of his soul, and that also means protecting how I mother.

I don’t participate in parent-led weaning, do feeding or sleep schedules, or facilitate development toward milestones with me dictating to my son how he should be. Motherhood has taught me to follow my son’s lead and be attuned to his developmental signs, attachment needs, and nervous system cues. In following his lead, I’ve come to trust my ability to mother instinctually. My son is healthy, thriving, and connected. To me, he is evidence of John O’Donohue’s sentiment that “To be natural is to be holy.” I want him to always trust his instincts and listen to his emotions like they are sacred messengers, and I know I have to model this as a mom to make this impression.

On our our motherhood journeys, all of us will reach a point where expert advice and other women’s guidance can only take us so far. Our children are our teachers. They show us who they are with what they need from us every day. Who we become in service of our children is often a version of ourselves that we need, too. We become wiser, more grounded, more compassionate, and more empowered as mothers. We become wilder in this sacred work.

Remember the wisdom of your instincts as you mother. Reclaim your wildest, truest self. It is a treasure in your relationship with your children. It is the touchstone of all things natural, holy, and good. And as Estes reminds us,

“Nature does not ask permission. Blossom and birth whenever you feel like it. As adults, we need little permission, but rather more engendering, much more encouraging of the wild cycles, much more original vision (Estes, 100).”

May you honor your original vision as you mother wildly,

~S

Want to connect more with my work?

♥ Order my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥Order my ebook, The Protected Postpartum: An Attachment-Informed Workbook for Planning and Setting Boundaries in Postpartum.

♥ Follow me on Instagram!

♥ Don’t forget to like this post & subscribe to the journal!

Postpartum is a perfect example of many experiences co-existing at once.

You're falling in love with your baby and you’re overwhelmed with the mental load of checking all the boxes: is he getting enough milk? Is her belly button infected? Is this normal?

You’re excited to become a mother and you’re also grieving your child-free life and the old you.

You’re exhausted and can’t remember the last time you slept more than three hours, but then you feel like you could do this forever when you look at your little one.

So many feelings and truths co-exist in the postpartum period. And here’s another one: postpartum is a sacred season and it is a time that also feels like survival.

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When I first had my son, I heard so many times from other moms to “soak up the newborn snuggles!” “Enjoy it while you can, they grow up so fast!” and “Embrace every minute"!”

And while these comments were well-meaning reminders to be present for this short-lived season, I remember feeling a lot of pressure to enjoy something that was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.

When people asked me how I was enjoying new motherhood, I was honest. “It’s beautiful and brutal.” And that was the truth. I couldn’t sugarcoat the hard parts.

I couldn’t sugarcoat getting mastitis three times, or having an unplanned C-section.

I couldn’t sugarcoat that feeling of despair that arose when the sun went down and I couldn’t predict what kind of sleep I would get.

I couldn’t sugarcoat the loneliness that welled up when I looked at old photographs of myself or remembered a life that had time for reading poetry books, picking up a random hobby, or going on Date Night with my husband.

In postpartum, I was surviving. Survival was on my mind because I was keeping a baby alive. And that baby was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Yet he existed at the center of a web spun from so much striving, sacrificing, & stressing. Like the sun, when I looked at him he took away my sight for anything else in the sky. I forgot how tired I was or how much my incision hurt when I held him to my breast or kissed his yeasty little head. I knew I loved him, but it was this mystery to me, how much I could love someone I had just met, who was so new to the world but fit so naturally in my arms.

Whenever I write or speak about the challenges I experienced in postpartum, I encounter a part of myself I observe in so many other moms. I call it the “mom guilt” part. Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say postpartum was brutal because… my baby is so worth it! Oops, I wasn’t supposed to talk about the incredible death of my old self that happened in matrescence because… my baby is all that matters!

Just as soon as we start to express the very real impacts of motherhood on our mental health, identity, & inner life, mom guilt beats vulnerability back into the closet. We feel this pressure, whether it’s from society or some internal voice, to shut up about how we're holding up and get on with the caring for our young, who need us despite however we’re feeling.

What I’ve realized now, 18 months postpartum and currently pregnant, is that the sacredness of the postpartum period is found not in overriding this sense of survival for the awareness of the sacredness of our child, but in making room for all of our experience as sacred in the relationship with our child. The vulnerability I felt postpartum when I was struggling to get my son to latch correctly, for example, helped me to be present with my son’s vulnerability as he worked through a tongue tie.

Attachment expert Dr. Gordon Neufeld says that “Love can only be felt if there is enough vulnerability.” When we make room for our vulnerability as new mothers in the postpartum period, we make room for deep love for our babies and the spellbinding process of attachment.

Talking about the struggles of new motherhood is not a negative deterrent for loving our babies. It actually is a pathway to love. It actually educates us in vulnerability.

Survival is deeply sacred. Looking back, I see all of of those challenging early postpartum moments as sacred initiations. I learned to trust my body and my wisdom in postpartum. My capacity stretched. My sense of compassion deepened. I learned who I was in those middle-of-the-night feeds, in the commitment to contact napping, and in the backbone I sharpened as my son’s advocate. What I survived educated me in love: I would pay any price for my baby.

If you’re newly postpartum, feeling like you vacillate from being in heaven with your baby to being in the trenches, know that motherhood is multi-dimensional enough to hold all of your experience.

Postpartum can be brutal.

Postpartum can be beautiful.

Postpartum can feel like survival.

Postpartum can acquaint you with the sacred.

You don’t have to fully process or be present with everything you are experiencing right now. Sometimes you are just going through it, and that is enough.

Let go of the pressure for postpartum to be any experience other than what you’re currently having.

Embrace what postpartum is teaching you right now and how it is shaping you into the kind of mother your baby needs.

Trust that that mother is also someone you need, too, even if you can’t appreciate this new self right now.

With you on your journey of matrescence,

~Sarah

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Psst. Need some help navigating postpartum?

My ebook guide, The Protected Postpartum: An Attachment-Informed Workbook for Planning and Setting Boundaries in Postpartum, is here!

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Inside, you’ll learn why postpartum boundaries matter, how to prepare before your baby arrives, and how to confidently communicate your needs with family and friends. From navigating visitors and unsolicited advice to understanding matrescence, newborn attachment, and postpartum recovery, this guide combines research with practical tools you can use immediately.

Inside you’ll find:
• 130 pages of evidence-informed education and practical guidance
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• Resources for when you need additional support

Whether you’re expecting your first baby or are currently in postpartum, The Protected Postpartum will help you feel more informed, prepared, and confident to advocate for yourself and your baby.

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Want to connect more with my work?

♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

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On my latest Instagram poll, 96% of 581 moms said they didn’t like to share their baby. While this isn’t official research and reflects the small sample size of my audience, these findings are interesting when we consider how they interface with the expectations of family members, friends, and other folks in the village to hold the baby during visits.

So why do so many people expect to hold a newborn despite how many moms are uncomfortable handing their baby over?

For starters, most people are not informed on what is actually happening to a new mother after she delivers a baby, including other mothers. The majority of the research on matrescence, or the psychological process of becoming a mother, was conducted in the last 15 years. Unless you’ve consciously read or exposed yourself to this research, you’re not going to understand why a new mother is so hypervigilant and how hormones like prolactin and oxytocin sculpt her brain to be the attuned, present, responsive mother her baby needs for survival. Instead of receiving validation, care, and support, new moms are likely to be labeled, overprotective, anxious, or even selfish for setting boundaries around their proximity to their baby.

The way we treat infants in this culture is still largely driven by cultural myth and social ideology. How many times have we heard, “it’s good for them to cry,” “he needs to get used to this,” or “she won’t remember any of this” as justification for low-nurture caregiving behavior? When I had just delivered my son, for example, he was routinely subjected to a heelprick to monitor his jaundice levels. I had several nurses and doctors reassure me that “he won’t remember how this feels” despite the fact that research shows early experiences of pain can shape the limbic system, or the emotional part of the brain. Even medical professionals who specialize in infant care are not familiar with the latest neuroscience research on the infant brain.

If we really understood what a new mom and her baby actually need, we would prioritize their mutually regulating relationship.

We wouldn’t resist giving a crying baby back to their mother or chastise that mother for her closeness to her baby. We would celebrate their closeness, praise a new mother’s responsiveness, and acknowledge that baby’s dependence as perfectly developmentally natural. We wouldn’t give mothers tips on how to make the baby need her less or pressure mothers to let other people soothe a baby that only wants her. We would would respect infant dependency and maternal protectiveness as sacred, natural parts of postpartum.

In this article, we’re going to name seven research-backed reasons why new moms may not want to share their baby. As a new mom, I hope it’s validates your experience and helps you feel less alone. If you are not a new mom, but you have a new mom in your village, I hope you use this information to inform your interactions with her. Let’s get into it!

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7 Research-Backed Reasons Why New Moms Don’t Want to Share Their Baby:

#1: Maternal vigilance

We are hormonally and neurologically wired to feel extra protective of our babies.

Maternal vigilance is a psychological state of protectiveness that mothers experience in pregnancy and postpartum. It is an adaptation that ensures infant survival and it exists across most mammalian species. In the third trimester, mothers show increased vigilance to threats such as fearful and angry faces. In early postpartum, mothers demonstrate heightened sensitivity to infant cues such as their cries and smiles (Kim, 2017). The amygdala, the center of the brain responsible for processing emotion and danger, dramatically changes during the postpartum period and becomes larger, which heightens mothers’ sensitivity to threat (Luders et al., 2021). Prolactin, the hormone responsible for regulating breastfeeding, directs aggression and hostility from nursing mothers toward who the brain registers as “out-group members” (Kellner, 1984). Last, parental preoccupation, or a state of mind and behavior associated with frequent checking and worrying on the baby, peaks immediately after childbirth and decreases at 3-4 months, right when the fourth trimester ends (Kim, 2017).

#2: Exogestation and the need for dependence

Babies are completely vulnerable and rely on their mothers for regulation, comfort, and safety. Because of their sharp attunement and deep attachment to their babies, mothers are sensitive to this and want to keep their babies close.

Babies have extremely vulnerable brains and nervous systems (Buckley, 2008). They do not possess the ability to regulate themselves and they fully depend on caregivers for meeting their emotional and physiological needs. Biological infant sleep expert Dr. James McKenna uses the term exogestation to describe this time in the first few months of a baby’s life and he says that the mother’s body is akin to the womb for the newborn. As baby adjusts to life outside of the womb, mom’s voice, heartbeat, and touch signal the very comfort and safety they experienced in the womb. Skin-to-skin contact with mom regulates baby’s digestive, respiratory, and cardiovascular processes (McKenna, 2020). Just being in mom's presence is regulating for the vulnerable infant and it makes biological sense that mothers would prioritize their baby’s proximity during a time of profound dependence.

