The Intersection of Boundaries With Parents and Parenting Your Kids

IS your nervous system the reason boundaries feel so hard? Both with your parents and your kids or partner? 

Freeze, fawn, people pleasing, emotional labor, and the family roles women never stop carrying.

If setting boundaries with your parents feels similar to a toddler meltdown, there’s probably a reason and it’s not because you’re weak, dramatic, or incapable.

In this episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast, we unpack the invisible emotional labor many adult daughters still carry long into adulthood and motherhood: being the helper, the fixer, the peacekeeper, the emotional support system, the “easy one.”

We explore how nervous system survival patterns like freeze and fawn shape family boundaries, conflict avoidance, people pleasing, and overfunctioning — especially for high-functioning women who learned early how to read the room and manage everyone else’s emotions.

We also talk about:

•  why boundaries with parents can feel emotionally impossible 
•  the messy middle between full contact and no contact 
•  how motherhood exposes unresolved family dynamics and patterns
•  why your child’s emotions may trigger younger parts of you 
•  the difference between guilt and shame in healing work 
•  how over-responsibility quietly drives burnout 
•  building boundaries without dramatic ultimatums 
•  radical responsibility without over control 
•  healing “down” toward your children and “up” toward your family system 
• the hard healing of being a cycle breaker 

Using a personal example about taking space from social media, we also explore how clarity often comes from creating distance without needing scorched-earth decisions or permanent rupture.

This episode is for women navigating:

•  boundaries with parents 
•  emotionally immature parents 
•  people pleasing 
•  family guilt 
•  freeze and fawn responses 
•  nervous system healing 
•  difficult family dynamics 
•  emotional burnout 
•  cycle breaking and motherhood 
•  family estrangement and low contact relationships 

If you’re exhausted from carrying everyone emotionally and ready to lead your home from a more grounded, honest, and regulated place, this conversation will help you feel seen.

Follow the Motherhood Mentor Podcast for the rest of this series on family boundaries, estrangement, people pleasing, and nervous system healing. Share this with a friend who carries too much, and leave a review if this episode resonates.

If you would like 1:1 coaching and support on this topic, you can work with me here. 

If you’re ready to stop living on autopilot and start leading your life with deep presence, I’d love to work with you. Book a free interest call here: Click Here

💌 Want more? Follow me on Instagram @themotherhoodmentor for somatic tools, nervous system support, and real-talk on high-functioning burnout, ambition, healing perfectionism, and motherhood. And also pretty epic meme drops. 

🎧  Did you love this episode? Be sure to follow and please take a quick moment to leave a review and send this episode to a friend. I'd love to hear from you on how this podcast impacted you, send me a DM or an email. 

Transcript

Why This Series Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Dollard, and today we are going to be talking more about no contact and estrangement and boundaries with parents and this whole conversation that I'm hoping to have around what it's like to navigate complex boundaries and relationships to family, especially to your parents, but maybe it's to your siblings or maybe it's to your own kids, maybe it's to your partner. There's so much that there is to say because this is such a complex and nuanced topic. And that's why I wanted to do a series. That's why I was like, this can't just fit into one blog or one hour podcast. Like there needs to be all of these different parts. And even then, we're not even, we're not even gonna hit all of the things that I want to hit. And this is just a conversation that I wanted to keep having with you. And

