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The Motherhood Mentor
Welcome to The Motherhood Mentor Podcast your go-to resource for moms seeking holistic healing and transformation. Hosted by mind-body somatic healing practitioner and holistic life coach Becca Dollard.
Join us as we explore the transformative power of somatic healing, offering practical tools and strategies to help you navigate overwhelm, burnout, and stress. Through insightful conversations, empowering stories, and expert guidance, you'll discover how to cultivate resilience, reclaim balance, and thrive in every aspect of your life while still feeling permission to be a human. Are you a woman who is building a business while raising babies who refuses to burnout? These are conversations and support for you.
We believe in the power of vulnerability, connection, and self-discovery, and our goal is to create a space where you feel seen, heard, and valued.
Whether you're juggling career, family, or personal growth, this podcast is your sanctuary for holistic healing and growth all while normalizing the ups and downs, the messy and the magic, and the wild ride of this season of motherhood.
Your host:
Becca is a mom of two, married for 14years to her husband Jay living in Colorado. She is a certified somatic healing practitioner and holistic life coach to high functioning moms. She works with women who are navigating raising babies, building businesses, and prioritizing their own wellbeing and healing. She understands the unique challenges of navigating being fully present in motherhood while also wanting to be wildly creative and ambitious in her work. The Motherhood Mentor serves and supports moms through 1:1 coaching, in person community, and weekend retreats.
Follow on IG: @themotherhoodmentor , send me a dm and let me know you found me through the podcast!
Website: https://www.the-motherhood-mentor.com/
Want to join the email fam for free workshops and more support: https://themotherhoodmentor.myflodesk.com/ujaud8t4x9
The Motherhood Mentor
Beyond calm: nervous system regulation for moms and business owners
Calm and balanced are no longer my goal. Why? Because sometimes life needs and requires me to be activated. It's healthy for us to have anger, rage, overwhelm, and burnout.
Discover the power of understanding the window of tolerance through a holistic perspective and how our personal histories shape our stress responses. By acknowledging the natural highs and lows of our nervous system, we can cultivate health in both the "winter" and "summer" phases of our lives. I discuss the often-overlooked struggle mothers face in distinguishing their emotions from their children's, and why setting healthy emotional boundaries is essential for preventing emotional dysregulation.
Explore the concept of dynamic balance with me, as we move beyond the limiting ideals of rigidity and flaccidity. Drawing parallels to the changing seasons, I share insights on building a resilient life force through somatic healing and updating unconscious patterns that may be holding us back. Instead of striving for an unrealistic state of constant calm, learn how to build resilience and adaptability, empowering you to face life's challenges with both strength and vulnerability. If you're ready to embark on this transformative journey, consider joining me to enhance your emotional and nervous system regulation, fostering lasting transformation and self-trust throughout all of life's seasons.
We were never meant to always be or feel balanced and calm. But we can build dynamic range of health, resiliance- building deep roots of wellbeing that can help us meet out lives with the appropriate force needed for good. Sometimes that health is activation in fight or flight and sometimes that health is freezing or fawning. We just don't want to become stuck or cycled into our dysregulation.
1:1 Somatic Healing and Holistic Life Coaching
Chapter Markers:
0:02 Navigating Nervous System and Emotional Regulation
15:43 Exploring Health Through Dynamic Balance
Join us next time as we continue to explore the multifaceted journey of motherhood.
Thank you for tuning in to The Motherhood Mentor. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review us.
Stay connected with us on social media and share your thoughts and experiences tagging @themotherhoodmentor
Welcome to the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I'm Becca, a somatic healing practitioner and a holistic life coach for moms, and this podcast is for you. You can expect honest conversations and incredible guests that speak to health, healing and growth in every area of our lives. This isn't just strategy for what we do. It's support for who we are. I believe we can be wildly ambitious while still holding all of our soft and hard humanity as holy. I love combining deep inner healing with strategic systems and no-nonsense talk about what this season is really like. So grab whatever weird health beverage you're currently into and let's get into it.
Speaker 1:Welcome to today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. Today, we are talking about nervous system regulation and emotional regulation, because I am going to lose my mind if I see one more reel or piece of content teaching mothers how to calm down, teaching you how to breathe, teaching you how to breathe, and I think for so long, women have tried so freaking hard to be good and grateful. And don't get me wrong I want to be good and grateful, I want to feel good, I want to feel happy, I want to be grateful, I want to be present and I want to want what I have. I want to see what I have and I don't want to miss this season, and I think so many women. I want to see what I have and I don't want to miss this season, and I think so many women. We use that as this rug that we sweep all of our dynamic, wide range of humanity underneath that. And when we're talking about nervous, when I'm talking about nervous system regulation and when I'm talking about emotional regulation, I actually don't think our goal should be calm and even and steady and quote unquote balanced.