#3: Oxytocin and skin-to-skin contact

When a mother holds her baby, both she and her baby release oxytocin, the bonding neurohormone. This deepens her attachment to her baby and makes her want to hold baby more.

Oxytocin intensifies the the emotional bond between a baby and his or her mother and it is released with frequent holding (Yoshida & Funato, 2017). When mother and baby gaze into each other’s eyes, vocalize, and exchange touch through holding and contact, their brains are bathed in this bonding neurohormone. Additionally, frequent holding and skin-to-skin contact have long-term positive impacts on baby’s emotional resilience, self-esteem, and relationships (Kirshenbaum, 2023). Supportive touch changes a baby’s heart rate and moves them into parasympathetic activation, a state of calm in the nervous system (Yoshida & Funato, 2017). Babies are wired to be held, and they are born with a proximity-seeking instinct for the mother who carried them for nine months.

#4: Frequent holding establishes breast-feeding

It’s natural to want to keep a baby who is nursing frequently in your arms.

We’ve established that every time mom holds baby, her brain releases the bonding hormone oxytocin which deepens her attachment with baby. Oxytocin also plays another crucial role for the postpartum mother who chooses to breastfeed: it allows milk to let down so baby can nurse effectively. Holding her baby produces a feedback loop that helps the new mother breastfeed. And if baby is having issues nursing, whether they are on a nursing strike, working through latch issues, or fighting a fast letdown, being held in their mother’s arms relaxes them enough to try nursing again. When moms are breastfeeding, protecting the exclusivity of holding their baby, especially during the first 3-6 months, protects the breastfeeding relationship as it is being established. Baby may want to comfort nurse or cluster feed, and bringing baby to the breast as often as possible regulates mom’s milk supply and ensures baby is getting the comfort and nutrition they need.

#5: Maternal mental health

Holding baby isn’t just good for baby; it’s good for mom, too.

Research shows that the more mothers hold their babies, the more likely they are to feel confident, responsible, and strong (Feng & Zhang, 2024). Holding baby frequently not only develops the attachment between a mother and her baby, but it also increases her self-esteem at a time when her identity is destabilized, especially if she is a new mother. Additionally, holding and nursing baby regulates mom’s hormones after birth when she experiences the sharpest hormone drop of her life. The oxytocin released from skin-to-skin contact is an anti-stress hormone that reduces postpartum anxiety and even diminishes sensitivity to pain, making for a smooth transition into postpartum if mom had a painful or traumatic birth.

#6: Baby’s fragile immune & nervous system

Allowing other people to hold your baby introduces bacteria and sensory information that can be challenging for a baby’s fragile immune and nervous system to integrate.

Babies are born with immature immune and nervous systems. Around three months of age, these systems start to become more robust, but initially, they are extremely fragile (Buckley, 2008). Babies are more susceptible to illness and overstimulation when they are held by multiple people. Keeping baby in their mother or primary caregiver’s arms limits their exposure and reduces risk.

#7: Prolactin’s impact on caretaking instincts and proximity-seeking behaviors

Prolactin, the hormone responsible for producing milk, also increases caretaking instincts and proximity-seeking behaviors in the new mother.

New mothers are wired to care for their own babies and keep them close. Prolactin helps a new mother prioritize her baby’s needs and engage in “offspring-directed behaviors,” or behaviors such as grooming, soothing, and feeding baby. This hormone also creates high levels of motivation in the mother to soothe and interact with her baby (Georgescu et al., 2021). For this reason, many postpartum mothers cannot relax when they see someone else caring for their baby, no matter how well-intentioned, safe, or competent that caregiver is. Prolactin creates an almost compulsive need in the mother to address a baby’s needs themselves (Buckley, 2008).

In conclusion: the maternal brain prioritizes proximity to baby and frequent holding.

Wanting to hold your own baby is biologically normal and reflective of neurohormonal changes, the attachment relationship, and an awareness of your baby’s dependency needs.

With you and rooting for you on your motherhood journey,

~S

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This is who I want to be pregnant: soft. joyfully embodied. prepared, together, graceful.

In short, I want to present the picture of motherhood that I idealized before I became a mom, before I understood that a season of my life would arrive where I had to put “brush my teeth” on a to-do list so I wouldn’t forget, when I would have to sacrifice nail appointments because finding a sitter or juggling schedules with my husband was too difficult, or when I would have to give up bangs or earrings because these accessories were now a liability with a feral toddler.

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There are still parts of me that don’t want to admit that motherhood has changed me into someone who feels rougher, more unhinged, and even less feminine on certain days.

Being pregnant with my second child, I can already appreciate how a second gets swallowed up by your fast-paced life. With my first, he set the pace and changed everything. His moods and needs dominate the day and my life orbits around him. I don’t have time to think about the normal aches and challenges of pregnancy because I’m making lunch or trying to coordinate naptime with an appointment or managing a meltdown. I have less resources, and if I’m honest this makes me feel guilty for not being as intentional with thinking about my pregnancy. I used to write my son letters when I was pregnant, meditate with my hands on my belly every night, and ritualize his milestones. Now I’m more stretched, and the free time I do have is spent preparing logistics for the baby, not necessarily connecting with him on this super-psychic level.

But if motherhood has taught me anything, it’s that the real work of it is becoming who our children need, not trying to live up to our own self-imposed ideals.

I talk to my baby while I nurse my son. I feel the baby kick while I read my son books about becoming a big brother. I think about my baby while my husband and I review the budget to make sure we’re saving enough for maternity leave. My second son is arriving into a fully established family with daily routines and splashes of chaos and multiple layers of competing needs. The intention I poured into my first is not realistic with him, but it doesn’t mean the love is less or the effort is meaningless.

With this pregnancy, I’m focused on becoming a more resourced, stable mom. I’m taking the prenatal supplements, drinking more water, and going to weekly chiropractic and PT. I’m clarifying meal prep systems, building my postpartum freezer stash early, and getting that meal train going.

I’m no longer romanticizing and fantasizing about a motherhood experience that doesn’t involve trade-offs. I’m grounding and nesting. I’m wiser this time.

I know what to expect, I trust my decisions more, and I’m preparing for a different initiation into matrescence, one that sees the family as a whole and not just the child.

My first child was a universe that sucked me into an all-consuming gravitational field. My husband used to joke that I would step on his face to get to my son. One time, I broke our car’s air conditioning unit to crawl into the back seat to comfort him. My son was my everything, but now 17 months postpartum with a baby on the way, he fits into a bigger universe which is our family. This is good for my son. This is good for all of us. And it will be good for the son that is coming to enter a family that knows how to make space for everyone.

That’s the difference with a second baby: your perspective shifts from pouring into just one person into considering the needs of everyone in the family.

And instead of feeling guilty about this, I’m challenging myself to see this as a good thing. My second son has a big brother. He has a more seasoned dad and a more seasoned mom. He has extended family members who understand the ways of our family and won’t have to adjust to the culture shock of ecological breastfeeding and family cosleeping. A lot of the firsts that come with a first won’t exist for him, but he’s arriving in a relational space that is more formed, stable, and ready.

I would love to have the time to knit my baby a receiving blanket, curate a pregnancy playlist, or do any of the other things I did with my first. But I didn’t have the lived experience and wisdom to prioritize the basics over the poetics back then. We painted a nursery that my son never slept in but didn’t have a meal train, a prudent reserve, or an established plan for postpartum. I was excited in my soul but I wasn’t ready in the groundwork of my life.

With this baby, I’m preparing in a different way. I’m considering finances, resources, and the family. I’m considering his birth with real questions about how to manage risk and the pain of childbirth because I’ve been through it before. I’m learning from my first experience and creating back-up plans and a clearer birth plan than before. I will be the first person to physically touch my baby when he’s crowning. I will bury his placenta underneath an apple tree in our yard. I will not let anyone else’s fear or guilt touch me.

I know the kind of mom I am in this season of matrescence. I’m not as soft or polished as I envisioned. I’m older, crankier, and more sure of myself. But I’m okay with that because I am who my children need.

I trust in this process of becoming. I trust my body, I trust this baby, I trust birth. That’s the gift of motherhood. We don’t become our ideals. We embody the version of ourselves who our children need and realize this mother we’re embodying is actually who we needed, too.

I believe in your becoming, and so do your babies,

~S

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I polled 514 mothers on my Instagram account and 89% reported feeling like their mother or mother-in-law overstepped boundaries and tried to nurture a relationship with their child that was more maternal than grandmotherly. Here are some of the stories I've heard:

• Multiple moms stated that their mothers or mothers-in-law insisted on being referred to as “Mom” or “Mommy”, not “Grandma”

• Multiple moms stated that their mothers or mothers-in-law protested their plan to exclusively breast-feed because they wanted to have the opportunity to “bond with the baby”

• Multiple women stated that their mothers or mothers-in-law directly contradicted their rules with their children

• Multiple women stated that their mothers or mothers-in-law would not give their baby back to them when the baby was crying

• Multiple women stated that their mothers or mothers-in-law demanded unlimited visits or overnight visits in the postpartum period

Anyone else triggered?

But what does an appropriate grandmother-grandchild relationship look like? How is this different than the mother-child relationship? When does this role overlap get sticky?

In this article, I’m going to explore these questions through the lens of attachment theory, trauma theory, and family systems theory. And if you don’t know me, but somehow wound up on this page, my name is Sarah, and I am a therapist, author, mother, and doula who helps mothers, couples, and families break cycles of trauma and heal with the next generation in mind. Let’s dive into this topic and name all of the nuances that coalesce here.

Defining The Role of Mother And Grandmother

A mother carries parental authority with her children that a grandparent does not possess. This authority is psychological, developmental, and legal. She makes decisions for her children’s well-being, provides for their basic and emotional needs, and assumes responsibility for them. Grandmothers don’t carry this authority. They can support a parent’s parenting decisions or try to influence them, but they aren’t tasked with enacting them.

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Mom Mom Maria, owner of the popular Instagram account @mommom.maria, defines this role difference as follows:

“A mother is responsible for raising the child and making important decisions for them. A grandmother is an extended family member whose role is to love, support, and respect those decisions. Many grandmothers get this wrong because they confuse being important in a child’s life with being entitled to authority over it.”

Dee Dee Moore, founder of the popular Instagram account @morethangrand, says this about the difference:

“As a mother, your role is twofold: to meet your children's basic human needs and to provide a strong foundation so they can navigate life's challenges. When you become a grandmother, you provide support so your adult children can do those things for their children. You don't stop being a mother, but mothering now means letting them lead instead of actively guiding them.”

