Your Childhood Shapes Your Motherhood: The Neuroscience Behind Why You Feel SO Triggered as a Mom

In this deeply honest conversation, I unpack how your childhood, nervous system, & subconscious wiring shape the way you show up as a wife & mom today. I delve into why you feel so triggered by “small” things, why mindset work & productivity hacks DON’T work, & what it actually takes to become a calmer, happier, more grounded mother from the inside out.

You’ll hear pieces of my own story: growing up as a high-achieving, people-pleasing “good girl”; struggling with postpartum depression; chasing the perfect planner & systems; “balancing” it all yet still feeling like it was never enough. It’s taken me years of struggle & study to realize our present-day triggers actually stem from DEEP childhood wounds & it’s so important to do the inner work of healing to ensure we don’t pass those wounds on to our kids. My great mission is to equip every mom with proven tools to rewire things at their root. 

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

•  Why your kids’ meltdowns, messes, & big emotions trigger you so intensely—& what your nervous system is trying to protect you from
• Why positive thinking & mindset work alone will NEVER be enough to change how you respond when triggered
• How “little-t” & “complex” trauma programmed your beliefs about worth, safety, & belonging—even if you had a “good” childhood
• Why you HAVE to heal your nervous system so you can break these vicious generational cycles & become the mom your kids deserve…the parent you deserved when you were a kid
• Practical first steps to start gently exploring your own triggers, patterns, & protective adaptations

AS MENTIONED:

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 HOMEWORK:

Your homework is to think of a recent time you got frustrated with your child. What was going on in that moment? What did you feel, both physically & emotionally? What emotion or emotions do you think your CHILD was feeling when they engaged in the behavior that triggered you? Now think back to when you were little. How was that emotion handled by your caregivers? Email me or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity to share your thoughts. I sincerely invite you to schedule a free consult to do this beautiful healing work with a certified, trauma-informed neurosomatic expert like me!

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next episode to learn how & why the brain gets patterned to need CONTROL to feel safe.

Did you know your nervous system secretly shapes your thoughts, emotions, choices, relationships, and life? My 1-hour masterclass, "Finally Understanding Yourself, The Missing Manual for Your Brain and Body," gives you foundational wisdom and practical tools to feel calmer, more connected, and more in control no matter how chaotic things are around you: https://solutionsforsimplicity.thrivecart.com/ns101/

Loving this podcast? Please help it get found by more listeners by taking quick minute to leave a rating & review in Apple Podcasts. Take a screenshot of your text review before you submit it, then email that to help@solutionsforsimplicity.com and I'll send you my powerful Happy Mom Protocol™ (a $297 value) FOR FREE!