Speaker 1:When I think of nervous system regulation, I think of your dynamic range of health, I think of your ability to have a nervous system that knows how to find and feel safety and how to come back to safety after it gets dysregulated. So if you think of this, there's this window of tolerance that a lot of people talk about in the somatic world, in the polyvagal world, and essentially, if you think of it, you have this level of activation in your own body or in the environment, so in the bodies of other people, right? If you think of, like, the level that your kids' emotions can get to before you lose context, before you feel like you start losing agency and choice when it comes to your behaviors and what is happening is that your body starts responding for you. Your unconscious behaviors start happening. From education that happened when you were a kid, in your family, in your church, life, right, like what were you taught about sadness, what were you taught about anger? Those are the things that will start coming up when you are outside of your window of regulation.
Speaker 1:What I work with women on is widening and playing into the edges of that window of regulation. So when you are at the lower end of your regulation, what does health look like there? Right, if you start feeling a little bit burnt out, a little bit of depressed and when I say depressed, I'm not talking about like the diagnosable, actual condition, I'm talking about like the human experience of depression, of your body just wants to move low and slow. You want to get under the covers the things that were bringing you joy, just like don't feel good. You are having like a deep sense of grief. There's this like feeling it feels like you're trying to walk through mud or you're trying to run through mud if you're moving at too quickly of a pace. But how do you build health into that low, slow space? What is that energy trying to do, and is this an energy that we need to listen to, like what's going on there Is there, is this a yellow orange or red flag about something that's going on in your life that we need to pay attention to? Or are you in a natural winter, right Like? Are you having a winter where we're going to have these ups and downs and these, these ebbs and flows, and are you just meeting your edge of slow health, because a lot of women panic because for so long we've been fed this consistency that looks like constantly being balanced, constantly being at the same steady pace and having every single day of our lives not just look but feel the same, and that's just not realistic.
Speaker 1:What's real life? What is nature? What is biology? What is health? Is that there are going to be seasons that are lower and slower and darker. There's going to be seasons, like summer, that are brighter and faster and there's more life and energy. But what does it look like to trust that?
Speaker 1:Or let's look at the other range of that high activation of you're feeling overstimulated or overwhelmed, or anger or rage falls into this. Anxiety, right. It's this fast dysregulation, right? So dysregulation can look very different depending on how your body responds to stress, depending on how your body responds to different types of stress in different relationships. When your kid gets angry and starts throwing a fit, it's so important to notice what is the difference between their dysregulation and your dysregulation A lot of us have, especially if you're an empath, especially if you are very emotionally sensitive.
Speaker 1:If you're like a highly sensitive person, you can pick up and feel other people's emotions almost as if they're your own. So your kid can be having a lot of dysregulation happening in their body and you can start to mirror that dysregulation if you don't have healthy, emotional, energetic boundaries, which unfortunately a lot of moms do not, because we live in a culture that really prioritizes essentially codependency. I don't think our culture is teaching women healthy detachment and differentiation from our kids. They're teaching us to be overly attuned and responsive to our kids. And listen, this is coming from like a type two Enneagram empathetic, heart led mom whose tendency is over-parenting. Like my tendency is to over-parent my kids, to over-pay attention to their emotional wants and needs, and what happens is now my kids don't have a regulated body to look to Regulation.
Speaker 1:When it comes to animal bodies, which we are, it's a collective thing. It's a pack animal thing, if you think of one animal senses and sees danger on this side of the pack, I need the other side of my pack to energetically and emotionally pick up on that, so that they also get panicked and freaked out. And so the second I start to run, they go oh, I have to run too. And that's what's happening as mothers your kid is having dysregulation, is having activation happen in their body, and then your animal body is picking up on that and going oh my gosh, we need to respond. That's what happens so often for so many of us mothers and I love that there's so many resources now of helping mothers teach our kids emotional regulation.