Both of these definitions come from grandmothers who help other grandmothers navigate healthy relationships with their adult children. I find their definitions interesting because they both talk about how being a grandparent requires you stepping back from the parental role of active guidance, leadership, and authority. But as Maria states, many grandparents get confused about this role difference. Why does this happen so often? Let’s dive into the reasons now.

Identity Loss For The Grandmother

For some grandmothers, the arrival of a grandchild signals an opportunity to fulfill unmet emotional and ego needs. On an unconscious level, many grandmothers crave the identity and authority that being a parent offered. They miss making important decisions for their children, being respected by the community for their parenting, and feeling a sense of stability in the role of mother.

As a family therapist, I know that transitions into various life stages are not always easy and family members don’t always make them with grace. Dee Dee Moore talks about this struggle on her Instagram page, explaining that becoming a grandmother often involves loss as the grandmother adjusts to a peripheral role rather than the leadership role she’s accustomed to embodying.

This loss is intensified when the grandmother didn’t have much meaning in her life beyond being a mother. If her marriage was emotionally empty and she relied on her children to meet her needs for connection, or if she didn’t have a career or personal interests and poured into her children to meet her needs for purpose, it makes sense that she would try to remake this experience with her grandchildren, even if it causes tension with her daughter or daughter-in-law, and feel disappointed when her vision for getting these needs met doesn’t go according to plan.

When Grandmothers Crave Primary Attachment

In the attachment world, we have this concept of primary and secondary attachment. When a baby is born, he or she is wired to form a primary attachment with the mother. The baby recognizes his or her mother’s voice, smell, and heartbeat and he or she is wired to seek proximity with the mother. This need to be held and near the mother is so strong that biological infant sleep expert Dr. James McKenna says the new mother’s body is equivalent to the womb for the newborn.

When this primary attachment is secure, the baby learns to develop secondary attachments around nine months of age. Secondary attachments are where the baby learns the world is safe, and the felt sense of comfort he receives from his mother can be distributed to other people in the village, such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Not every baby or family follows this clear-cut model of attachment; some grandmothers are more involved in the baby’s life in those early months if that is the mother’s preference, and this bond deepens if the mother supports opportunities for bonding such as offering bottle-feeds or more skin-to-skin contact.

But it’s also incredibly normal for a newborn to only want their mother, especially if that baby is a breast-fed baby. This maternal preference can feel rejecting to some grandmothers who have visions of being able to soothe the baby without the mother’s help or having a more hands-on role with their grandchild. As mentioned previously, becoming a grandmother also involves loss, not just of identity as a mother, but also as keeper of the primary attachment relationship. Adult children form deeper attachments with their spouses and children as they grow up. This can feel destabilizing and threatening to the grandmother as she copes with the loss of closeness with her adult child who now becomes a parent.

Generational Differences Create Tension

The more I observe this phenomenon of tension between the grandmother and mother after a baby is the more I can’t help but see the impact of generational differences. For starters, the average age of becoming a mother is older than previous generations. The average age of first birth in 1970 was 24.6 years, while today it is 27.5 years. The average age of marriage in 1970 was 23 years, while today it is 30.5 years. What does this tell us about generational expectations?

In her book You, Your Husband, and His Mother, Dr. Tracy Dalgleish observes that tension between mothers and daughters-in-law often arises due to this precise difference in age and maturity. New moms today are more educated, financially stable, and mature than their mothers or mothers-in-law were when they became mothers. For a younger mom, I imagine there is a desire to look toward a maternal figure for guidance. But for an older mom, say in my example, being in my mid thirties, I feel clearer in my preferences and vision as a parent. And not only that, but being told how to parent after living on my own for 15 years, owning my own home, and being accomplished in my career, feels jarring and infantilizing.

Mothers and mothers-in-law may be completely unaware that offering unsolicited advice, undermining or criticizing a parenting decision, or exercising parental authority in place of the parent, such as by disciplining the children or soothing a baby who only wants their mother, is inappropriate because this is what their mother or mother-in-law did to them. They never questioned it because they were younger and more easily influenced.

But moms today are more sure of who they are and what they want as mothers. The self-assuredness also comes from cultural shifts in mental health. Moms today are more educated on boundaries and self-advocacy than moms of previous generations; therapy is more accessible and more women have made use of this resource. This makes us more conscious of our needs and feelings and less likely to let someone push our boundaries, especially with our kids.

Additionally, moms today are more aware of parenting research than mothers of previous generations. Parenting experts like Dr. Becky Goodman, author of Good Inside, offer free tips on social media platforms, and if getting our daily dose of parenting advice through Instagram-scrolling isn’t enough, we can order a parenting book through Amazon that will be on our doorstep the next morning.

Our mothers and mothers-in-law simply cannot relate to what it is like to parent with this much access to expert advice. Most of them have not invested in their inner work the way that we have, leading to clashes between unconscious expectations around parenting roles.

A Way Through The Tension

We’ve named the tension, but now what?

Differences in expectations point to the need for clear communication. Dee Dee Moore says that having conversations before the baby arrives can reduce hurt feelings and resentments. Parenting expert Dr Becky offers several boundary scripts for talking to your mother or mother-in-law when you feel like they are undermining your parenting. These scripts usually involve three tactics, which are:

• Emphasizing appreciation for the grandparent

• Emphasizing importance of being aligned

• Clearly and briefly communicating the behavior you want and the impact of the behavior they’re engaging in

Here’s a few examples:

• When your mom calls your child “my baby” or asks your children to call her “mom", you can say something like, “I appreciate how much you love my child but teaching her to call you mom creates confusion for her and upsets me. Let’s stick to Grandma. It’s important to me that we are on the same page with this.”

• When your MIL insists on soothing your baby when your baby is crying for you, you can say something like, “I would appreciate you giving my baby back as soon as she starts crying. My priority in that moment is her regulation and as her mother I feel comfortable soothing her in those moments.”

• When your mother interjects with you setting a boundary with your child, you can say something like, “It’s important to me that we are aligned on rules and boundaries with the kids. Please do not interject again when I am setting a boundary. If you have an issue you can pull me to the side privately to discuss.”

Remember, it’s not your job to manage your mother or mother-in-law’s feelings. It might be challenging to sit with their disappointment or resentment if you are accustomed to changing your boundaries to meet their expectations and regulate their feelings. But your job now is to be your child’s leader and advocate. Their safety and attachment is what matters most.

Grandmothers are allowed to get triggered. We can let them have their reactions without taking these reactions on.

A Final Word on The Hurt of An Overstepping Mother or Mother-in-Law

The protectiveness you feel with your child is instinctual and biological. This protectiveness intensifies in the early months of postpartum when your baby is most vulnerable and your brain is heightened with hormones that fuel bonding, caretaking, and protecting. But even when your baby grows into a child, this protectiveness is deeply woven into the attachment relationship. When someone tries to get in the way of your relationship with your child, it feels violating. And it is violating.

It is violating to tell a mother how to parent.

It is violating to contradict a mother’s established rules and boundaries with her children.

It is violating to ask a mother to have her children call you mother when you’re not her mother.

It is violating to ask a mother to bottle-feed her baby when she plans to breast-feed, or to insist on soothing her baby when that baby is crying for her.

It is violating to criticize a mother’s parenting decisions.

Not disrespectful. Not upsetting. Violating.

And it doesn’t feel good to coach the person who violated you on how to respect you as a parent, especially when you expected that person to act more supportive and understanding on your parenting journey. Dr. Tracy D says that some relationships with mothers-in-law take work and do work because both the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law ultimately value the relationship and see it as an overall positive. In considering your mother or mother-in-law’s relationship to your child, you might be willing to have these annoying boundary conversations because you value their relationship with your child as their grandmother. But if your mother or mother-in-law is not willing to stay in their lane as the grandmother, and repetitively oversteps into the role of mother, tough conversations and misunderstandings start to feel like a pattern, one that you can’t afford for your children’s well-being or your own.

Only you can make the call of what boundaries to set. Give yourself grace as you learn and give yourself room to explore what a nourishing relationship with your mother or mother-in-law feels like in this season of life as a parent.

And you’re not alone. Over 500 women -- and counting -- are in your shoes.

Believing in your matrescence journey, always

~S

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I’m offering a 6-week attachment & trauma-informed support circle for postpartum moms starting in July. If you get on the waitlist now, you’ll be the first to be invited to register, with a small gift from me (psst: registration will open this weekend ;) ). Get on the waitlist by visiting this link & clicking Nurtured (or DM me your email).

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In my work as a therapist with parentified daughters who have experienced childhood trauma, I understand intimately how these two emotions get suppressed in the interest of surviving trauma in the attachment relationship.

It’s not safe to feel a sense of loss about your parent when you are tasked with meeting their demands and trying to meet their unrealistic expectations.

It’s not safe to feel a sense of anger when your parent violates your boundaries or holds you to unfair standards as their child when you are trying to preserve attachment with them.

This is the essence of how attachment trauma happens and how emotions like grief and anger fail to complete inside: to get our need for proximity and closeness to the parent met as a child, we cut off the natural emotional reactions to the parent’s bizarre, inappropriate, or unstable behaviors. Dr. Gabor Mate encapsulates this concept best when he says:

“When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.”

We are wired to choose attachment, even with the most emotionally immature, neglectful, or abusive caregivers, over ourselves as children because attachment equates to survival.

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Now, enter, adulthood. Enter, attachment trauma recovery. Enter, healing.

Maybe you’ve been on this journey for a while and you’ve done some inner work around these attachment wounds. You’ve started to recover the healthy anger that got lost in the service of attachment and you’ve started to grieve the parent you needed over the parent you received. You’re feeling sturdier in your sense of self and have differentiated to a large degree from your parent and family of origin. Your adult life looks nothing like your childhood and the way you treat yourself looks nothing like what was modeled for you by your parents.

Maybe, like many of the parentified daughters I work with, you have children of your own or recently have begun your motherhood journey. And the wounds you thought you processed and “worked on” are now revealing larger taproots. You’re starting to question your relationship with your parent in a more investigative, scrutinizing way. You’re remembering scenes from your childhood and you’re struggling to empathize with your parent. How could they treat me this way, when me doing this to my child is incomprehensible? Maybe you’ve taken this line of questioning a step further — are they going to do this to my child? Am I willing to take the risk — of them lashing out at my child this way or being this irresponsible?