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn 

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

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You can only parent to the extent to which you allow your children to be the child you did not get to be. Everything your children do that triggers you is because you were not allowed to express that emotion yourself. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis, ready to make more time for you, Let's dive in. Today we are finally talking about how your childhood shapes your motherhood, and the cutting-edge neuroscience behind why you feel so triggered as a mom. I've promised you this episode for a while, and I'm obviously biased, but I think it is so powerful. It's seriously everything I just wish I'd known at the start of my motherhood journey. I just wish someone had prepared me for how much my kids would trigger me, would bring up the most horrible, hurt parts of me I wasn't even necessarily aware existed, and that someone had prepared me for what was really going on in those moments. It has taken me years of struggle and study to realize our present-day triggers actually stem from deep childhood wounds, and it's so important to do the inner work of healing to ensure we don't pass those wounds on to our kids. If you are listening in real time, I am sure you don't notice or care, but I am a day late getting this podcast out—it's releasing on a Wednesday instead of the normal Tuesday—because December is such a crazy time of year. In fact, it's precisely the time of year many of us are most likely to get triggered. Because of holiday stress, a million school activities, end-of-year pressures at work, kids getting sick or being out of sorts because they are off their normal sleep schedule or hyped up on sugar. You might be traveling or getting ready to host extended family, which brings up a whole load of drama. For me, as a behavioral science professor, it's always extra crazy with final exams and grading. Every May and December, I question my whole life's choices in selecting a career where my most demanding responsibilities at work coincide with the two most already stressful months of the year. The bigger point is that mom life is stressful. We do get triggered. and then respond to our kids from a stressed out, emotionally dysregulated state. But it's not just the present stress that's coming up in those moments. It goes so much deeper, and the more aware you are of this, the more you can counteract your triggers and respond to your kids from love and connection, even when you're stressed. Now, this episode in itself could be triggering for you because I am delving into something few, if any, people are talking about. It might be easy to feel called out, confronted, defensive, maybe even upset or enraged when you hear it. But I invite you to listen with openness and curiosity. Maybe listen a couple of times. What, if anything, stands out to you? What, if anything, feels true for you? I'm sharing an interview I gave for Lori Oberbrookling's Secrets of Supermom podcast, in which I talk not just about my own hard and healing journey of motherhood, but the real path to being a happier mom. Why you have to heal your nervous system So you can break free of these vicious generational cycles and truly become the mom you want to be. The mom your kids deserve. The parent you deserved when you were a kid. Let me say that again because it's so important. You've got to bring your own childhood wounds to light so you can heal them. Your kids need you to heal them. Before I play the interview, let me give you the top 10 takeaways up front, because I know you're slammed on time, so I at least want you to get the punchline, even if you have to tuck the full episode away for another time. but also because I hope they pique your interest to listen to all the life-changing gold waiting for you in the full episode. 1. Most of what drives your stress, anxiety, and perfectionism isn't mindset, it's your nervous system. Over 90% of your daily thoughts come from subconscious wiring formed in childhood, long before logic or mindset tools were available to you. And research confirms you will never be able to change your mindset if you don't first re-pattern your nervous system for safety and capacity. 2. Little T Trauma Shapes You Just As Much As Big T Trauma I will have a future podcast episode where we delve into the concept of complex trauma and see PTSD as it's known so much more, but even a quote-unquote good childhood could still have been full of small daily moments of shame, tension, and emotional disconnection that show up powerfully now in your marriage and motherhood. 3. Childhood responsibilities and emotional environments taught you who you had to become to feel safe. You will always recreate these with your own kids until you learn to break free of them. I share how, in my case, Sensing my parents' stress made me over-perform, over-achieve, people-please, and become hyper-fixated on control in order to create emotional safety, earn my worth, and solidify connection with my caregivers. Number four, productivity, mindset, and time management tools help until you hit motherhood. Then it doesn't matter how much you've mastered planning, systems, schedules, even energy rhythms, you will still feel stressed, reactive, and never enough because these tools don't begin to resolve the nervous system programming that's at the root of all else. 5. You can only parent to the degree that you have healed your inner child. Your kids' behaviors trigger you because they mirror emotions you were never allowed to express. You never learned to tolerate those emotions in your body because your caregivers couldn't tolerate them in theirs. Now you are doing the same thing to your children. 