Speaker 1:I don't think we can just teach our kids this without practicing it ourselves, without embodying it in ourselves, because emotional regulation is not just a logical thing, it's not just in your brain, it's not just about what you know and can express with language. It's also about the energetic, emotional energy and how it moves you and how you respond to it and how you relate to it and how much activation you can hold in your body or witness in another's body, while staying present to who, where and when you are staying present to who, where and when you are so much of, when your kid gets dysregulated and then you get dysregulated, you're responding from another time and place. You're responding how your parents treated it when you cried. Let's say, your kid is crying and you're trying to make them feel better and you want it to stop. Maybe that's how your parents treated sadness. Maybe you realized sadness wasn't safe in your house. It wasn't.
Speaker 1:You know, you don't have to experience trauma to have patterns built. All of us had patterns built in childhood. All of us had patterns built in our schools, in our relationship with our peers, in the religious environment you grew up in or didn't grow up in. Your body knows patterns. That's what our animal bodies run on. That is what keeps us safe and healthy. And while we're at this beef with some of the social media stuff, can we just stop calling everything a trauma response? Can we stop making everything trauma and listen? So much of it's real and true and also, this is just a normal, healthy human reaction. It's just what we do. It's realizing that we are nature, that, as it doesn't matter how sophisticated and buttoned up and pretty and perfect we get, whether that's like our healing or emotional or mental health or our spiritual maturity. I don't care how successful you get, you will always be a human, you will always be a mammal. You will always have these patterns and responses and reactions. You will always have dysregulation and regulation, because that is healthy response.
Speaker 1:A great example if your kid is about to run into traffic, your body in that moment does not need to be calm, it needs to have a intense I would use the word violent, but I don't mean like violent against your kid but you need to have this intense explosion of energy to go grab your kid, to yell their name Like this is not the time for you to be calm and gentle. Another great example if your kid is having an experience where you need to be able to feel anger in your body, because so often anger is the energy we need to set and to hold a boundary. But women haven't been taught how to hold anger. We've been taught to never be angry, because so many of us either saw anger that was deeply, deeply repressed, that never got expressed in a healthy way, or you saw an expression of anger that was violent, either towards themselves or towards you, and so we fear these emotions in us. We fear this normal, healthy, human emotion and if it helps you think of emotion just as energy. It's just energy that is trying to move you. And how is this energy trying to move you?
Speaker 1:A great example when I'm feeling overwhelmed or overstimulated, which honestly happens often, and I think the thing that sucks is half the time. When I'm overstimulated or overwhelmed, it's not even from something bad, it's something like my kids are playing and they're like half fighting. And, honestly, my body, my nervous system, when my kids fight, even if it's like natural, healthy bickering, my body is like stage five drama. It's like we need to stop this, we need to fix. I want this to stop, I want it to go away. And that anger, while real and like you know, I'm not invalidating my experience but like if I'm in the car driving and my kids are bickering, my nervous system is saying this isn't okay, we need to make it stop, like we need to make it go away. That's actually healthy for my kids. I want my kids to learn that it's okay to bicker and fight. I want my kids to learn that we have arguments with the people that we love because we see and think and feel differently.
Speaker 1:So my kids are back there having like a verbal squirmish and my body is like, oh my gosh, there's conflict, panic. I have to be able to feel my body isn't panicking because something's wrong. My response to this doesn't need to be setting a boundary with my kids because, you know, one of them is actually being like disrespectful or shameful or, you know, using language that isn't honoring to the other kid. That's a different scenario. In that scenario I need a little bit of that overwhelm or that anger or that panic feeling to like do something, to go in and actively parent. But if that feeling is going on inside of me and I can say, huh, interesting, I feel like I'm having an over under response to what's actually happening. That is where nervous system regulation is so important is am I appropriately responding to what's happening right now? Because if I'm not, it's likely that my nervous system is remembering a pattern from the past or I'm projecting an expected future, like, let's say, my son is saying something and my body, unconsciously, is responding to this idea that like oh, he's not going to be like caring or empathetic or respectful. It's like it's.
Speaker 1:Our brains have so many ways of skewing reality. I really should do a podcast on the different like mental projections and like how our minds twist things, because our minds are the most overwhelming place. Our brains, while. They are so, so powerful, but when we are under or over utilizing them. I think this, honestly, under and over utilizing our brains is half of the mental health problem. Our culture has never taught us how to use the body, and so we're rocking around only using, you know, 10, 20% of our capacity, of our ingenuity, of our knowing, of our wisdom, of our action-taking. Energy, like so much of you, is below the neck. Think of your body. You're only using 10% of you.