Maybe you’ve had an arms-distance, low-contact relationship. You’ve learned to “sidestep”, a relational strategy coined by author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents Lindsay Gibson to describe how some adult children of emotionally immature parents deal with their parents, which involves ignoring the bait and limiting engagement. But now you’re thinking… even low contact is too much. Even an extremely limited, distant, boundaried relationship is work you don’t want to pour into them. And as you’re bonding with your baby, as you’re raising little children, maintaining a one-sided relationship with your parent is beginning to feel like too much.

In my clinical experience working with parentified daughters, becoming a parent is often the tipping point to estrangement and going no-contact.

You may have already reached this point or considered it even if you don’t have children of your own, but becoming a parent puts the relationship under a microscope. You stop making excuses for your parent once you understand the responsibility of parenting. And you stop wanting a relationship with your parent when you realize they never appropriately embodied this responsibility in a real way, while your life is consumed with it.

Going no-contact, as parent-adult child estrangement expert Dr. Whitney Goodman sees it, is rarely an impulsive decision and often arrives after years and years of trying to make an impossible relationship work. It’s usually a well-thought out decision that has been processed and planned for a long time. But what most parentified adult children don’t anticipate about estrangement is the grief work that follows. We’ve been grieving before this decision. Loss is tinged in this decision because we have to accept that our parent did not meet our needs, and in fact, created more injury than connection.

But shutting the door opens another door. And what’s behind that door is deep, profound grief.

The grief that your child-self was trying to avoid with all of the strategies they learned to survive attachment trauma — strategies like people-pleasing, walking on eggshells, or being hyper-responsible — comes crashing in when you actually cope with the loss of the parental relationship. It’s one thing to recognize that the relationship is not what you want or need and another thing to actually say, I am no longer psychologically investing in this relationship. That declaration reverberates in the inner world and activates young, proximity-seeking parts. These parts are now face-to-face with their deepest fear, a primal fear that we all carry as mammals, which is to be separated from the parent.

You may have coped with the psychological loss of a parent in trauma healing work but now you cope with the loss of ongoing relationship.

Estrangement can feel like the death of a parent or the loss of a shared history. Even if that history is painful and filled with trauma, it’s still your history and your parent is still your parent.

It’s important to name this if you were thinking about estrangement or if you are navigating it now.

A part of you may always miss your parent. Parts of you may also feel relieved and empowered in making the conscious decision to go no-contact. You can make room for the dialectics of this kind of loss and hold space for all parts of you, including the young ones who simply want proximity to a parent, even if that proximity hurts, and the adult part that is choosing safety and stability in a season of life when you can’t afford to lose your peace of mind.

I’ve heard psychologists often describe estrangement as a process that requires a lot of effort. In one podcast episode that unfortunately I cannot recall to properly cite, Esther Perel says that “it takes a lot of psychic energy to keep a door closed” in referencing estrangement. The logic is that your parent will always be your parent, and just because you don’t talk to them or see them on an ongoing basis doesn’t mean this relationship is extracted from your psyche. I find these conceptions of estrangement slightly misleading and unhelpful.

The reality is that maintaining contact or going no-contact with an emotionally immature, abusive, or neglectful parent is challenging either way.

It takes a lot of psychic energy to keep the door open on a harmful relationship, too. Parentified adult children don’t have good options when it comes to navigating relationship with their parents. In my opinion, the emphasis needs to be on the relationship parentified adult children have to their inner world of parts and their own healthy adult awareness or Self-energy, rather than the relationship to the parent. Risks and benefits to contact with your parent need to be named and evaluated from season to season in your life because they will change with the season. Childfree-you you may have had the space to deal with your mother’s temper tantrums, for example, but mother-you doesn’t. Single-you may have had space to deal with your father’s entitlement, but married you doesn’t.

As you grow up and differentiate from your parents, your maturity and healing process may ask different things of you. Estrangement isn’t the end of a healing process or the end of a relationship – it’s the beginning of a new relationship to yourself.

Estrangement is one option of many for navigating a difficult relationship with difficult parents. It’s not the pinnacle of healing and it’s also not the last resort. You’re allowed to learn from this process and change your mind on the journey.

If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, I’ve enclosed an inventory below for paid subscribers.

Thank you for reading, and as always, remember that all of you makes sense, all of you belongs, and all of you matters in the greater story of who you are,

~Sarah

Want to connect more with my work? Here’s what I’m up to:

♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS is now open for registration

♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥ Get on the waitlist for my postpartum support group Nurtured

The Contact Ambivalence Inventory: A Guide For Making Decisions About Maintaining or Eliminating Contact With an Emotionally Immature, Abusive, or Neglectful Parent

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I heard about the hormone shift of the early postpartum experience and knew weepiness and heightened reactivity were to be expected, but I never anticipated how entangled grief would be in my early motherhood experience. Though I was (and still am) an entirely devoted mother who paid (and will pay) any price for my child’s well-being, and though I celebrated this new being and our close relationship and the identity shift of motherhood, there was an inexplicable emptiness that permeated my early postpartum experience alongside the beauty of it. I look back now and more accurately see that emptiness as grief, as the awareness crystallizing of all the responsibilities of motherhood.

If we are honest with ourselves, every new mother goes through a grieving process.

We don’t talk about it because it’s taboo. We face plant into a wall of mom-guilt when we acknowledge “negative emotion” and we risk the label of postpartum depression if we name the challenging parts of this season of life. Perinatal mental health expert, Karen Kleiman, says that grief permeates the postpartum experience and is a core emotion of this season of life. But we don’t treat grief as “normal” in the maternal experience. We exile it as we perform the cultural expectation of being the happy, pleasing mother with no needs or world of her own. No one wants to risk the judgement of others when they’re already raw, vulnerable, and unsure. Why would new moms talk about grief when we want to convince everyone that we’re good at this?

What’s especially tragic about this exiling of grief is not only that grief is so normal and unavoidable, but that grief, from an existential and emotional development standpoint, is central to integrating experience. This means that for us to reap the full fruits of motherhood, including all of the knowledge, lessons, and insight, we have to name, mourn, and accept the forgotten fruits from our former life. This seems obvious yet almost every mom I’ve encountered has expressed resistance to this kind of grief work, which leads me to wonder:

why are we so threatened by the admission that motherhood involves losing parts of ourselves?

In the haze of early postpartum, I remember several women with well-meaning intentions saying that I needed to get back to myself. I needed to find my interests again. Do something just for me. Get my identity needs met through work. I get that they were trying to help me stay afloat and not lose myself in early motherhood. They wanted me to remember that there was a me beyond my baby. But looking back, especially with my understanding of grief’s role in the postpartum process and more of an understanding of the physiology of postpartum, this is what I want to say to that new mother who was fielding these women’s comments, and any new postpartum mother:

it’s okay to lose yourself right now. It’s okay to not know who you are beyond taking care of your baby. This is one season. It will pass and you will find yourself again in motherhood.

In mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, he conceptualizes a phase of initiation called “entering the belly of the whale.” When we are called to grow, mature, and act heroically in our lives, we will pass through a period where it feels like we are in the dark. We are bereft of our resources; how we normally cope fails and we feel humbled with how little we know and how inadequate our best thinking is. The suggested course of action in this phase of initiation is not to do battle with the darkness, but to lean into it. Allow ourselves to be humbled. For in that darkness, we are remade. The whale spits us out eventually.

Postpartum is a time of profound psychological remaking. While I appreciate the advice to find something that reminded me of myself, my physiology was completely primed to think only of my son. This is why many experts on infant development and matrescence refer to mother and baby as the “mother-baby dyad” during this time. We exist in a deeply entangled hormonal and relational ecosystem with our babies. Research shows that maternal vigilance, or the state of hyper-protectiveness with our babies, is highest for the first 3-4 months postpartum, and then starts to decrease. We’re supposed to be entirely oriented to them. This can be terrifying when we’re in it and worrying for people who care about us. Will we ever be ourselves again?

When we surrender to the shifts of motherhood and accept the messy, liminal space of remaking, our identity eventually reconstitutes. We exit early postpartum with renewed focus, awareness of our strengths, and wider range as women. I wrote a book postpartum, in the same fashion of how I am currently writing this post, with my son latched and flutter feeding during a nap. I clarified boundaries around my family, shifted into a creative direction that made room for my identity as a mom, and evolved my marriage, learning to love my husband with this new mother-role as he grew into his new father-role.

Postpartum taught me so many precious lessons through every tender moment, and because I didn’t fight the changes, because I allowed myself to feel all the feelings through them, I’ve grown into a clearer, more embodied version of myself. I am grounded in what matters. My family and my children will always come first. And I can use my talents, passions, and interests to support my family and fill my cup so I can be present with them. Motherhood has profoundly deepened me.

This is the gift of grief work for mothers: it opens us to the full spectrum of humanity.

That’s our job as mothers, isn’t it? To educate our children about what it means to be human? I don’t ever want to present an image of motherhood to my son or to the world that is one-dimensional and unintegrated. When I am having a hard time balancing it all, I say out loud, “Mommy is having a hard time doing our routine today.” When I am impatient or distracted, I acknowledge that I have a part that isn’t being kind or present, and it isn’t my son’s fault. Of course there is an age-appropriateness to how much of my experience I share with my son, but I do believe it is important to model that we aren’t martyrs.

Motherhood is not a fantastical idyllic space of bubbles and peek-a-boo and endless nurture and sacrifice with a smile. There is anger here. There is loss here. There is pain here.

Like any relationship and any initiation in life, we encounter the full spectrum of ourselves as we are being remade. It’s okay to grieve in this transition. I promise, it will not threaten the relationship you have and you want with your child. My experience is that it actually enriches it. It will evolve the parts of you that can’t be expressed in this season of life in the same way. For example, I have learned more about yoga engaging in my practice with a toddler crawling over me, or in little twenty minute chunks of time than I have in the glorious 90 minutes I would give myself at sunrise at the shala every day. I’ve learned more about poetry making up songs with my son and being outside in the garden than I ever have editing a national literary journal and reading and writing poetry endlessly on my days off. I don’t need to wander into asceticism and solitude now to access meaning in my life. The relational space of motherhood gives rich context and powerful lessons every day that bring me back to basics, keep me humble and focused, and remind me of what really matters.

It’s okay to grieve on your motherhood journey. It will enrich the journey. I promise. And I’m here with you.

Believing in your matrescence journey, always,

~Sarah

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I’m offering a 6-week attachment & trauma-informed support circle for postpartum moms starting in July. If you get on the waitlist now, you’ll be the first to be invited to register, with a small gift from me (psst: registration will open this weekend ;) ). Get on the waitlist by visiting this link & clicking Nurtured (or DM me your email).

Want to connect more with my work? Here’s what I’m up to:

♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS is now open for registration

♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥ Follow me on Instagram!