6. True healing creates new reactions naturally, without white-knuckling or going against your innate urges. You will know you are healed and your brain is literally rewired when you don't have to control your reactions. You just respond differently. Number seven, you have to take radical responsibility for your own happiness. When you stop outsourcing your happiness to your kid's behavior, your husband's mood, or the state of the house, you show up calmer and your whole family benefits. 8. Breaking generational patterns is so possible, but it begins in your body. By healing your own nervous system, you can then offer your children what they so desperately need and you never had. Unconditional love, emotional safety, and the freedom to be fully themselves. 9. Your triggers are invitations, not failures. they simply point directly to where your nervous system still feels unsafe or unworthy, which means every triggered moment is just a map toward healing, not a sign that you're a bad mom. And number 10, you deserve joy, rest, and belonging, not just productivity and performance. My greatest mission is to help moms reclaim their worthiness, rebuild internal safety, and live and parent from love rather than obligation so your kids inherit a healthier emotional legacy and are set up to truly flourish. The last thing I want to mention is that if any of this pulls at your heart, you are so welcome to use the link in the show notes to schedule a free consult with me. I am here with and for you always. Okay, without further ado, take a listen. Hey, hey friends. Welcome to the show. I am so excited to have Dr. Amber Curtis back with me today. We are going to dive deep into some stuff and I cannot wait. I told her, I said, I have so many questions for you. We're just going to start recording so we can get into this. Dr. Amber, welcome. Thank you Lori, it is my great privilege and I am so excited to talk about all of this. Because as I mentioned, I've just been on an amazing journey of self-discovery and I've loved getting to bring other women along on this and the more I go through it, the more common I realize this is. So I love that we get to have this conversation and that we as a society are raising awareness on a lot of these big hidden sources of stress and frustration, anxiety, depression, big, big things that we often look to fill or to solve with, you know, The immediate solutions we are bombarded with by marketing and messaging. And the reality is it's all deep within us. So where do we start to unpack it? Yeah. Yes. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. Will you take a step back and just tell us a little bit about you and who you are and your family and all those things just in case somebody is new to you? Yes. So I am affectionately known as a crazy person. That is the label that my very best friend gave me and at first I was so offended. But I realized that I am a crazy person in what I consider to be the best possible way. So I just fully embrace it. By crazy, I am someone who is doing a million things and loves it. And I am pulled in a million different directions. And I do flit from one project to the next. And I sometimes do more than feels humanly possible. And sometimes that can make other people feel like they're not getting maybe the attention or the time that they want. But all that to say, I am so grateful to be a mom of four young kids. a wife to the most amazing man. We met when I was 17. We've been together almost now 25 years, married for 19. And then on top of that, I am a full-time behavioral science professor. And I started a coaching business six years ago that has morphed and transformed along with my personal journey. So through that, I love working one-on-one with clients. I run the More Time for Mom podcast. I have a YouTube channel. I do lots of group programs, lots of just trying to share everything I have learned both the hard way and through my years of academic research on how we moms can flourish, like how we can really live our best life and find ourselves after looking outside ourselves for those answers for way too long. And if you've been listening for a while, now you know exactly why I love her, because you're like, oh my goodness, she sounds so much like you, because I feel like we are so alike. We do so many of the same things and live so much of the same way. And I love it. And so I love the chance to get to talk to you. And we're going to talk a little bit about this journey, because you've had some changes that have impacted your mindset, your ways of thinking. You've had some really significant changes, even since we first had you on the podcast, I think. And it's big stuff. And I want to dive into that because I think a lot of other women that are listening to you, that are listening right now, they will resonate with this. I agree. I'm such an open book. And I laugh looking back at myself, but not in a mean or cruel way. Just such gentle compassion for the person who really thought that she needed to earn and achieve and do big things. And she did all those things, right? It's so great to look back. But all of that seemed to work until I had kids. Then I struggled severely with postpartum depression. We've talked about my story before. But even at that point, once I was able to get help and recover, The fixer in me, the overachieving perfectionist in me was convinced that I just needed to find the right way to do it, the right way to fit the puzzle pieces of my life together. And that's where I started my coaching business to share all of the productivity and time management and goal setting tips that I had achieved or, you know, acquired because they had really helped. They really did enable me to, I hate the term, but balance these different areas of my life. And yet, I was surprised that I still didn't feel at peace in the midst of that. Having the perfect planner, using the Pomodoro time management technique, even what I shared the last time I had the honor of being interviewed where we talked about energy rhythms and working with your body's natural peak performance windows. I was doing all of that, and I was doing great things. And I realized it still didn't feel like enough. And