Episode 14: Stop trying to forgive your mother. Do this instead.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle. So last week we talked about the mother wound, and I wanted to go deeper because there's one piece of this conversation that I think it's more wrong than right. And that is forgiveness. So today we're talking about why I want to stop people from trying to forgive their mother and what to do instead. What if I told you forcefully trying to forgive your mother is actually getting in the way of the real healing work? I know that sounds fucked up, right? But stay with me here. Here's what I see over and over again. There's a woman out there who is carrying legitimate pain from her mother. Maybe she neglected her, maybe she physically abused her, sexually abused her, and the world, religious traditions, well-intentioned people, other family members, friends, strangers are telling this woman that she needs to forgive her mother. You only have one mother, they say. Your mother had um a horrific upbringing, too. Move on, stop trying to carry things from the past. You need to go quickly and ultimately forgive your mother. So instead of allowing this woman to feel her pain, to grieve her pain, and to move through it, she is trying to forcefully forgive her mother because she feels pressured to go that way because she thinks that forgiveness is the ultimate end goal when it comes to the relationship with her mother. So she's trying to forgive her mother, but she's wondering why nothing is changing. In fact, maybe she is maybe more angry, maybe she's more having more anxiety, maybe she's just more triggered by her mom than ever before because she's just like, okay, I'm trying to forgive her, but every time I see her, or every time she gets near me, or every time I talk to her, just thinking about her without even talking to her already gives me anxiety. Why are these patterns still there? Why is the anger still there? Why is the grief still there? Because it is all unfinished business. Because you cannot forgive your way through grief, you can only grieve your way through it. Telling somebody that they need to forgive their mother is not healing. Here is the truth. Forgiveness is not a requirement for healing, acceptance is, and those two things are not the same. Forgiveness, if it comes, it comes organically. It is not something you force, it is not something you decide, it is something that happens quietly on the other side of a long and honest grief process. And sometimes it doesn't happen at all. And that's okay. Your healing does not depend on it. What your healing depends on is acceptance. And we're going to talk about what it actually means and what it feels like in just a minute. But first, we need to talk about the most important step, and that is grief. I want to say something that's really important. This is not the same grief as death. It is something that's probably more complicated than that. Because the mother that you're grieving never existed. You're not mourning someone that you had and then lost. You are mourning someone you needed and never had. You are grieving a relationship that could not be what you deserved. That is real loss. Even though it was never yours to begin with, it deserves to be grieved fully without rushing to any other side like forgiveness. And here's what grief looks like in real time, not intellectualizing it, but how the body processes it. It looks like tears that come out of nowhere in the car, in the shower, at moments that seem completely unrelated, and yet something in you knows exactly what it's about. It feels like the tightness in your chest when you see a mother and daughter who are clearly close, the flesh of something that is not quite jealousy and not quite sadness, but somewhere in between. It feels like the anger that surfaces when your mother does the same thing that she's always done, and a part of you still, after all this time, hope it would be different. It feels like the exhaustion of finally letting yourself feel something that you've been managing and suppressing and explaining away for years. It feels like the strange emptiness that comes when you stop waiting for her to change, when you finally really let go of the hope that she will one day become the mother that you needed. That emptiness that I'm explaining is the grief that we're talking about. Now, these are the seven stages from what I have referenced. And I want to walk you through them specifically through the lens of grieving your mother, because this kind of grief is unique and it does not always look the way people expect. Before I do that, I want to say that these stages are not a checklist. You will not move through them in order and arrive neatly at acceptance. You will cycle back, you will feel like you process something, and then it surfaces again six months later in a completely different way. That is not failure. That is grief. That is exactly how it works. Stage one, shock and denial. This is often where it starts. And for many of us, this stage lasts for years, sometimes for our whole life. It sounds like she did the best that she could. It wasn't that bad. Other people had it worse. I had a roof over my head. She did love me. All of those things can be true, and they can also be a way of protecting yourself from the full weight of what you are beginning to feel. Denial is not weakness, it is the nervous system's way of giving you information at a pace that you can handle. But when denial becomes a permanent residence, when it becomes a story that you tell to avoid feeling, it keeps you stuck. Stage two pain and guilt. This is a stage that trips so many women up because the grief starts to surface and it almost immediately the guilt arrives right along with it. Who am I to