Healing Mother Wounds: Forgiving Your Mother and Yourself

Mother’s Day can bring up so many emotions. For some, it’s a beautiful day filled with love and connection. And for many others, it can be layered with grief, disappointment, longing, resentment, confusion, or the ache of not having received what was needed.

In this episode, we explore the healing of mother wounds through the lens of the Recover Your Soul process. Not to stay stuck in blame or victimhood, but to create space to honestly acknowledge what was felt, what was missing, and how those early experiences shaped the patterns, beliefs, and stories we still carry today.

So often we dismiss our own feelings by saying, “They did the best they could.” And while that may be true, healing also asks us to allow ourselves to recognize the impact those experiences had on us emotionally, spiritually, and even within our nervous systems.

This conversation is also about forgiving ourselves.

As mothers, so many of us carry guilt, shame, regret, and the fear that we somehow got it wrong. We wanted to do better. We wanted to love well. And yet we are human beings carrying our own wounds, patterns, and limitations while trying to raise children in a complicated world.

Healing begins when we allow ourselves to stop carrying the blame.

This is an invitation to witness yourself with compassion, to honor the truth of your experience, and to begin releasing the weight you were never meant to carry forever.

Your healing matters.
Your forgiveness matters.
And the love you learn to offer yourself has the power to change everyt

The NEW book is here! Recover Your Soul- A Spiritual Journey of Healing from Addiction, Codependency and People Pleasing Get Your Copy !!!!! 🧡