I started to peel back the layers and realize, oh, what's going on under the surface? And of course, I've been working with amazing coaches myself over the years. And the first one really helped me see that so much of it was in my thoughts, right? and what control we have over our thoughts to affect our feelings and our actions and our results. And that was so empowering. So I really shifted into this, you know, positive psychology, lots of positive mindset. We just need to think the right things and everything will be great. But then, right, kind of along in the same time, We lost my husband's brother to cancer. My mom passed away of cancer. Of course, lots of other hard things, just trying to manage our family. And all the while, I'm like, OK, I'm just going to think positively. I'm just going to adopt the right mindset. Note that common word, right. I'm going to find the right way. And I realized, and it was just made aware to me, that we don't have the luxury of choosing our thoughts. 90 plus percent of them are dictated by our subconscious and specifically by the way our brain got wired from the moment of conception. and that has led me on this BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL trail of trying to learn how the nervous system works and what the role of the nervous system is in our daily life and how our brain got patterned to believe different things how those patterns and that programming are showing up in all of our responses to our current triggers And more importantly then, of course, the fixer in me, like, great, what do we do with this then? I have been getting certified in Neurosomatic Intelligence, which is the relationship between the brain and the body and how trauma gets stored in the body and how to really build safety and capacity at the level of your nervous system to break all of those harmful subconscious thought patterns, those beliefs that have been hardwired into your brain, harness the power of neuroplasticity and somatics to really help you Finally change your thoughts. Like you can't change your thoughts out of nowhere. We got to get even deeper to the level of the nervous system. And I know that is, is a crazy thing to say. It can maybe sound so out there to someone that hasn't been on my journey. So I want to hit it home with some really concrete examples. So many women that I work with. feel this drive to really perform great at their job and keep a perfectly clean, organized house and be the perfect mom and make sure they have a thriving marriage and all very good, beautifully intentioned things. But they don't realize that they have externalized their sense of self-worth and they have made their worth dependent on what they have to show for it. And so much of that, I find, personally in my own experience and through lots of the coaching that I have done, comes down to how safe you felt as a child and what you had to do to get attention, to feel love and belonging, and especially the way that we as children so naturally look to our caregivers for our sense of safety. And we pick up on their frustration, their emotions, their trauma, whatever they might be going through, right? And little t trauma, even. Whether it's financial insecurity, whether it's mom is stressed because the house is always dirty, whether it's marital issues between your parents, whatever it was, when you didn't feel safe, You took on fault and blame, even though it was not yours. And you stepped up to make it better. Some way, some how. And all the things that we have been striving to do have really been because we are trying to make everyone around us okay and we have been programmed to think we are not okay UNLESS everyone else is okay. Which, of course, they never are. It's up to each of us to be okay for ourselves. And it's this never ending cycle of feeling so lost and empty and unsafe in our own bodies, like being afraid to take up space as ourselves because we want everyone around us to be okay. And again, no one's even consciously thinking this as we go through our daily lives. But oh my goodness, it's really profound. I'm glad that you said little t trauma. I just literally said this to a friend this week. I said, I said it because he was saying he felt this certain way and he was like, but I walk around and there's all these other people that are feeling like that are, let me, that have big traumas, right? And not to discount anyone's big traumas, but he was discounting his quote, little t traumas. And that's exactly what we said. I said, little t trauma is still trauma because what you're talking about doesn't have to be some wild, crazy thing. And I'll give you guys an example of a little t trauma for me. I had an uncle that said, wow, you really ran fast. When I was at an Easter egg hunt and I was like seven years old and I was slow, right? I was like the slowest runner. So in my head, right, I am fat and slow forever, right? Like I'm 40 something and fat and slow Lori is constantly telling her things and like reacting to those things. That's little t trauma, right? Not a big deal. He was just being mean, right? And, but It's a memory in my mind. So this little t trauma, like you said, can cause thoughts to come and you don't control the thoughts. And that's what you were saying is that you were like, oh, I can just change my thoughts. Well, I don't control when my, you know, when my Easter egg hunt, like, fast-paced thing comes back, right? I don't control that happening. Now I get to decide what I do with that thought. I get to decide how I feel about that, right? And I get to then make the next choice. But I am so glad that you said it that way because it can just be all of those little things that stack up to the way we then think and feel about ourselves. Absolutely. It's what research calls complex trauma in the sense that it is repeated and inescapable. So it is everywhere when you are a child, whatever your home environment was, you could not get out of. And it really affected how you came to