Parentification, or the experience of role reversal in the relationship with your parents, happens when parents recruit children for adult responsibilities such as emotional caretaking or task completion. Some common examples of parentification I have observed in my clinical work over the years include:

• taking care of younger siblings because the parent is emotionally unavailable or chemically inebriated

• becoming the parent’s confidante or feeling like a second spouse

• feeling pressure to make the parent feel like a good parent instead of feeling safe enough to share your needs

• handling adult responsibilities like paying bills or making appointments because the parent is chemically inebriated or mentally ill

• walking on eggshells to avoid the parent lashing out and suppressing your feelings

When children are tasked with adult responsibilities, they aren’t allowed to be children. Innocence, playfulness, and connection get sacrificed for obligation, self-reliance, and independence. Many parentified adult children feel like they missed something essential in their childhood or didn’t have a childhood. If you relate to this experience, you’re probably burned out on the constant conscientiousness and responsibility you feel in relationships but struggle to access another way of being.

When parts feel this automatic and protective, we call them protector parts in IFS. Protector parts protect us from the vulnerability or trauma that wasn’t safe to experience. For parentified adult children, depending on adults, connecting with emotion, or asking for support were never options. We learned we had to be strong, independent, and capable of meeting our own needs to survive.

Some of us even go to an extreme of creating a complex around counter-identification with our parent. In other words, we strive to be the opposite of them. If you saw your parent constantly inconveniencing and overly depending upon others, you became exceptionally gracious and competent at solving your own problems. You learned to view vulnerability as weakness and protect yourself against it at all costs.

The trouble with these kinds of protective strategies long-term is that they often outlive their purpose. You may have had to become hyper-independent to survive a childhood with an addicted, financially irresponsible parent, but this hyper-independence creates issues in romantic relationships because being able to be vulnerable builds trust and intimacy, and your protector parts are still hell-bent against being vulnerable because it doesn’t feel safe.

In IFS, we never make protector parts go away. We start with the premise that they make sense in relationship to how they survived and that they deserve respect, curiosity, and support.

We don’t bypass protectors and insist on new strategies. We listen and follow the protector’s lead. When traumatized parts feel validated and understood for their stories of survival and resilience, they naturally become open to exploring new roles and ways of being.

I want to tell you a story about how one of my parentified protectors has been experiencing some healing:

As a child who navigated addiction and divorce in my home, I’m used to feeling like there aren’t enough resources to support me. If I had a goal, it was on me to make it happen; I didn’t rely on anyone to draft the vision or fund the project or help me figure it out. When I wanted to go back to grad school, or open a yoga studio, or get clean and sober, I didn’t ask for help. Asking for help felt foreign.

Finding my way on my own has always felt safest, most familiar, and most reliable, and that’s the path I’ve taken with most major events in my life.

Enterrr motherhood. Now, I am not the kind of mom who wants advice or asks for help unless I really feel like I need it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be home with my now-toddler during the day and work part-time at night, doing therapy, writing my book, and making content without having to hire a nanny or put my child in daycare. A few months ago, my husband mentioned how much I seemed to be struggling with all of the duties of parenting, managing a household, and working and suggested that we rely on my mother-in-law a bit for childcare.

Oh, how I balked. There was so much resistance in me! This had nothing to do with not trusting my mother-in-law or not wanting to give up time with my son. Something in me revolted against the idea of needing anyone in this difficult season of life where I am stretched thin every day. When I am stretched thin, my parts don’t look outward for support. They look inward and try to find a new solution or redouble my efforts.

Trusting someone to consistently support me when I really need support feels harder to my parentified protectors than not expecting support and handling something difficult on my own. Can you relate?

Eventually, my husband and I decided to have my mother-in-law come over for a few hours one afternoon a week. In the beginning of the arrangement, I felt a lot of anxiety. I couldn’t relax into the feeling of having a few hours to myself to catch up on admin tasks or errands or pour into my nervous system. Looking back months later, I think I was afraid to adjust to a new normal that could be taken from me again, only this time it wouldn’t just affect me, it would affect my son. I was afraid that me accepting help was me admitting that I needed someone and that felt worse than struggling and just doing it myself. But now I’ve settled into the weekly Grandma-comes-over routine. I see how positive my son’s relationship is with his grandmother and how much more resourced I am when she comes, like I’m able to take some deeper breaths and approach my son fresh and present.

This experience of receiving help and trusting in someone’s support has also offered some healing to parts of me that never had relational support as an option. I’ve realized receiving help isn’t as risky as my protectors think it is. Even if this arrangement isn’t forever, I trust that leaning into it will help me with the next learning experience on my parenting journey.

One of the ways we help our parentified parts heal is by giving them opportunities for what we call a “redo” in IFS or a “corrective experience” in trauma-informed terms. If we didn’t feel safe enough to trust, we build relationships where we can start to cultivate those skills. We do this slowly and in a titrated fashion so as not to overwhelm our protective system or veer too far outside our window of tolerance. In the personal example I offered, letting my mother-in-law watch my son for a few hours once a week is a low-stakes risk to the part of me that is anxious about receiving help. By respecting our parts’ needs rather than blowing past their limits, our protectors are able to actually witness and integrate a new experience.

As you reflect on your own experience with parentification and the theme of being strong, keep the following IFS axioms in mind:

♥ Protector parts always make sense in relationship to what they had to survive.

♥ The beginning place of healing is always offering respect and understanding to our protectors.

♥ We heal by moving at the pace our protectors prefer; we don’t blow past their limits.

♥ Traumatized protectors feel automatic and intense; healed protectors may prefer their strategies but become open to new options and perspectives.

♥ Protectors heal when you compassionately hold them and respectfully offer them experiences that show them other possibilities.

Always remember that all of you makes sense, all of you belongs, and all of you bears vital wisdom.

~S

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Want to connect more with my work? Here’s what I’m up to:

♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS is now open for registration

♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥ Get on the waitlist for my postpartum support group Nurtured

Mother’s Day isn’t any different and brings up all kinds of hurts and longings.

You may have been looking for connection today, and in its place, found criticism.

You may have been looking for presence today, and in its place, found absence or distraction.

You may have been looking for warmth or kindness today, and in its place, found dismissal or avoidance.

All of us have a built-in awareness that desires unconditional love from our mothers. In developmental terms, we call this an attachment conscience. It’s bigger than attachment instincts, which drive us to see closeness and proximity with the caregiver. Attachment conscience is the awareness we have of how our caregiver regards us, and what we need to do to secure their approval.

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We all want to be regarded with delight, warmth, and welcome; we want to sense that we are loved for who we are, exactly as we are. When we are met with rejection, coldness, or disapproval, something in us deeply suffers. We ache with a mother wound or what Kelly McDaniel describes as mother hunger. When we have not experienced the kind of safety, comfort, or guidance that we need from our mothers, we form a negative poor belief about ourselves one that tells us we are unworthy in some way fundamentally receive the kind of love we crave.

As children, we don’t have the ability to assign responsibility to the parent when the parent fails to provide for our attachment needs. We take on this responsibility by blaming ourselves. We form a negative belief about who we are that says we are unworthy. This belief keep us searching for the missing ingredient of attachment in relationships.

As you celebrated Mother’s Day, maybe you noticed some tenderness around this missing ingredient. You may have started this day wanting acknowledgment, connection, or validation and received the same old, familiar hurt. Mother’s Day puts the relationships with your mom under a microscope and forces you to reflect on where you’re still hurting.

If you’re a parentified daughter, Mother’s Day might feel like a day where you’re busy trying to meet someone else’s explicit or imagined expectations of you. You might feel more connected to your mother’s reactions and treatment of you than your actions or emotions. For example, instead of feeling good about the dinner you prepared or the gift you purchased, you’re busy scanning for signs of disapproval, listening for passive aggressive comments, or walking on eggshells to make sure you’re not the person who disappointed her this year. Or maybe your relationship with your mom is more emotionally distant, and while you can’t relate to that sense of hypervigilance, you feel the struggle in picking out a card that feels true to your relationship or spending any time with her when you literally have nothing real to talk about.

If you’re a mother yourself, Mother’s Day can feel extra hard because you’re more focused on your parent than being present with your own family. It might be your job in your family of origin to plan an event, do all the cooking, or keep the peace, despite having little kids who need your full attention and wanting to be celebrated yourself. Mother’s Day not only puts a microscope over the relationship with your mom, but it highlights the disparity between her imbalanced expectations or severe distance and the absence of care or closeness you need. Mother’s Day can feel like a repeat event where your mother’s feelings or needs are the focus, even though you’re the one in the trenches with little ones in need of support.

For parentified daughters, the river of care flows backwards and Mother’s Day is a microcosm of this inverse relational dynamic.

So, how to heal? We turn the river of care inwards. We turn toward the parts of us that are bearing the responsibility of the attachment relationship and ask, “what do you need? I’m here.”

Attachment injuries like the mother wound rarely heal by your mother doing an about-face and magically becoming who you needed back then. Call me skeptical, but in my clinical experience, the parents who actually do this are in the minority for parentified daughters. It’s safe to count on your mother not changing. It doesn’t mean she can’t or that you can’t want her to. It just means that she has a track record and her behavior is predictable.

The emotional immaturity and under-development that it takes for a parent to not meet their child’s attachment needs is deeply pathological and typically requires years of therapy and concerted effort to change. For most emotionally immature parents, it feels safer to continue a dysfunctional relationship than face the risk of accountability and change.

So if you can’t go to the person who gave you the mother-wound to heal it, how do you heal?

In IFS, we acknowledge the parts holding pain around these wounds. We get curious about how our system has learned to protect ourselves to survive these hurts, and we get to know these parts in a respectful relationship. We get curious about what our parts are needing, and we try to meet these needs in presence, or what we call Self-energy.

When it comes to healing the wounds of parentification and childhood trauma, I prefer the term healthy adult awareness which I learned from developmental trauma expert Dr. Lawrence Heller. Our healthy adult awareness is the awareness that is bigger than our parts, the presence that is capable of sitting with them. It’s not something we need to work on cultivating. It cultivates naturally by simply being present with our parts, and if we’re not sure how to exactly do that, or we ever get stuck, we can borrow other people’s capacity to be present and offer this connection to our parts, such as in the case of working with a therapist.

If you’re feeling the hangover of Mother’s Day, I want you to know that:

♡ You’re allowed to take your time with what you’re feeling and what your parts are needing.

♡ You’re allowed to sit with the feelings that weren’t named on a Hallmark card or weren’t allowed by your mother when you were a child. You can feel the anger, the grief, and the sadness.

♡ You’re allowed to spend time with the parts that were disallowed and get the support you need from people outside your family system.