Social Media As A Boundary Mirror

SPEAKER_01 0:56

if you've been listening to this series, I would love to hear from you. You can send me an email, you can send me a DM. I'm on and off social right now because just like this series is talking about, I actually have a very interesting relationship to social media right now where I'm not no contact with social media. I'm not done with it. I'm not ready to just be done with it and log off and never log back on. But also, more and more and more over the last year and especially over the last six months, it has becoming more and more clear to me that this relationship that I have to social media for my business isn't working. There's been a pretty long time where personally I could feel that I personally don't want to be on there. I don't need it for scrolling, but it still felt like business-wise, I needed to be there for my business, which by the way, can we all just talk about that as business owners? I'm not even really sure how social media is working for my business. And it's only been in the last few days. I just took a two-week break from social media. And not only do I feel better personally, but professionally, I have so much of a clearer voice of myself because I have so much less input. I have been in a season where I'm really creating and writing and speaking. And I was really finding myself overwhelmed and creatively blocked. And sometimes our output isn't the problem, it's the input. And I honestly think I had way too much input. I had way too much that I was seeing and hearing from every angle anytime I was on social media. And I love when I get to connect with people genuinely, and more and more, it just doesn't feel like I get that social interaction or connection from social media in the way that I felt like I used to. And I guess you could say I've been half-assing it. I've been putting in what feels good and showing up when it felt good and then not showing up when it didn't feel good. But I've been in the season now where it's like, well, I don't feel like this whole need to like go full no contact and this huge I'm off social media for good. It's just, you know, when it works for me and when it feels good. And mostly for me, that's going to be creating and sharing my own work, which I think for a while as a business, it feels out of integrity to me to be contributing there, but not consuming. Does that make sense? Like it feels like a weird expectation of here, let me contribute to the noise in your life. But I'm aware that me consuming isn't actually good for me personally or professionally. So I'm only going, I'm only going to create and share, but I'm never going to consume. And but I have seen a lot of people who are like, I'm not on social media, or they're talking about this social media break, but they're doing it on social media. And it always just feels a little weird to me. It always just feels a little odd. But I share that story, not to talk about my social media break, but to share the example of a weird relationship, of this navigation of I'm not ready to like just call it and not be on it or not be in it. And I'm starting to look at the dynamics. I needed a clear, clean, short-term break to be able to feel and see what it is like when I have more space and distance. And social media has less access to me, and I have less social media access to myself. Where like I love not being perceived and seen. I love getting to write and create videos in a way that feels very different to my body than social media does. And that is something that's going to happen when you are navigating relationships to people.