see the world and your role in it. one of my ongoing wounds that I'm working to heal, right? And I also want to insert here that this is never, never about placing blame and pointing fingers or harboring, you know, anger towards the people that we may feel could have helped us start off on a different path, right? The truth is always that each of us is doing the best we can under the circumstances, and my goal is for us to have so much love and compassion for anyone who has hurt us or that we feel shaped us a certain way, especially our parents, because they didn't know better. We can probably imagine what they went through for their nervous systems to become the way they were. And it just, again, we are doing this deep inner work now to stump the wounds from passing on to future generations. And we will come back to why I am so passionate about moms doing this work for themselves, but in my own experience, one of many of the complex trauma things that has really been surfacing for me. is the, you know, again, nice way to say it, but my sweet parents were just really struggling in their marriage and struggling to find themselves apart from the marriage, right, in and outside. They ended up getting divorced when I was older, but it's amazing how now I can really feel how that affected me as a young girl. I could sense their tension. I felt the uncertainty over what are they going to do because they weren't happy. I could tell they were not happy. I didn't have words to verbalize it. But as a young girl, it feels so unsafe to think that the people you rely on for your survival are not okay. So what did I do? Again, not even at the level of consciousness, but just, oh, let me get great grades at school. That made my dad happy. Let me help my mom and take on all this responsibility in the home. That will make her happy. And again, like my parents were amazing. And, um, So it's finding that balance. It's not blaming them, not shaming them, but just acknowledging and allowing myself to speak my truth that I was affected by the emotions that were not dealt with in my home. and the way that all of that tension made me feel unsafe, and so I sought to compensate for it by performing and trying to do all of these things that made me a perfectionist, people pleaser, and many other things, right? All this perpetual anxiety that if I don't perform, if I'm not amazing, then I'm not safe because I can't make my parents happy and You know, it's just a very deep, deep thing. Yeah. So you obviously have done a lot of work, right? You've been doing a lot of work on an ongoing basis to find some of these things, because some of us don't even know, right? We might know we had a great childhood or a crappy childhood, or we might know that our parents weren't that nice, right? Some of us might have those sorts of experiences. But sometimes we kind of don't know what that is. What kind of started you getting into this and being able to start peeling back the layers, I guess? Oh, I'm so glad you asked that. There's nothing like parenting. Realize? You've got work to do on yourself. And what an inner child still exists within you. That's the short answer. The detailed answer is that I was using all the productivity strategies. I was so successful at my job. I am successful in my business. things have been going great and yet I hated that I would still snap at my kids or that my husband and I would get into fights over ridiculous things, right? And so it just, it started to occur to me more and more. that it wasn't just about changing my thoughts, right? Something was going on within me that was causing me to react to current situations in ways that fell out of my control. So I've been doing all this work and it is paying off so much because you realize that you can only parent to the extent to which you allow your children to be the child you did not get to be. That everything your children do that triggers you is because you were not allowed to express that emotion yourself. For example, earlier this summer, I was dishing out food to my kids before dinner or trying to get everybody to come sit up at the table and dinner time at my house is pretty comical. It's a disaster. Poor boys. I mean, I've kind of given up. But my little three year old is Mr. Independent, classic youngest child. He's just like, I'll do it myself, but very sweet, comes over with his little plate. I dish him out some corn and he insisted that he was going to carry the plate to the table himself. And I know better, like I know the corn is going to spill. So I'm like, no, no, I'll do it. He's like, no, no, I'll do it myself. And so sure enough, he takes one step and wobbles and his plate of corn spills all over the floor. But in that moment, I didn't even realize it at the time, but I just very calmly was like, oops, no big deal. Here, let's bring your plate back. I'll get you some more. And it was only after I was walking him back to the table and carrying his plate for him that time that I had this like flash of, wow, that is not how my father would have reacted, did react to similar situations when I was a child. and whether it had been a verbal outburst, or display of physical frustration, or even just a grimace on his face. I felt in my body, just imagining the situation I was overcome with that feeling of shame, that feeling of like, oh, I messed up again. I'm horrible. I got to get this right. I'm so sorry, daddy. Like, again, I love my dad to death. So if he and I have talked about all these things, we have healed so much, like, um, I hate giving the wrong impression. But the profound work is that as I have. learned to do this work on my own nervous system, I have built that capacity to handle messes, or kids being kids, or doing things that my parents did not have the capacity to handle. And the reality of that entire situation is just, it's a stressor. It's something outside your control happening. And what we control is our reaction to it. My default reaction back in the day, as much