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Transcript

The Day After Mother’s Day

Rev Rachel Harrison 0:30

It's the day after Mother's Day, and it can be a very complicated day for a lot of people. And one of the things that I think is important is for us to allow ourselves to feel the feelings that were valid and real, that helped create some of our own wounds, our patterns and stories that we're healing today from our own mothers. But even more importantly, I believe it's important for us to be healing our own wounds as a mother, to forgive ourselves fully and completely for anything that we may perceive to have been a wrong for our own children. We're learning how to allow the feelings to come and to step into an opening of forgiveness that allows us to be who we are becoming and releasing and letting go of old wounds, old stories, old patterns, but we have to be honest with how we've felt first, how we were mothered, and maybe how we mother. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcasting community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and community. Today is the day after Mother's Day. And as I'm recording it, it is Mother's Day 2026. And what's interesting is I had already recorded and edited and uploaded a podcast for Monday. And the whole time that I was doing it, I felt that intuition that I didn't know what it was, wondering what the deal was, because it was on boundaries and saying no, which was a perfect next episode from our episode before that was around enabling and how to be of help instead of saving people. As I woke up at four o'clock in the morning this morning, and I had this distinct knowing that we need to talk about mothers, being a mother, having mothers, all of the work that we've been doing in recover your soul, and on our soul's journey to be in a day, and maybe it's the day of a difficult day for you. For a lot of people, Mother's Day is this beautiful day with all this fantasy and expectation of perfection. And you see it in the advertising, bringing your mother flowers and having beautiful lunch somewhere, and everybody working around this perfection of what it was like to be raised and to give appreciation to mothers. And for a lot of people, it's a very complicated day. It's a complicated day because they didn't have that relationship with their mother, or because being a mother has been complicated, as I believe it is for every single one of us that is a mother. And there are all these different layers of how we're seen by other people and how we're seen by our children. And in this community in particular, where we are dealing with people who have addiction in our lives or have maybe mental health issues or are dysfunctional and we're learning how to walk through the door through that, because it is, it absolutely is what's happening. And to step into this desire to heal ourselves, to truly, truly awaken to our soul's journey, to see from a new perception, to be able to look at everything from a new lens, but it doesn't mean that we aren't in what feels hard, what can be very difficult. And these feelings that are information, you know, I'm always saying that feelings are giving us information. And we've been taught for so long to push those feelings aside and to make nice or to be accommodating, or for us to not want to look at them because it's just too much. But you have the courage and the capacity in this work that you're doing on your own journey, whatever it is, regardless of whether you're doing the steps of the recover your soul, I don't care. I, you know, I want you just to hear in my voice that you are on the path that is right for you. And whether my steps speak to you or not, whatever the reason that you're here listening to this episode, there is some resonance around a desire to release the wounds and the pain that you have from your own childhood and potentially that you have from your own being a mother. So even for those of you who are not mothers and are the men listening to this episode, we are looking at this aspect of ourself that has this aching for a connection and acceptance and a love and a support and an unconditional bond that feels like the promise of what mothering is. And many of us don't experience that. And I work with a lot of people who are working on their own mother wounds. And what I think is so great about this journey that we're doing in Recover Your Soul, or our soul's journey, however you want to call it, is that we all have whatever it is that we come in with. And instead of seeing it as something that's terrible or something that you landed in by mistake, or that this was some fault that happened, what if we start to look at it from a different angle? What if we start thinking, okay, so I came into this family like this? I came into a relationship with a mother who couldn't give me what I knew from a very, very early age that I needed. Or a mother who smothered and gave so much that you became so accommodating for. Everybody has these experiences. And I think for a long time we haven't known how to handle it in our own bodies, right? So we've made up these beliefs and patterns and stories and systems to be able to be with what we didn't know how to be with when we were young. This is one of the foundational pieces in therapy and the realization that you're able to now have feelings and awarenesses that, of course, your little bodies and your small understandings couldn't take in. Of course. And when we give ourselves permission to understand that as children, as babies, even pre-verbal, that there wasn't the ability to understand what you knew innately. If you're not getting what you needed when you were younger, you know it because we are we are born with needs, with primal needs. If you are hungry, you cry. If you're cold, you cry. That's why babies cry is they're telling us something. And even babies like, oh my gosh, my son Bodhi had colic so bad. And it was so painful to have this little baby that I loved so much and I wanted to feel better. And he just cried constantly for months because his stomach hurt, and we didn't know what to do about it. And we tried different things, we're trying different things, we're giving him different formulas, we're giving him, you know, my breast milk dried up, and so then I couldn't breastfeed him. But even when he was breastfeeding, he didn't like that either. And eventually we found out that he was lactose intolerant. And when we moved to that, then he stopped crying as much. But he was giving us information about what didn't feel good. So we know from a very early age what we are and are not getting. But I don't think we've give ourselves credit about how that goes into our nervous system and how it goes into our subconscious and how it goes into our psyche to create the patterns that we are looking at now that end up being how we are in the world. And so Mother's Day, I think, is just so fascinating because it is this opportunity for us to have another layer of healing if we can step into the forgiveness that comes from spiritual growth. The forgiveness that means that we have the ability to feel the feelings without pushing them down, without trying to solve or resolve them, and sometimes without even trying to get down to the why, why, why, and just allowing yourself to be in a moment where there's grief, where there's anger, even, where there's the feelings that you don't even know how to name, but to open to have curiosity about what they are, because generally underneath in our ability to feel comes the core wounds. And those core wounds often have something to do with not being seen or loved or having um real parts of us that didn't get what we needed. Now, we almost always go right to the thing that I hear everybody say, and I've said myself too, which is, you know, my parents just gave me what they had to give. And that's great and that's important because we're not moving into a victim space here, a woe's me space. We're in a recognizing how you feel so that you can understand what patterns and what stories you've created around those very legitimate feelings. And when we can do that, outside of the, of course, our parents did the best that they could, there's this opening to be able to explore what your soul's here to explore. Because we're all here to explore this depth of