When Motherhood Triggers Old Roles

SPEAKER_01 5:02

A lot of adult daughters are carrying massive amounts of invisible emotional labor when it comes to relationships, when it comes to family, when it comes to the dynamics and the energy of the household. And a lot of the way that they're feeling with their kids. So I've worked with a lot of women who they really struggle with their kids' big emotions, their kids' big fits. Their kid has a spiral, their kid gets really angry, and it triggers the mom so much. And she feels incapable of responding in that moment from her logical self. Like she's so high functioning. She's so good at taking care of shit. She's so good at the emotional intelligence. But her kid scares her a little bit or it overwhelms her, or it's it feels like this big scary. Like, how does she know if this is appropriate or inappropriate? And oftentimes, a lot of what's happening is not just your relationship to your own motherhood or your relationship to your kid. What you're sometimes feeling is that maybe in your home, you are the peacekeeper, you are the emotionally mature child, you are the helper or the fixer, or you were the easy one, or you were the emotional support system. Maybe you had a parent who was explosive. And so you learned how to never touch the bomb. You learned how to be easy and go with the grain and try to constantly read the room and the energy of your parents so that you tried your hardest to not piss them off. Because when you are a kid, when you are a little kid, your parents are God to you. And especially if you were raised in an especially authoritative household, what I mean by they are God to you is they are your survival. You can't survive without them. So when we learn about, you know, in fourth grade science, when we learned about there's a tiger, you've encountered a tiger, and the tiger is about to attack, and your body will either fight the tiger or flee from the tiger. Most kids cannot fight their parents and win. They cannot flee from their parents and win. They cannot fight and survive. They cannot flee and survive. And so there's two options that our nervous system tends to use, which is freeze and fawn. And freeze is you dissociate from yourself. You become frozen, non-existent. And that might mean literally, you totally shut down, but it also might mean that emotionally you shut down. You dissociate from your body and go to your head or go to imagination or overthinking in order to not have to be there. So you're there, but you're not really there. And some bodies go too fun. I can't run from this tiger. I can't get away from this tiger. So I'm going to disassociate from what I want and I'm going to pet this tiger. I'm actually going to appease and please and soothe this tiger so that I don't become its prey. This is a very relational nervous system pattern, and it can be very complex, and multiple things can be happening at the same time because with fawning, there's a massive activation, but you're not, there's a repressed fight and flight. Fawning might look like you getting him what he wants, you getting him his water, or setting up the TV from him, or I don't know what it looked like in your household, but this doesn't even necessarily mean an abusive father. This doesn't necessarily mean a toxic household. This could have just been you had a really intense or mean or abrasive father, and you in your own system didn't like it. And so you tried to be so good to avoid that response from him. It's a micromanipulation of their behavior. And I don't say I don't mean manipulation in the way that like you're consciously or maliciously manipulating them, but I mean that your behaviors are not based off of your internal response. Your behaviors are not coming from your own needs and desires and consent and boundaries. It's a responsive, reflexive reaction to what you think they want and need from you. Your behaviors are not actually your own behaviors. It is this role, it is this appeasement, it is this performance that you put on for the other person. Maybe you had a mother who was really, really emotional. And anytime you became emotional, it triggered her to become super emotional. So you learned to navigate and micromanage your own emotions so that you didn't set her off. Maybe she wasn't a bomb exploding, but she was a bomb who would implode. And she was so overwhelmed. And you were this empathetic little kid who could tell, mom is holding so much and she can't handle it. I need to take care of my own needs so that I don't be a burden to her. These are some of the stories that can happen even in the healthiest of households. These are things that I've witnessed some of these things happen in my own households. And this is not a you're a bad parent or you're a good parent. This is just our animal bodies are consistently creating stories and patterns and responses in order to adapt, in order to survive, in order to belong to the family unit. What is my place? What role do I need to play? What games do I need to play? And how do I play that game? What's my role in this family? And a lot of this is responsive and reflective, and it works short term, but in the long term, it often ends up harmful not only to us, but to other people. This is one of those things that I love about Enneagram, is Enneagram really helps us see and understand and then change the way that we were not just framed by our nature, but it was nurtured into us. What is my fixation of survival? Is it I learn to be successful and get good grades because that's when I get attention from my parents? Is it no one's gonna take care of me? So I've got to take care of myself and I gotta make sure no one else controls me. I have to make sure that I'm in control, not because I want to control other people, but because I don't want them controlling me. Did you learn how to not have needs because you had a sibling who had high special or medical needs, or maybe you just had a sibling who was like a wild child and your parents were always dealing with that sibling. And so you kind of got forgotten because you were the easy child. Your needs were never as extreme or never as detrimental as the other sibling. And so you just learned that it didn't really matter, that it wasn't important, that there wasn't space, that like it wasn't even worth bringing up. You volunteered yourself as tribute to the family. These are sometimes the emotional labors that adult women are still carrying to this day. Those patterns still have their residue. Those patterns we learned in our innate families are absolutely showing up in our current families. Now, one of the things that happens is sometimes we repeat the patterns of our parents. And sometimes what happens is that we tend to move to the other side of the spectrum. So we move into this polarity to balance the energy. So if there's really toxic masculine energy in your family's household, you sometimes, as a mom, might show up in the toxic feminine. And what I mean by that is like you go to the absolute opposite. And yet, oh my gosh, you're still in dysfunction now because you're out of balance. You're not in this space where you're feeling into what is appropriate. You're just trying to read the room and constantly move the needle.