as I hate to admit it, would have been to be sad and frustrated, not maybe even at my kid, but just like, oh, here's a mess, and I just would have conveyed displeasure at the situation. But in that moment with my own sweet son, that didn't show up at all. I was, I am so proud of the difference this has made in my ability to love my children unconditionally, right? To love them for who they are, not what they do, not whether they spill something, not the million messes or when they talk back or all of these other things. It has fundamentally changed the connection I have with my kids and same with my husband, right? Because I just realized that. This is my, this is my work. This is, it's all me, right? And same for them. They control their responses and reactions, but it doesn't have to be the default, the way your brain was wired. So. Yeah, I love that. So it really was. It wasn't having the same thought and having to go, oh, I had this thought, and instead of yelling, I'm going to choose to pause and be calm. It was literally that you had done so much work that you didn't even have the uh thought, you had the whoopsie thought, right? And it wasn't, you didn't have to do any, it wasn't stressful to do any control over your behavior because there were none of the, none of the ugly came up anyway, right? All of it was just like, This is no big deal. We got this, right? And it just felt more peaceful. You could show up more peaceful because you felt more peaceful about it from the beginning. It is so possible to rewire our brains and build these new connections that are based on the love and the worthiness and just the connection that we all desire. Our fundamental desire as humans is to feel like we love and belong. And I really felt like I had that growing up, but I realized as an adult that at the nervous system level, that's not really the way things got programmed in my body. And I'm so happy that I've been able to realize that and make changes and get help. So that I can be a parent for my kids that I didn't get to have. Yeah. So, I mean, I think if anybody has been listening to even like a little part of this, they like it is very clear why you like this is so important to you, right? It's literally changed your life. It's changed all of the things. It's the way you show up in in all areas and And you have a lot of areas, right? Because you talked about all the interests that you have and all the things that you love to do and be a part of. And so what made you go, I need to help other women get unstuck because this is that important? It really comes down to our kids. I know I'm idealistic. I am a dreamer, right? But as Saint Mother Teresa so famously said, if you want to change the world, go home and love your family. And I get emotional because I like we feel so much love for our kids. I know you do. Each and every one of you loves your children so much, but you don't love the way they make you feel or rather that you feel in the moments where you are triggered. by something they do, just for being kids, or just because they are lesser developed nervous systems learning how the world works and trying to figure out how to regulate their own emotions and what behaviors are or are not acceptable. And old parenting styles were so authoritarian, so black or white, so you need to be seen and not heard, you can't cry, you can't share your emotion, that's not acceptable, I'm so disappointed in you." There was just so much of either not allowing emotion or just shaming that was occurring. And what that really does is tell the child, you are not worthy, you are not okay, you need to change who you are in order for me to approve of you, me the parent to approve of you. And I realized that that was what I was doing in my early parenting because of the way my childhood wounds were showing up. And I've just realized how common that is, right? We all have our different wounds and we will still wound our children some way. However, I am on a mission to help us moms. Do the work to find safety and capacity in our own nervous systems. Really, really be able to regulate our own emotions and restore safety in our own bodies every moment, but especially when we're triggered, because the problem isn't our kids. It's not their behavior. It's our response to whatever they are doing. And they are learning from us. We are modeling for them what they are going to pass on to their children. And I want my children to know that all their emotions are valid. And for more than that, right? That they don't have to change who they are for me to love them. That my love is not conditional on them complying with my demands. My love is not conditional on them getting good grades or kicking a winning soccer goal or telling me they love me, right? They're allowed to think and do what they do within obvious limits. But like my, their job as my child is not to make me happy. I, and you as the parent, you as the mom, you are responsible for your own happiness. And when you have been brought up believing subconsciously that your happiness rests outside of you and requires everyone else to be okay, everyone else to be happy. You never are. So then you're never happy with your kids. And they're not making you happy, and it's so bad. Yeah. But when you take control, when you take radical responsibility, I call it radical responsibility for your own happiness. Like, Laura, you can see my face, because I'm giddy with this now. Like, I want to be a happy mom. I want every mother to be filled with such joy. that they have the gift of parenting their children, and that their children feel so loved, so safe, so okay being who they are, that they have permission to go and share their gifts with the world. They're not following in our footsteps, being the perfectionist people-pleasers, full of anxiety, high-functioning or not, right? It doesn't feel good, did not feel good to me. to go through all the motions I used to and feel so worthless at the end of it all. Now that I've realized