♡ You’re allowed to make contact with young parts that never got their attachment needs met and meet them in presence.

♡ You’re allowed to set new boundaries for next year’s Mother’s Day and learn from what this year taught you.

Always remember that all of you makes sense, all of you belongs, and all of you bears vital wisdom.

~S

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Want to connect more with my work? Here’s what I’m up to:

♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS is now open for registration

♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥ Get on the waitlist for my postpartum support group Nurtured

One of my favorite stories growing up was “The Ugly Duckling”, and today my favorite retelling of the folk tale is Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s narrative captured in Women Who Run With The Wolves.

If you’re not familiar with the story, a “duckling” is born to a family of ducks that look completely different from him and therefore deem him ugly. He travels far and wide to find where he fits in, facing hunters, farmers, and other animals that bully and abuse him. After months of searching and at the height of his dejection, he finally finds a group of swans. They swim over to him and welcome him into their pod, at which point he realizes that he looks just like them and rests in the assurance of finding his belonging-place.

In Women Who Run With The Wolves, Estes reflects on the motif of exile found in this tale and how soulful women experience exile. She writes,

“A girl is banished for the exact reasons we see in “The Ugly Duckling”… In some parents’ fantasy whatever child they have will be perfect, and will reflect only the parents’ ways and means. If the child is wildish, she may, unfortunately, be subjected to her parents’ attempts at psychic surgery over and over again, for they are trying to re-make the child, and more so trying to change what her soul requires of her. Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent (p. 171).”

Like the ugly duckling, I grew up in a home and culture that tried to change what my soul required of me.

I was willful, loud, and frequently told “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”. Feeling singled out, I would point out the faults of my siblings and was told I was still the child, to be quiet, to stop being difficult. I became a vegetarian at 13 with burgeoning dreams of being an animal rights activist but my goals were always too much in some way. No, I couldn’t protest the circus, no, I couldn’t leave PETA leaflets at my local movie theater, no, I couldn’t convert my little brother to an animal-free diet. My passions always seemed too big for what my family could hold.

On a deeper, subconscious level, my energy challenged parts of the family system that were steeped in denial and emotional avoidance due to addiction.

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In the literature published by the organization Adult Children of Alcoholics, the message “don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel” is referenced frequently to describe the culture of a family living with alcoholism. In my own home, I felt this implicit message in what was outlawed or ignored.

Many questions and feelings were forbidden. This was the great puzzle of my childhood, how to not think what was natural to me about the unnatural behaviors of the adults around me. I think this is true for any child surviving a parent’s active addiction: we have to pretend to not think and feel, get okay with sweeping things under the rug.

When you grow up in addiction, you learn that it’s not safe the feel the fear that naturally arises when your parent is inebriated but everyone acts like they’re completely normal.

It’s not safe to feel the anger that naturally arises when your parent checks out of basic parenting duties and makes you responsible for magically finding lunch money at the back of a junk drawer or conjuring dinner from a cabinet of canned beans and fridge filled with empty shelves and expired ingredients.

It’s not safe to feel the grief that naturally arises when your parent can’t be around you unless you’re high and you wonder, “Why am I not enough to want to be present for?”

Surviving a parent’s active addiction as a child requires sightlessness and dissociation. I have always had a soul that fundamentally requires seeing and feeling. I could not pretend. I faked it, sometimes. I learned to not talk about it and ask the forbidden questions. But even as a little girl, somewhere hidden and quiet inside, I tucked away my knowing and promised to return to it when I was old enough to live it. I knew there was something wrong with my addicted parent and I knew the way I threatened my family’s system of not talking about feelings was reflective of my family and not me.

It still hurt, though. It still created grief. It still created an ache in young adulthood that I carry with me as a 35-year old woman who owns her own home and has her own family and has a profession to which she belongs that is built on seeing.

In young adulthood, I learned to choose myself and stake a claim for my passions, interests, and values, no matter how they contrasted with the implicit messages I received from my family of origin. I owned a yoga studio at one point, started a successful Instagram platform, and became a therapist. These experiences affirmed the me I was never allowed to be. But in choosing myself, I also walked a grief-laden path. I paid a price for standing in the truths I saw with emotional distance, family conflict, and estrangement in later adulthood.

The price so many of us parentified adult children pay for autonomy and differentiation is exile from the places we want to belong.

This creates a polarization inside: parts of us become identified with our autonomy since acceptance isn’t an option, but other parts of us, often very young parts, desperately long for that acceptance. When polarization is painful, parts try to reconcile it by blending with one part of the polarization. For adult children of addicts and alcoholics, this often looks like becoming more independent, embracing what makes us different from their family systems, and walking paths that contrast with our childhood histories.

In embracing independence, we often shut down the parts of us that desire inclusion in the family system. As a trauma therapist, I’ve learned that we have to make room for grief in trauma healing work, especially around wounds of rejection, exclusion, and exile from the people and groups that are supposed to offer us love, acceptance, and inclusion. To survive these wounds, strong, independent parts of us focus on differentiation, or setting us apart from the dysfunctional family. Unmourned grief is often the price we pay for this kind of survival.

To heal from childhood trauma, we need to make room for all parts. We need to make contact with unprocessed emotion and have courage in feeling what we couldn’t when we were busy surviving.

If you relate to the story of “The Ugly Duckling,”

if there are parts of you that have known rejection from the people who were supposed to nurture you,

if the price you paid for being your authentic self was the loss of connection,

Here’s what I want you to know:

♥ You can love the parts of you that were rejected by your family and also feel the hurt of rejection.

♥ You can be proud of how you survived and also feel angry that you had to be so strong, independent, or self-focused.

♥ You’re allowed to choose yourself and acknowledge that there is very real grief in making that choice, even if it’s the right one.

♥ You may always have a young part of you that is wired to seek belonging with your family, even if the only way you could ever secure this belonging was by suffocating your authentic self.

♥ And most importantly: the belonging you seek is inside, in entering into a loving relationship with all parts of you and respecting these parts as vital messengers and bodies of wisdom in the greater story of who you are.

Becoming who you were meant to be may have come with a painful price, but today you can belong to yourself and welcome all parts of you home.

Always remember that all of you makes sense, all of you belongs, and all of you bears vital wisdom.

~S

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Want to connect more with my work? Here’s what I’m up to:

♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS is now open for registration

♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))

♥ Get on the waitlist for my postpartum support group Nurtured

Can you think of a single piece of unsolicited advice you valued on your motherhood journey?

I can’t. I really can’t. And maybe I’m in the minority of mothers who doesn’t value the opinion of a “seasoned mom” or input of an “elder” in the village unless I explicitly ask, but as I progress on my parenting journey I don’t just see less value in unsolicited advice, I see actual damage.

Most people have poor responses to unsolicited advice in general. It brings up feelings of self-consciousness, embarrassment, and defensiveness, like you are suddenly under a microscope being picked apart when you thought you were vibing with someone or at ease in your own flow. It takes you out of connection with the person offering it, removes you from the relational space of presence and inserts you into a power hierarchy.

Think about it: in order for someone to offer unsolicited advice, no matter how well-meaning the intention, they are making one of the following assumptions:

1. I am more informed on this subject than you are, and I have to make you aware of it.

2. The way you are doing things isn’t working or isn’t good enough, and I know better.

There’s a presupposed assumption of knowledge and right-ness; the advice-giver posits him or herself as more powerful in some way, more correct, more knowledgeable, more aware or informed, and the person receiving the advice as in need, and therefore vulnerable, dependent, and unaware.

As a highly sensitive, neurodivergent, and gifted woman, I’ve always been confused by unsolicited advice.

I have my own path in how I do things. I learn by figuring things out on my own. This is the autodidact in me: I have an intellect that needs to discover, explore, and test for myself. Your advice is irrelevant to me if you don’t understand the way I think. Maybe that sounds harsh, maybe that sounds selfish, but I have the creative freedom and success I have in my career because of the way I think. I see patterns and possibilities from how I observe, analyze, and reflect on information, and this requires deep focus, intense hyperfocus, the kind that is easily disrupted by too much input.

When I was writing my book (available for preorder here ;) ), I was careful to keep this project close to the chest. I didn’t share it with many colleagues and I didn’t talk about what I was writing on my social media platforms until I was mostly finished. I had learned from other creative experiences that people love to offer their ideas on your projects even when you don’t ask them, and this rarely benefits the project. Of course there is a time for gathering information, doing your research, and consulting with valued mentors and teachers, but inevitably, in any creative process, there reaches a point where you have to cut yourself off from input — you have to go within, trust what you’ve gathered, and assemble it with your intuition. Too many voices disrupts creative direction.

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Most people don’t talk about motherhood as a creative endeavor, but it is to me.

Being a mom is the most creative thing I’ve ever done. Google AI defines creativity as “the ability to produce original, innovative, and useful ideas or products by connecting disparate concepts, utilizing imagination, and applying skills.” I see my son as the creation, and I steward to the creation that is him by integrating parenting philosophies, imagining possibilities, and using skills like attunement and responsiveness. This creative process is a relational, reciprocal one with my son also shaping me as a mother, but it is deeply creative nonetheless, a mix of instinct, imagination, and intuition.

If we think about motherhood as a creative process, maybe we would respect mother’s intuition the same way we trust an artist’s instincts.

Imagine having the audacity to bark suggestions up at Michelangelo when he was completely absorbed in painting the Sistine Chapel — this is what we do to mothers when we offer our input when they didn’t ask, make a suggestion for them to try something differently, or compare their parenting approach to ours.

Even if you’re a seasoned mom, even if you think you’re a great mom, your children are their own creation unlike anyone else’s and your maternal instincts are uniquely situated to them.

There’s so much you simply don’t know about a mom when you offer unsolicited advice: what her parenting philosophy is, why she’s making the choice she’s making, what she’s already experimented with, what her instincts are saying, the day she had with her children, everything her children are going through that she is carrying, what she herself is carrying, her mental load, what her temperament or her children’s temperament is, what her history is… I could go on.

Instead of offering unsolicited advice, I would love if we could offer postpartum mothers something else.

What if we met postpartum mothers with genuine curiosity and a sincere openness to learning about their parenting philosophies?

What if we met postpartum mothers with humility and a spirit of teachability that invited them to teach us about their children and the parenting journey?

What if we met postpartum mothers with connection and an energy of celebration that empowered them to be vulnerable in our presence and feel seen for their selfless efforts in mothering?

I firmly believe that there is nothing unsolicited advice can do that connection can’t do better.