From Reading The Room To Regulating

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Now, here's the reality. As parents, I believe as parents, it is part of our job, it is part of our diligence, it is part of our leadership that we are the regulators of our home. We aren't just the ones reading the room, we're the ones regulating the room. Our kids don't have the capacity or the know-how or the perspective to know that you just cut off the crust of their sandwich and they are losing it and they're losing their minds. They in that moment don't have the perspective that this is not life or death and that they're okay. But what happens to so many parents who are dysregulated is you never had to deal with that as a kid because you never had outbursts as a kid, because you weren't ever safe enough to have outbursts. You weren't ever allowed to express anger or rage. And now all of a sudden, your kid has the audacity to do that. And not only does it poke at your ego, it pokes at the story of kids should be quiet and unseen and unheard, and they should be well behaved and they should listen on the first command, because we truly live in a culture that expects kids to be quote unquote well-behaved and not just healthy humans. Your kids are actually phenomenal at emotional regulation. And what I mean by that is when they feel an emotion, they just express it and they move through it, and they probably do it a lot faster than we would if we could just leave them alone, if we could trust them process. By the way, when I say leave them alone, I mean like stop trying to fix it, stop trying to fix them when they're in a spiral, when they're in dysregulation. Can you hold the capacity to still have perspective while validating their experience, but not always validating their emotion? I really do think this generation of parents has an opportunity to truly, to truly redefine what healthy leadership looks like. And I think that has to start in the home. Because if we or our kids are the future political leaders, shout out to our political, absolute shit show, which like that even like even just shit show feels like I'm making a joke of it. Like, this isn't funny. This is alarming that there are so many leaders and bosses and parents who are so out of integrity, do not hold, do not know how to do conflict, they are not emotionally intelligent, they don't know how to be compassionate and empathetic, but they also don't know how to have a backbone. We need to have both. We need to be able to be empathetic and compassionate, but we also got to have backbones. We need that as adult parents, both for our parents and for our kids. And

Cycle Breaking Heals Down And Up

SPEAKER_01 16:53

what is happening for so many women is that they have become these cycle breakers. They are breaking the cycle, not just up but down. And I think most moms can recognize when they're breaking a cycle from their family between their kids, and you are quite literally standing the line. You are quite literally stopping cycles and patterns from happening. But when you do that, you are not just healing down into your family, to your kids, to your relationships. You're healing up. And healing up the ladder actually can be a lot more vulnerable and raw and rough because that's not the power dynamic that we're used to. But a lot of women that I've worked with, they have much more capacity and they have already outhealed their mothers. And what I mean by that is they have more emotional maturity and wisdom and self-responsibility and self-respect and authority than their mothers do. Their mothers hit a certain age and then they stopped growing, they stopped learning, they stopped healing, they stopped challenging themselves. They never matured emotionally or relationally or spiritually. And so there's so many women that I work with who feel so dry because they don't have someone in their lineage that is pouring into them, that is teaching them wisdom, that is imparting grace, that is taking care of them. They don't have a mother and a father who can teach them things who they can go to with their problems. Their parent half the time is the problem.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

That's a lot of weight on a single person. This work, this healing and boundaries, it can never just be talked about at an individual level.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

It is relational. It is relational to ourselves and to our culture and to our communities and to our children and to our partners and to our siblings and to our friends and to the spaces you lead at work and in business and in the wider culture. Like we do not exist in bubbles. Everything that you heal, everything that you caretake and shift a dynamic to, it shifts other people. And that's why that's part of why this work is so hard. Is you can't just expect you to change and then everyone around you to just be like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Perfectly happy with this. It's like, no, it you are interrupting patterns that for some of your families have been running for generations. And I think it's important to name here your parents might not have had the safety or capacity because they were the cycle breaker. Maybe they had even worse abuse, even more trauma. Maybe they were in systems where like they wouldn't have even thought to heal it because they were still surviving it. So you might have the privilege or the capacity, and also the burden, mind you, let's name that, also the burden and the heavy and the hard and the massively uncomfortable of healing this because your parents still had to survive it. Now, I'm also probably talking to some women who you were the one who still survived your parents. That you were the last in your generational line, you were the last in your lineage to have a martyr mother or to have an addicted mother or an addicted father or to have abuse or to have neglect or to have emotional abuse, or even with these good and healthy parents, like I want to be the last person in my generation where my daughter hears me hate my body. What if eating disorders stopped with this generation? What if being obedient, even when the authority is mis is misusing their authority? I don't want my kids to be obedient to me at all costs. I want them to be so obedient to their internal access of self. I want them, I want them to know that like I don't have better access to God than they do. They actually don't have like a junior Holy Spirit or a junior God. Like they have just as much access to authority as I do. They have just as much sovereignty and choice. And I want to be able to teach them how to use that and not just look to me for all of the answers, but to look inside themselves and how to take advice, how to take support, how to ask hard questions, how to have hard conversations without easy answers. There's so many different things that this generation of parents is trying to break or is trying to.