Speaker 1:When you are only using mental, when you are only thinking, when you are only problem solving in your head, when you're only thinking about mental health, when the reality is that your health, when you're experiencing anxiousness or overwhelm, or overstimulation or anger, that's happening in your body, it's happening in your chest, it's happening in your lungs, it's happening in your throat. It's happening in your chest, it's happening in your lungs, it's happening in your throat, it's happening in your gut, in your stomach, in your pelvis, in your legs. It's happening. You know, your anger is happening in your voice, in your loudness, in your intensity, in your movements. That's what embodiment teaches us. That's what somatics teaches us is. It teaches you how to get back to a place where you understand your human body, where you understand your nervous system regulation. You stop being afraid of dysregulation because you understand what's happening. You stop panicking when you're having a human experience.
Speaker 1:And so when you think of nervous system regulation and emotional regulation, and so when you think of nervous system regulation and emotional regulation, I'm curious what it feels like for you to change your goal from being calm or good or grateful to being a human with a wide range of dynamic, range of motion. When I'm thinking of my goals for my physical health, like my physical, biological body, I don't want to be so, so strong that I'm rigid and inflexible, right, I can't be so strong and strict and hard, because then I become fragile, then I become. You know, if you're holding a really strong, hard posture, you're actually more likely to bend and break If you are flexible and dynamic and strong, damn like. That's the kind of balance I want. Because, if you also think of it, if you're too loosey, goosey, if you're too flexible, if you're too soft, now you become flaccid. Now you don't have the strength or the tone or the resilience or the backbone to be able to hold yourself.
Speaker 1:So when you're thinking of nervous system regulation, emotional regulation, think of what does a healthy, dynamic life force look like? How can I play into the edges of my slow and fast and hard and soft and be able to move in the whole wide range of it? How do I build and open up myself to a wider range of my health? How do I learn to trust that balance and safety and health and thriving is not finding one way? Consistency, I think, is so much bullshit, like our current culture loves consistency so much and I think it's so stupid. I don't want to be consistent, I want to play with my capacity. Like if you look at nature, if you look at anything in nature, there's consistencies, yes, but like there's also seasons, and even within the seasons, there's really hot days and there's really cold days, and there's rainy days and there's dry days. It's like it's this wild, diverse being. You are meant to be a wild, diverse being. You are meant to be a wild, diverse being. So, yeah, steady and strong, but also soft and vulnerable, passionate but fickle. That's for sure a song that I'm really trying hard to not sing into the microphone right now. I hope this helps you. I hope this encourages you when it comes to emotional regulation and nervous system regulation and if you are in a season where you are realizing like I don't have enough regulation for this, I've been there and I would love to help you.
Speaker 1:I help women with somatic healing and very tactile ways, and what I mean by that is it's not just you talking, you are learning how to show up and hold and respond and react differently. We are building new layers and levels of resource and health, both inside of you and outside of you, and this is the kind of work that I love doing with women. It is deep, long-term understanding that there's no such thing as resetting your nervous system. Listen, you're not a computer. You can't push a button and reset your nervous system. You can't push a button and reset your nervous system. Your nervous system is so smart, your unconscious, somatic animal body is so smart.
Speaker 1:And I promise you all of the ways right now that you are self-sabotaging, all of the ways that you are showing up in motherhood you don't like, or your business that you don't like, those patterns they came from protecting you in a different season. They no longer serve you. They no longer work because you have not updated your system. You have not updated your operating system, and so much of the work that we do in somatics is understanding what's the system you're operating under. And then, how do we create and build new patterns, how do we build new depths and maturity when it comes to health, and how much capacity you have to hold this regulation in yourself, how much dysregulation you're able to face and hold with others, whether that's in conflict or boundary setting or building a business, because you better bet that visibility and the boundaries that you hold with your business or your clients.
Speaker 1:Money. Money is a huge one for our nervous systems, one that, like I for sure, don't have all the way figured out yet. I don't think we ever have it all figured out, but if that's the kind of work that you're doing right now, I want to create the invitation of working together. If this is the kind of work you love, if you've been enjoying and loving this podcast I mean one please share it. If you love this podcast and it's bringing you life, will you take a moment and follow the podcast, leave a review, share it on social media or share it to a friend? That helps this offering that I'm bringing reach more women and it supports me and my business to be able to keep doing this, to be able to keep showing up, to build this platform where we're really having these raw, real conversations about what it actually looks like.