Coming alongside a new mom with a spirit of relating, encouraging, and being present with them not only strengthens your relationship, but it rejuvenates her mood, replenishes her energy, and renews her vigor. This is especially true if she’s in the trenches with little ones and isn’t sleeping regularly, barely has time for self-care or alone time, and feels like she’s just surviving. Most new moms are already feeling the pressure to be the perfect mother and are inundated with opinions from the village and social media. If she wants your opinion, she will ask.

Give her a compliment instead. Most new mothers are starved of positive feedback and are already feeling invisible. Everyone asks about the baby and has opinions on what he wears and how he eats. But who’s asking about mom? You know, the person who grew the baby for nine months, risked her life to birth him, fed him from her own body, and was awake for every night feeding no matter how exhausted or stressed out she was? Who’s asking about her well-being and actually trying to strengthen it with emotional support, encouragement, and kindness?

You’re not too sensitive if you’re over the unsolicited advice on your motherhood journey. You’re connected to your instincts and protective of your process. And while it might be inconvenient or annoying for other people, this kind of focus and attunement to your children serves your children.

You’re allowed to say, no more input.

You’re allowed to say, this is my preference.

You’re allowed to say, I have my own approach with this.

You’re allowed to say, I’m not looking for advice.

Trust your instincts. Surrender to the creative process that is motherhood. And remember you don’t have to field any opinions or advice that take your focus away from your children.

~S

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Want to see what else I’m up to? Here’s how you can connect with my work:

♥ Nurtured, a postpartum support group, and Emergence, a pregnancy support group, now have a waitlist. You can be the first to hear about openings by getting on the waitlist here.

♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS: An 11-Week Guided Journey is now half off if you register this month (you’ll also get a signed copy of my book in the mail)

♥Sign up for a matrescence / attachment parenting support session here or an IFS coaching for attachment healing session here.https://stan.store/sarahannsaeger/p/ifs-coaching-for-attachment-healing

♥Subscribe to the journal. Thank you for being here <3

My healing came from this place of work. I was always working to be better. Working to understand myself better. Working to be less reactive.

I took this spirit of work into my relationship with my parts, not knowing at that point in my healing journey that this was actually a part! Wanting to change, grow, and work on my parts came from a growth-oriented part. A well-meaning, productive, helpful part at that, but still a part. As I got to know this part and became more steeped in the model, I learned that healing doesn’t happen when we are focused on changing our parts. Healing happens when we are connected to our Self-energy, the curious, compassionate awareness that holds all parts exactly as they are.

Self-energy naturally heals because Self allows parts to exist as they are.

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When parts feel understood and accepted for their expressions, they naturally unfold and move into what Inner Relationship Focusing co-founder Ann Cornell calls “the next right step”: the space of growth that is that part’s potential and honors that part’s wisdom.

When we are in a space of working or fixing, we are blended with parts that have an agenda of healing. These parts serve the healing process, but they are not the agents of healing inside. Only Self can heal. Only the spirit of connection, acceptance, and unconditional love can support parts in releasing the roles and beliefs that they took on to survive.

Parts that serve our growth are still parts that we can appreciate. I notice these kinds of parts showing up today on my parenting journey, where they have a tendency to focus on the ways I’m distracted or impatient with my son and push for more presence, more patience, and more connection. For many trauma survivors, parenting can be a frontier of anxiety and vigilance as our parts work hard to not recreate our childhood reality for our children. As a mom, the stakes always feel super high to me because I work in the field of childhood trauma as a therapist and have also experienced it.

My perfectionistic, growth-oriented parts fixate on ways I can improve as a mother because they don’t want my son to experience the emotions and challenges I navigated as a child. I can honor these parts by acknowledging their positive intentions and where they come from, and at the same time, I can remind them that I don’t need to be a perfect parent (you can read more about this in my last Substack article, “Stop trying to be a perfect mom and aspire to be good enough.”)

You don’t need to be always growing, always working, and always progressing to be healing. Resting in presence with your parts is enough.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to heal from complex / attachment / childhood trauma in a way that honors your experience instead of feeling like work, you can preorder my book, The Internal Family Systems Journal For CPTSD: An Integrative, Parts-Work Approach to Healing Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which will be published in July AND… dun dun dun… you can sign up for my 11-week Book Club starting in January 2027 where yours truly will be leading live sessions coinciding with the IFS practices in each chapter.

Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS: An 11-Week Guided Journey

Don’t just read the book—live it with me for 11 weeks.

This 11-week guided experience starting January 2027 is designed to help you move beyond insight and into real, embodied transformation using the principles of Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the practices woven throughout my book, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD: An Integrative, Parts-Work Approach to Healing Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Each week, we’ll walk through one chapter together—not just to understand it, but to integrate it into your life in a grounded, supported way.

This is not a traditional book club.

This is a space to slow down, connect inward, and gently build a relationship with your parts so that healing, clarity, and growth can unfold from within.

Join the Book Club <3

What You’ll Experience Each Week:

• A live, guided 75–90 minute session
• Opening parts check-in ritual
• Lesson from me on the core concepts from that week’s chapter
• A guided experiential practice to help you embody the work
• Live Q&A + space for reflection and integration

You’ll leave each session not just with new understanding, but with a felt sense of how to apply it in your everyday life.

What This Space Supports:

• Moving from survival patterns into intentional, embodied living
• Building a compassionate relationship with your inner world
• Integrating the concepts from the book in a practical, sustainable way
• Feeling less alone in your process through shared experience

What’s Included:

• 11 live weekly group sessions, held on Saturdays @ 11 a.m. EST
• Access to session replays
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Recently, I’ve been ill and have required more sleep than usual. During the day, I’ve been distracted more than usual, turning on the television for a mindless procession of gardening shows while my 15-month old wanders around the living room, alternating between handing me treasures he excavates from under the couch or wielding my favorite pen like it’s a magic wand. At night, I turn into a werewolf. Every time my bed-sharing son wakes up to nurse, I groan as if summoned out of hibernation, and in my state of sleepy annoyance bark “Stop!” every time he pulls my hair and forms another bald spot amidst the patches of postpartum hair loss.

I feel like I’ve been a mean mommy. I don’t like who I am as a parent when I don’t feel good and when I’m exhausted.

I’m learning, like many worn-down toddler moms, that parenting is rarely an expression of fixed qualities like patience, calm, and kindness and is often a reflection of our nervous system state, resources, and practices. Right now I’m under-resourced and over-tired. No one is their best self in any relationship when they’re not getting what they need. I have to give myself this grace as a mother and still find a way to troubleshoot the issue so I get more sleep and offer attunement rather than annoyance to my son. It’s not fair to teach him that I’m there for comfort at night and then silently get resentful when he reaches for me.

I think all mothers struggle with acknowledging their parenting misses and mistakes, but I’ve found that mothers with attachment trauma histories struggle even more. Because our attachment needs, which Dr. Gordon Neufeld defines as the need for proximity, belonging, sameness, significance, understanding, and love from the parent, were not met as children, we fear recreating this experience with our children and fixate on perfectly meeting their needs. In attachment terms, this is called the quest for perfect attunement. It’s important for you to know that perfect attunement is not only impossible, because, well, hello, the human experience! but it’s also not a factor that needs to be present for a child to develop secure attachment.

The research on attunement is interesting: research shows that attunement only needs to occur 30% of the time in healthy parent-child relationships. This means that the majority of the time, parents are misattuning to their child. They’re not there for their child the way that the child needs them, they’re misreading their child’s needs, or they’re missing the child’s bids for connection. What makes up for these misses? Repair and the commitment to come back to connection.

Repair is what builds trust — in parent-child relationships, marriages, friendships, or any meaningful relationship.

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We don’t trust people because they’re perfect. We trust people because they’re real. When people show us that they care and acknowledge when they treat us in uncaring ways, we feel seen, understood, and loved, all attachment needs that Dr. Neufeld defines. How can we become close to someone when there’s never any tension, conflict, or difference? How can we learn about ourselves and the other person if we’re just always connected, harmonious, and in tune? We can’t.

In some ways, I see this drive to be the perfect mother as a reflection of the emotionally neglected child’s longing for the fantasy parent figure. When a parent is extremely emotionally unpredictable or unavailable, the child starts to push away connection because they learn it’s not safe to rest in it. Because connection will disappear suddenly and then reappear without warning, it becomes too painful for the child to allow themselves to receive connection. They start to fantasize about a rescue figure or perfect parent who understands, protects, and cares for them.

When we hold ourselves to the standard of being perfect mothers, we are often holding ourselves to the standard of our traumatized younger self who created fantasies about the perfect parent.

By insisting on our own perfection, we make ourselves into this unrealistic, idealized parent-figure who our fantasies imagined was always there, always available, always loving. When perfectionism shows up in our parenting, we can remember that this is almost always a protective strategy trying to keep us safe. Perfectionism is an attempt to arrive at predictability. There’s a comfort in expecting ourselves to be perfect as parents amidst the sea of uncertainty that shows up in new developmental stages, chaotic temper tantrums, and big feelings. If we’re perfect, parts of us feel in control. Just like our younger self felt safe in envisioning a perfect parent who was always there when we knew intimately the pain of neglect, abandonment, or unpredictability, by striving to be this perfect parent these parts are soothed in the ups and downs of parenting.

When you find yourself striving for perfection in your parenting, I invite you to get curious and ask: who inside actually needs this perfect parent fantasy? Because guaranteed, it is never your child, but a young part in need of inner attachment.

When my child wakes up in the morning, he isn’t thinking about how I laid like a stiff board in the middle of a hard night when he needed to nurse, gritting my teeth because the hair pulling was exceptionally excessive (and yes, if you must ask, I’ve tried everything save shaving my head or weaning). He’s noticing the sun filtering through the blinds and smiling at me when I open my eyes. This is our moment of connection, of repair, of attunement after misattunement. He knows he gets a big “Good morning!”, a song, and a cuddle (no matter how much hair he pulled out the night before). He trusts that our day will start together and that I delight in him. And I do! Every day. Because I’m not Angel Mommy every moment of every day. Sometimes I check out. Sometimes I’m impatient. Sometimes I’m a werewolf at night. But I always come back to connection.

I want to offer you one final reframe. Missing our children and then owning these misses is actually necessary for our children and part of good parenting because it is an accurate reflection of real relationship. It is our job to educate our children in life and in humanity. Do you know a single perfect person? A single perfect relationship? I don’t. And you know what? As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it truly is these rhythms of relationship, of connection following disconnection, of harmony following division, of understanding following misunderstanding, that builds relational intimacy and cultivates personal self-awareness.