feel this? She loved me. She tried. What kind of daughter grieves her own mother? Feeling guilty about grieving your mother doesn't mean that you shouldn't be doing it. It's a sign of how thoroughly you were taught that your feelings, her needs, her comforts, her image mattered more than your own truth. Your grief is not betrayal. Betrayal is something that you've been doing your whole life to yourself. What this is, is an act of pure honesty. Really allowing yourself to see all of the grief that you've been suppressing your whole life. This is something that is long overdue. Stage three, anger and bargaining. This is the one that surprises most people because for so many of us, especially for those raised in religious or emotionally suppressed households, anger at our mother felt absolutely forbidden. But the anger is real and it is valid. It is the part of you that finally says, I deserve more than this. What happened was not okay. I had needs and they were not met, and that mattered. Stage four depression. This is the settling into the reality of it all. The sadness that has no clear endpoint because, unlike a death, the loss is ongoing. She is still here, the relationship still exists, and yet you are grieving it. This stage can feel like a fog like a quiet and persistent sadness that sits underneath everything. Stage five, an upward twist. Something begins to shift. The feelings become a little less consuming. You start to notice moments, brief ones at first, where you feel something other than grief, where something in you begins to loosen. Stage six, reconstruction. This is where the real rebuilding begins. You rebuild a new relationship with yourself and the story that you have with your mother. You stop waiting for her to change and start showing up for yourself differently. You begin reparenting yourself to give yourself what was never given to you. You start to notice the patterns with more compassion and less shame. I want to be clear and say that acceptance is not saying what happened was okay. It's not pretending that what happened didn't exist and it didn't matter. And it's not deciding that you moved on. Acceptance is the moment you stop spending your life energy fighting a reality that can't be changed. It is the moment you stop waiting for her to acknowledge you, for her to apologize, for her to finally become the mother that you needed. It is the moment you genuinely, not just intellectually, make the peace with the fact that she could not give you what you needed. And here's how you really know that you arrived at acceptance. You think of her, and the tightness in your chest is not there in the way that it used to be. You can be in conversation with her or about her without the old familiar charge running through your body. The resentment that used to sit underneath everything has softened. Not disappeared necessarily, but softened into something that you can be with rather than something that is running you. You stop needing her to be different, to be okay. That is acceptance. And it is the most important destination in this entire journey. Before I close, I want to tell you about something I've been quietly working on. And if these last two episodes have resonated with you, I think this is going to feel like it was made for you because it was. In two weeks, I'm opening enrollment for my monthly membership called Breaking the Cycle. This is a space specifically for women who are healing from the wound of an emotionally unavailable mother. Let me tell you what it looks like inside of this membership. Every Tuesday morning at 10 a.m., we'll be meeting for a live teaching. I'll be talking about topics like the critical voice, people pleasing, self-sabotage, breaking generational cycles, understanding how our past is still showing up in our present. I'll be talking about the topic, and at the end, everyone gets to chime in, ask questions, and interact. This is not a lecture. This is a conversation. And in this conversation, we'll be learning from each other. Every Thursday at 10 a.m., we meet for live group coaching. This is where I sit with the women in the group. They share whatever is alive for them, and I coach them live. Other women in the group get to respond, support, and show up for each other. And in my opinion, this is where the deepest healing happens. Not because of anything I do, but because of what happens when women who truly understand each other finally get to be in a safe room together, be seen and understood. All sessions are recorded and sent to your inbox if you can't make it live. And in between the calls, we'll be having a private community available 24-7. This is a community of women who truly understand what you're going through and can support you in this specific topic. This is going to be a small container. I'm intentionally keeping it that way so everyone will feel safe. The membership is going to start at $79 a month and you can cancel at any time. If this feels like it's a good fit for you, I'm going to leave a link in the description notes to join the wait list. Again, open enrollment is next week. I'm opening the doors for five days and then I'm closing it. So open enrollment starts on Monday and it closes on Friday. You'll get an email from me to let you know that it's open. If you click the link in the description box, you'll put in your email address and then I'll send you the invitation for when it opens. Before I let you go, I have one question for you to sit with this week. What are you still waiting for your mother to give you that you can begin to give yourself? If this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to leave me a five star review. It inspires me to make more episodes like this. Thank you for being here, and I'll see you on the next episode.