Speaker 1:So what I was about to say is I have a couple spots left to work together in 2025 in a one-on-one container, and typically I like to work with women at least six months, if not to a year, and that's a big commitment it is. But I the reason I do that is because it's really easy to get quick win results. It's a lot different to have results that can withstand several different seasons because you know, in the first couple of months you're going to have this big transformation. You're going to have all of these like, oh my goodness, you're going to have all of this new health and life come up, and then what's going to happen is that life is going to push in and pull on those things and I want you to be able to build a deep level of health and self-trust and resilience and sovereignty and boundaries. I want you to be able to hold that as well in the winter, as you can in summer, as you can in fall, when shit hits the fan in motherhood or your marriage or your personal life or your family, or you get a diagnosis or something happens with your kid. That's where health is built. It's not just in this like oh, let's do like a cute little container when things are really good and let's build it up. It's what long-term, deep roots of health and wellbeing. That's the kind of work I want to do. You know I can give people quick wins and I love that too. I think we all need quick wins.
Speaker 1:Women I've worked with women and we've done one call and I've very frequently actually gotten the response of I have done years of therapy and I have never felt better than I have after this one call, and that lasts too. That is a lasting thing, not just like, oh, I feel better right now, it's like months later, I still feel better from this one call. And it's not because I'm magic, it's because we're working with soma, we're working with body, we're getting out of this. Let's just beat this horse to death. That's such a weird saying. Where did that come from?
Speaker 1:Okay, adhd focus when you keep going, you just keep telling the stories over and over of what broke you and what's continuing to break you. That doesn't actually build resilience that doesn't actually build strength, that doesn't actually build health. It's an important part of healing, it's an important phase of healing, but at some point we have to say, great, we know what got you here. Here's where you are. How do we get you to where you're going? How do we build more health and resilience and how do we build resource in you and capacity in you so that you can show up differently?
Speaker 1:Because I don't know about you, but I looked at my motherhood one day and I said like this isn't good enough. And it wasn't out of a place of shame anymore. It was a place of I'm not showing up to motherhood, to parenting my kids in the way that I want to. I'm not showing up to my marriage as the kind of wife I want to be. I'm not. I don't feel as a person who I want to be, my relationship spiritually and socially. I didn't like how I was showing up and that wasn't this like oh, you're okay, you should feel better. It's like, no, I want to feel better and I want to do better and that's okay. All right, I'm going to get off my soapbox.
Speaker 1:I hope this podcast encouraged you. I hope it didn't just encourage you and inspire you. Go, act on it. Go think about how this applies to your life. Get your hands dirty with it. Notice where and when and how you're getting dysregulated and then pay attention to what's going on in your body. Pay attention to if this dysregulation is yours or if you're mirroring your kid's dysregulation. See if you can notice the difference and the separation between their body and your body, their emotions, your emotions, their energy, your energy. See if you can remember where, when and who you are.
Speaker 1:So much, so much of health is remembering who you are, how old you are, who you decide to be, who you're creating and witnessing how much agency and access you have to a wide, dynamic range of responses. You could yell at your kid right now, but you could also sing. You could also lay down on the floor and start making snow angels I don't know you have like. Your body can move. You have keys to a car. You can leave. You can walk, you can run, you can fight, you can sleep. You can curl up in a little ball and cry with a weighted blanket. Those are all options available to you, and I think so many women are stuck in that functional freeze where you have forgotten that you have access to agency and choice, that it is not these little kids who are running your life.
Speaker 1:You are running your life. Don't give them control of your life. That's too much for them. Do not make your kids the center of your happiness and your wellbeing. That's too much to ask of them. They I. For so long I wanted my kids to be happy and healthy and I just that's too much to ask. They're not going to be happy and healthy all the time. They're going to get sick. They're going to have days where they're pissed off. They're going to have days where they're grumpy and sad. And what if we didn't make that a problem or our responsibility? Okay, anyways, I really am going to cut myself off this time. I hope you have a great day and I'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining me on today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. Make sure you have subscribed below so that you see all of the upcoming podcasts that are coming soon. I hope you take today's episode and you take one aha moment, one small, tangible piece of work that you can bring into your life, to get your hands a little dirty, to get your skin in the game. Don't forget to take up audacious space in your life. If this podcast moved you, if it inspired you, if it encouraged you, please do me a favor and leave a review. Send an episode to a friend. This helps the show gain more traction. It helps us to support more moms, more women, and that's what we're doing here. So I hope you have an awesome day, take really good care of yourself and I'll see you next time, and that's what we're doing here. So I hope you have an awesome day, take really good care of yourself and I'll see you next time.