For example, I’ve had the same fight with my husband probably thousands of times in my marriage. He doesn’t understand why I can’t get out the door on time (which for him means early) and I can’t understand why he has such a stick up his ass and can’t relax about getting to our leisure activity in a leisurely fashion. We’ve tried compromising, stretching, giving grace, and we still fight about it at least once a month. What I learn, however, walking away from these tense conversations is how different we are and how we can love each other dearly across difference. Even when neither of our needs are fully met, we still show up for each other.

This is love to me — it’s about the showing up, the effort, the trying, the reaching. When we own our misses with our children, we give them both a realistic and hopeful picture of relationship. Relationships have a rhythm and love is found in these rhythms.

Perinatal mental health expert Karen Kleiman discusses the importance of misattunement in reflecting upon child development expert Winnicott’s philosophy:

“Winnicott unveiled the intricate notion of imperfect parenting. He taught us that only through failing in amounts tolerated by the infant (then repairing or compensating for the failures) can mothers offer the best possible care by providing an honest representation of human connection (Kleiman, p. 40).”

We need to “fail” in relationship to deepen relationship. And “failing” is never really failure: it’s moving out of rhythm. It only feels like failure to the perfectionistic parts of us that equate love to a fixed standard rather than an unfolding process.

I promise you this: your child needs you as you are and your presence and best efforts are enough.

So instead of aiming to be a perfect mom, aim to be good enough. Your children will thank you for it.

~Sarah

p.s.

In my book, The IFS Workbook For CPTSD, I outline specific practices for building healthy inner attachment and working through attachment trauma. The book is available for preorder now!

Other ways to work with me:

• Follow me on Instagram

• Schedule an IFS coaching session for matrescence support (psst: super helpful if perfectionistic parts are showing up in your parenting ;) )

• Sign up for The Embody Lab’s upcoming program, Polyvagal Trauma Therapy Certificate (04/19-07/13) and use code SARAH for 10% off.

As a childhood trauma therapist, I have spent my entire career with people who experienced neglect, violation, and abuse in their attachment relationships.

The primary question I find myself asking in this work is, “What are the ideal conditions needed for a child to thrive?” This has led to a focus on attachment and emotion in my clinical work as I imagine therapy to be a holding environment that can support them in ways today that they needed back then. I have tried to give my clients a new relational experience in therapy so they can experience what safety and connection feels like as they heal from the wounds of the past.

As a parent, I continue to ask this essential question, but my focus is on my child in the present. How can I give my child a childhood he doesn’t have to heal from? I recognize the stakes don’t seem as dire and potential for traumatization doesn’t seem as prevalent for parents who don’t work in the field. But because I have an up-close view of what happens when parenting goes wrong, I parent intentionally, with an awareness of my son’s nervous system, emotional world, and attachment needs.

I try to remember Winnicott’s assertion that a healthy child doesn’t need a perfect parent, but a “good-enough mother", a mother who is mostly attuned, mostly responsive, and mostly caring. This principle is comforting in a time when parents are inundated with constant messages about what is needed to be a good parent. We’ve never had so much access to research on parenting, attachment, and child development in human history and we’ve never been exposed to so much literature on the subject.

We need to remember that our best efforts are enough, that we have everything inside of us to parent well, and that the times when we miss the mark can actually build trust in our children when we sincerely repair and learn from them.

Our instincts and intentions come from a good place and we can learn from this good place. I have to remind myself of that as a parent who sways toward anxiety and hypervigilance due to my professional background, that my presence and positive efforts to connect with my child is impactful, regardless of what perfectionism tells me.

As my son gets older and moves into the toddler era, I have been reflecting more on how I want to be as a parent. Mothering a completely helpless, breastfed infant requires a different awareness than mothering a toddler with preferences, a curious spirit, and a burgeoning sense of independence that likes to test everything.

I know that I want to raise my son in a way that honors his autonomy, that this begins from birth, and that this becomes especially more crucial now as he moves into a developmental stage where he’s experiencing himself as separate from me.

I know that I want to raise him to know and trust his internal experience, to express his needs and emotions, and to find that delicate balance between respecting his authentic self and still exercising adaptability, resilience, and creative thinking with others.

I know that I want to raise my son in a connected way that honors my maternal instincts and my nervous system, where I model, scaffold, and embody the safety and curiosity that I want him to find in himself.

Here is what I am learning about raising a connected child: connected children are often inconvenient children.

Children who are in touch with their emotions are inconvenient for the parent and for the society. They require slowing down and careful listening instead of treating them as if they exist only to follow your instructions. They require respecting their dependence on you instead of rushing them toward premature independence. They require respectful communication that teaches logical consequences and natural boundaries instead of expecting them to never test boundaries or ask questions about boundaries.

To raise connected children, we must meet them where they are developmentally and actually trust this process of development as something that naturally unfolds in the child.

When you surrender to this process of maturation, which, according to Dr. Neufeld, is facilitated through attachment, you have to trust your child’s potential and capability. You have to trust that when you completely honor and hold where your child is right now, without rushing them toward a developmental stage before they are ready, they will develop the necessary integration and internal connection to handle the next stage with success. This takes supreme humility as a parent, as well as resolve in protecting your child’s process despite well-meaning onlookers’ comments.

In my son’s infancy, I made the decision to follow parenting philosophy Resources for Infant Educators (RIE) protocols regarding trusting my son’s natural gross motor and movement development and not do structured tummy time. I received constant opinions and advice from other people regarding what they deemed a controversial, wrong decision. The shock! The horror! “YOU’RE NOT DOING TUMMY TIME?!” RIE emphasizes respect for a child’s pace in gross motor development and specifically advocates for not putting a child in positions such as sitting up before they are ready. Trusting in a child’s self-initiation and natural growth process is essential to the model, and I decided to trust what felt intuitive to me despite the comments.

I’d like to believe this plan paid off: my son was an incredibly early crawler and walker. I never “taught him” to crawl through manipulating his movement patterns or putting him on his stomach and I never “taught him” to walk through using a walker or insisting on him holding my hands. I sat back and watched. I believed he would do it when he’s ready. And he did. I just never expected so many people to criticize this decision or doubt his process.

Magda Gerber, founder of RIE, says, “Everything, especially something new, needs time and patience. You must plant and then reap.” As a society, we are not comfortable with the patience required to let a child grow into themselves at a pace where they can actually integrate, mature, and connect. We insist on a child meeting their milestones and miss the brilliance of how they are coming into themselves in their own way. We believe we have to “teach” a child to walk, to eat, to sleep as babies, and then to share, to listen, to “be good” as toddlers, as if these actions are not part of their natural impulses and will not develop in their own time without careful cultivation (I’ll explain more on what attachment research says on this in a moment).

Motherhood has taught me the power of trusting our children’s learning process: when we support their curiosity and autonomy, they become self-directive and confident. Children paradoxically want to try new things when these new things are not insisted or pushed upon them. But to respect their pace, we have to first believe they are capable. As parents, we have to see ourselves as stewards of their process rather than teachers of it.

In Gestalt therapy theory, we call this horizontal relating. We are collaborators, stewards, and explorers rather than authorities, experts, and dictators. Of course there are times to lean on our authority as parents to keep our children safe. Dr. Neufeld describes this use of authority as a healthy extension of attachment hierarchy: children cannot rest in attachment if they don’t feel protected by it. If I give in every time my son cries because he wants to play with the electric outlet, I teach him that boundaries are negotiable based on his feelings. I also send the message that I am scared of his feelings in some capacity, or I am not capable of holding them. Healthy parental authority looks like holding the boundary firmly and kindly, while naming the feeling. “You want to play with that and you can’t. You feel sad. I can hold you.”

I see parents so often holding boundaries without holding the experience of the child. From an attachment perspective, holding both is so crucial because this is precisely what builds emotional resilience, creative thinking, and adaptive processing. Dr. Neufeld describes boundaries like the one I mentioned with the electric outlet as “the wall of futility.” It’s a boundary that doesn’t cave, ever. Children realize that when they’re up against the wall of futility, nothing will change, and we will not budge. Because they are up against futility, they will experience frustration because they cannot change something that they want to change. But if we stay with their frustration, frustration moves to sadness via tears. And this is crucial because it is in the tears that a child’s adaptive processing comes online: “if I can’t change that, what can I do instead?” This is emotional resilience at work.

But emotional resilience can’t develop if we don’t name emotions. And this is the tension I’m beginning to observe with parenting styles that are not informed by attachment. Parents mistakingly think that by enforcing the boundary and ignoring the child’s emotion, they are reinforcing good behavior and minimizing pushback or meltdowns. But what it actually does is invoke a power struggle, especially if their child has a more sensitive or assertive temperament, and teach emotional suppression. In testing a boundary, the child is testing their autonomy. They need this experience to be acknowledged for them to sublimate this autonomy within bounds that can keep them safe. But again, we’re so quick to tell a child “don’t argue!” “Don’t talk back!” “Because I said so!” “You’re not listening!” “It’s timeout for you!” that we miss this critical moment of development.

Parents often feel the pressure to raise our children to be behaviorally compliant. We are praised for being good parents when our children “behave well” in public. We are praised for being good parents when our children play nicely with others and show signs of independence and not needing us. There is a subtle pressure, especially for toddler parents, I would argue, to get our children to listen to us, to behave in socially acceptable confines, and to accept boundaries instead of testing them. But this is the antithesis of the toddler stage. Toddlers test limits. They are forming their own sense of their selves and demonstrate this new independence through their favorite words, “NO!” or “MINE!” They are learning how the world works. So why do we encourage them to behave like an older adolescent capable of sharing, mixing feelings, or understanding cause and effect?

When we hold a toddler, just like any child, in where they currently are, which occurs by naming their experience, we create space for them to move forward with their development when they’re ready.

Holding a child at a developmental stage that defies acceptable social conventions is difficult when we experience pressure to mold that child into what society wants. Society approves of children who are compliant, good listeners. Society approves of parents who teach their toddlers to share and apologize and take deep breaths when they’re frustrated even though they research shows that they completely lack the brain development to engage these skills non-performatively. Skills like emotional regulation and sharing follow brain development and natural impulses.

When we hold a toddler where he is, when we name the desire to not share, when we name the desire to not follow directions, when we name the big feelings, we give him back the terrain of himself. We create internal coherence and relational connection. This supports his next stage of growth when he is ready.

Here’s to trusting in our children’s potential for growth and maturation,

~Sarah

p.s.

In my book, The IFS Workbook For CPTSD, I outline specific practices for building healthy inner attachment and working through attachment trauma. The book is available for preorder now!

Other ways to work with me:

• Follow me on Instagram

• Schedule an IFS coaching session for matrescence support.

• Sign up for The Embody Lab’s upcoming program, Polyvagal Trauma Therapy Certificate (04/19-07/13) and use code SARAH for 10% off.