Guilt Versus Shame In Real Growth

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Recreate it is not just, oh, sure, parents are good. It's like, okay, how good can it get? How much better? And I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and I have to be really careful who I talk to about my parenting struggles because when I share something that I'm struggling with, I'm pretty much never anymore coming from a place of shame or even okay, guilt's yes, because I shame is like something's wrong with me. I can't, I can't ever be good enough. Guilt is I'm acting out of alignment to my values. I am doing or saying something that I disagree with. I am behaving in a way that is outside of my integrity, and I need to change my behavior. I'm feeling uncomfortable or bad, not because I'm bad, but because something isn't working and I don't like it. And I have to be able to name that. I have to be able to feel that in order to change the behavior. But when I'm talking to people about my struggles as a mom, it's so interesting how quick people will be to validate it. Either validating how wrong or awful or hard he is or she is or this is, or validating, oh, you're such a good mom.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

I wouldn't worry about it. No, I'm gonna worry about it.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

My life foundationally and fundamentally changed when my daughter was a toddler and I started looking around and I allowed myself to tell the truth about how I didn't feel good enough. And I didn't make that, I didn't mean that in a shame way. I didn't mean that there was something broken or wrong with me, but I looked around and I said, she deserves better, and so do I. This isn't good enough for us. This isn't good enough for her. I started realizing I like I had all of this ambition and like desire to like teach her how to love her body and how to like have boundaries and speak her words and like never freeze or fawn never's dramatic. But like truly, especially when when I was this mom of a toddler, I started having all of these deep desires and like I was so ambitious as a mom. I still am. It's just innate in me to like constantly want to see the gap between where things are and how it could be better, how it could be even more connected or present or wonderful. And it's like I don't want to lose that part of me, but it's no longer coming from this pressure of I'm bad or I'm good. It's coming from this love, from this peace, from this desire to create something beautiful. And I it drives me crazy when I'm talking about that. And people try to just convince me, like, you're okay, you're doing such a good job. It's okay. When a mom tells me this isn't good enough or I don't feel good, I believe her. I listen to her. The medicine of I don't feel like myself anymore. I'm like, oh no, you're fine. It's like, no, when a mom says she's fine, or when she says she's not fine, or when she says, I'm okay, but I'm not okay, I want to believe her and I want to listen to what is working and what is not working. Where is the resistance? Where is the desire? Where is the ambition? Where is her integrity at? Where is that self coming alive again? And this work is so important to talk about. Because this, I hope you're hearing that this so deeply is not just about the relational boundaries with your parents. This is the story you're telling about yourself currently, about you as a mother. How you are under or over responding to your own values or your own identity as a mother, either based off of the blueprint that you saw or in avoidance of the blueprint you saw without ever really dealing with what that looks like. What are those patterns? And can you come into this place where you are centered and grounded so much into yourself that you don't have to just drive off of those patterns or in resistance to those patterns? Because again, coming back to that polarity, sometimes you'll try to be so unlike your parents that you'll actually move into the opposite end of unhealth. You'll move into a whole different dysfunction that looks nothing like your parents, but because it doesn't look like your parents, you just pat yourself on the back and say, I guess this is better than what they did. And this is such a hard topic to talk about because when I'm one-on-one with women, I say this in very different ways depending on how she needs to hear it. And I'm so conscious of like, I never want to make a mom feel worse, to put on guilt or shame or have her not feel good enough by something that I say. And I also really get tired of people coddling women and mothers and pretending like we can just ignore the problems internally or in our relationships because we're quote unquote good.