where my true worth really lies and that I am responsible for my own happiness, I can see the worth in everybody else. And I just want every mom to have that sense of fulfillment. And the joy it brings to your home doesn't mean there's not still problems and fights on messes and kids being kids. Jury is out. We'll see what my kids say about me when they're older. But my husband will be the first to attest that I am a wholly different person now than I was even a few years ago. And that is the biggest compliment I could receive. Yeah. I love this. Dr. Amber, I want to ask you a question we ask all of our guests, even though I could ask you questions all day long. Truly. I want to ask you when you feel most like a super mom. I love it. I will have to listen back to what I even said on my previous interview. But the big answer for today is I feel like a super mom when I have taken time for myself to do what makes me happy, when I have filled my own cup, when I have put my own needs and even desires first. I am such a better mom when I feel good about myself and I'm not outsourcing that to anybody else. I'm not expecting my husband to make me happy. I'm not expecting my kids to make me happy and I have claimed time to pour into myself whether that's through my workouts, whether that's through my creative outlets, through my business, through my serving coaching clients. I have a lot of things that bring me joy, as I'm sure all of your multi-passionate listeners do as well. And serving my family brings me huge joy as well. But I am a super mom when I'm doing everything I do out of love, not out of obligation and not with any expectation that they need to appreciate it. And I'm doing this because I have to. I'm doing it because I want to. I love it. We, I know, have listeners today that are really resonating with this, right? Maybe they feel stuck or they feel like, oh my goodness, I really get what Amber is talking about. Will you tell us one small step they can do today just to kind of get started on the journey? Yeah. First thing is just be gentle with yourself. I, in some ways, feel like the messenger. And don't kill the messenger. When I offer that maybe the solution isn't the latest, greatest planner or productivity strategy or time management system. All of these things we've been conditioned to think will fix our lives. Maybe that's not the thing, right? So I just want women to open themselves up to the possibility that how they currently feel and what is currently stressing them out, kids, homework, all of it, right? It really reflects their deeper triggers based on how your brain got wired from a young age, and that that's an invitation to explore who you felt you had to be to earn your worth and belonging and question now if that's still true. And then just very gently start peeling back these layers for yourself. Just see for yourself what a difference it makes for your family. And then on a practical note, I put together a program called the Happy Mom Protocol that really guides you on taking radical responsibility for your happiness and Six science-backed habits to make you happy, right? But I want to offer everyone listening a free sample of that program. I have a training within it, one of many, but the one I want to offer is called Why Mom's Happiness is Non-Negotiable. And I know you'll put the link in the show notes. It's a ten-minute video. I would love for everybody to claim that and just soak it in, reach out to me with questions, but you deserve to be happy. And when you take ownership of your happiness, I can attest, my husband will tell you, and I believe my coaching clients would really tell you as well, your whole family, your whole family is so much better. I love that. I love, love, love this. We will put that in the show notes, of course. But will you tell us where we can find you online if anybody wants to follow along or wants to come check out more? I would love to. So my podcast is called The More Time for Mom Podcast. New episodes every Tuesday. Would love for listeners to follow in there. And I'm always talking about all things mom life, psychology, neuroscience, goals, parenting, blah, blah, blah. But my website is solutionsforsimplicity.com. That's a great way to connect. And I'm quite active on Instagram, at solutionsforsimplicity. Excellent. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Lori. I love this time so much and it makes me so happy to get to talk to you and share all of this with all your listeners. Appreciate it. All right. What did you think? Your homework for this episode is to think of a recent time you got frustrated with your kids. What was going on in that moment? What did you feel both physically and emotionally? What emotion or emotions do you think your child was feeling when they engaged in the behavior that triggered you? Now think back to when you were little. How was that emotion handled by your caregivers? Again, this is deep, deep work, and I sincerely invite you to do it with a certified, trauma-informed, neurosomatic expert like me who is trained not just in holding space for all of your big, repressed emotions, but then helping you process them in a way that doesn't re-traumatize you or make you physically relive the things your brain has actively tried to forget. Healing is so possible and it really makes a world of difference, not just for your kids, but for how you feel in your body and who you are in your everyday life. Use the link in the show notes to reach out anytime. Then, join me next episode to dive even deeper into how and why the brain gets patterned to need control to feel safe. If you are someone who prides yourself on things being a certain way, but then feels the weight of having to do it all yourself and gets bitter that no one else seems to notice or care, This is going to completely open your eyes to what's really going on at a neurosomatic level and what you can start doing to change that. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day!