Responsibility Without Overcontrolling

SPEAKER_01 27:25

We have to stop placating to always feeling good. That is an emotionally unmature response. Being healthy means not feeling good sometimes. It means being massively uncomfortable when you are doing something that is harmful to you or other people. And you need to be able to feel that discomfort, that disappointment, that anger, that rage. Healthy regulation in your nervous system is not just being calm and peaceful. It's having the capacity, it's having the resource internally and externally to be able to handle conflict, internal and external, to have boundaries, to have tension, to have rub, to have a give and a take and a pull and a push. It is dynamic aliveness. Your boundaries with your parents, your boundaries with hard people who are messy and wonderful and brutal. No matter where you are on that spectrum, you know, there's this whole spectrum of relational health. And like maybe it, maybe it is severe. Sometimes, even when it's severe, you're not ready for no contact yet. And we have to figure out in your body how you move in that direction, how you start creating resource, how you start having micro conversations so that you can eventually get there. But none of that is going to happen unless we start telling the truth about the complex emotional labor that is the energetics of relationships, the things happening that aren't just on the surface, it's how it all feels to carry it and navigate it and move through it. So teaching yourself, like, what am I responsible for? What am I not responsible for? Who am I responsible for? What level of responsibility do I have? Because so many women are in hyper, hyper control of themselves and their relationships. You can't let go of control. You are death gripping and you are hyper-fixating and you are chronically high-functioning anxiety because you are trying to control and monitor and regulate everybody else's moods and emotions. You're trying to like constantly prevent disappointing people or having them disrupted by you. You're trying to not be inconvenient, you are overexplaining simple decisions, you're like constantly scanning for tension and you just feel responsible for everyone. And it's not that their opinions don't matter. I hate those quotes. Other people's opinions are none of your business. And it's like, no, I think they are your business, but you can't control it. You can impact it, you can influence it, but like where is that radical responsibility that is not overreaching into other people's stuff? It is learning how to have them, them have their sovereignty, you have yours, and feeling that separation, but also that connection. Because we are connected. We do impact each other, we do influence each other. That is a truth. But it's not your job to be an asshole whisperer. It's not your job to constantly monitor your mom's moods. All of this is part of the work of relational boundaries. It is not just contact or no contact, it is learning how to relate to self and learning how to relate to others. Boundaries are the relationship between you and another person. But in order to heal the boundary between you two, you have to be able to own your whole side so that you can have perspective of the person you're working with, the person you're talking to, the person you're loving, the person you're setting boundaries with. So learning that differentiation, starting, I hope this is starting to put some language to the things that are happening underneath the things, the things that are influencing and impacting not just you, but them.

Share Your Questions And Work Together

SPEAKER_01 31:47

I would absolutely love to hear from you. You can email me, you can me out, DM me on social media. Of course, if you're loving this series, share it with a friend and talk about it with her. Truly, like get your hands dirty with this content. I am, I am trying to make sure that this is not clean, that this is not overly planned, that this is not like put out there as just information that you take in, but something that you integrate, something that you feel and think about. Like, where do you disagree? Where am I getting it wrong? Where am I missing something? Work with that, play with it, think about it, talk about it with your therapist. If you need someone to support you on this journey, I would love to work with you. I would love to support you. I've opened a few coaching spots this summer and then a couple in the fall, specifically working with women on this relationship to self and then that relationship to other. Not this, oh, it's this boundaries course. I want to teach you how boundaries can become this living dynamic relationship from yourself and other people that doesn't just change the relationship to your parents, it changes the way that you relate to everyone and everything, your work, your kids, your partner, yourself, your past, your future, like everything, work, all of it, all of it is relational, all of it is boundaries work. And I hope that you're gleaning helpful tools, helpful language. Again, I would just love to hear from you. Ask me, ask me your questions. Ask me your context. I would love to hear from you. And I will see you the next episode.