feeling that only comes from being in body. And it means that there's abandonment, and it means that there's not enoughness, or it means that somebody looked you in the eyes and in their moments of darkness and said things that were ugly or harsh. I was watching something recently, and you know, I all these stars and all these famous people are so interesting that when you go and get their backstories, there's so many stories of incredible violence and abuse and neglect. We have these stories and these situations that are very real. Well, you may not have that story, but you have your story. And there's always something in our story that we need to validate that is around not getting a need met. And if we don't validate that, if we don't allow ourselves to recognize and acknowledge that that's true, that younger part of ourself stays activated because it just needs to be seen. And that's one of the things that I love about internal family systems, which, as you know, I take everything that I read or see and I mix it into my own thing. So take, take what the way what I'm doing and take what you need and leave the rest. But the way that I see it is it's these active, almost like characters in our own story that stay elevated and stay heightened because they didn't get to fully express or they weren't really seen. And they're just trying to get the attention so that they can relax, so that they can settle down. I work with so many people whose parents were addicts or had difficulty in their own lives prior to and didn't have the solidity to be able to have emotional intelligence or to show up in ways that were healthy. And, you know, that's a system that we're breaking now. We're actually looking at ourselves and our own lives in a way that will allow us to break these systems that have been happening for a long, long, long time. And there are families that look different. And there's a lot of envy sometimes when you look at those and you see those families that supposedly on the outside, it looks like everything's great and they all got along the whole time and it was all perfect. That may or may not be the case. We don't know what's on going on behind those closed doors. But when we are in a comparison or a competition with the people around us, we actually are missing our own soul's journey. We're actually missing our own capacity and opportunity to be in our bodies and to be in ourselves in a way that is maybe the richness that we need to fully awaken and release all these old wounds and all these old bonds, right? So when you can recognize these younger parts of yourself that may not have gotten what you needed, and you might have a complicated relationship with your own mother, whether she's alive or not. And I think the first thing to do is to stop doing the they did the best that they could, which is dismissing the capacity for you to be with who you are and what's going on with you, and just really be with it. Just be with what it did feel like, what it did feel like. It doesn't matter if anybody else validates whether that happened or not. You know, there's a story in the Recovery Soul book memoir that I just did about some of my own memories, and they're not validated by my parents. They didn't see it that way. That doesn't matter. Because if we're looking for everybody else to validate how we felt, we're going to continue to do that in our life to need somebody else to say, yeah, it's okay to feel that way. Well, you may have had siblings who had very different experiences than you. And as a parent, you want to treat your children the same. You don't. You don't. Everybody's different. Some kids are easier, some kids are harder, some kids you connect with, some kids you don't. And a lot of people grew up with a lot of different siblings, right? Either in mixed families or people who had a lot of kids. And of course, every single one of you was treated differently. Of course, you were. And it felt a certain way to you that it didn't feel like to anybody else. So this opportunity for us to witness and love our own self as a child and to hold those memories as yours gives those younger parts of yourself the ability to relax a little bit and to stop needing to be validated because they weren't validated when you were younger. So what's interesting is that then we move into the part of us being mothers ourselves. I work with a lot of parents of adult children because I'm the parent of adult children. And as a mother, we have these kids who are struggling. And this is so much of the community that's here. And when you are a mother, we had ideals of who we thought we were gonna be as mothers, even if we weren't given what we needed in growing up necessarily. We had our own idea of how we were gonna have the perfect family, how we were gonna be loved, how we were gonna be seen. And what's fascinating is that most of us ended up without even realizing it, picking situations, husbands, um, spouses, wives, whatever it is, that matched some of the same situations and relationships that we grew up with. You know why? Because it's familiar. Even though you think I'm gonna pick somebody totally different, you end up picking what you resonate with because that's how the universe works. We work in resonance, we work in alignment. And until you have clarity about the energy that you're putting out, the thoughts and feelings that you have create the world in which you exist. When we're younger, we don't know that. So we're just in our own minds with what's convenient or what's um um what we know. And I think about in my own life, I I married basically my dad on a lot of different levels. Charismatic, um, likes to party, center of attention, you know, good at everything that he does, and a little self, you know, self-centered, not in a bad way, but in the way where, you know, he sort of sees the world through himself. That's my dad. My dad is this, you know, kind of wild guy who always took all, you know, the attention of the room and was wonderful and high at high energy and was pretty self-centered. Well, I also am looking at my mother. And if I look at what was familiar in my relationship with my mother that I also chose in my mother's life, my mother who was calm and lovely on so many levels, and I'm so lucky as an only child, there was no, you know, um chaos or conflict, which, as you know, if you've listened to the podcast, was both great and a curse. But she was another person who the whole world revolved around what my mom needed and wanted. And so I learned how to sit back, be the peacekeeper, take care of everybody else. So I'm setting up these systems and I found and created and replicated relationships that replicated those exact things so I could continue to stay in those roles. So then I have my own children, and I have in my mind that it's gonna be an entirely different world. Well, it's not because I'm in the basically the same world that I came from, and I'm trying to have it be different. Then we have this perfection that we think we're gonna do as mothers, and it doesn't go that way. You know why? Because we're human beings and we're just as faulted with our own beliefs and stories and our own limited capacity to be with very difficult things, just like our own parents, just like our mothers. And one of the things that I think was so healing in my own life was for me to have in my mind this sort of frustration that the world revolved around my mom. But now I look and I see how she actually had an independence that I lacked. I'm always teaching you actually to choose yourself. She was modeling choosing for herself. And some of it was great, and some of it, you know, could have used a little bit of also paying attention to me and maybe what I needed and wanted in those times. But that's our journey together. And so then I'm looking at my own children. And one of the things that I think is so powerful about Mother's Day is to look at your own mothering and to step into this spiritual forgiveness for yourself. Because if you have a child who is struggling and suffering, I don't know a single person who doesn't say, I must have done something wrong. I must have messed this up somehow. And that isn't fair because we're all here as souls having this wild ride. And yes, admitting and taking responsibility for the places where you fell short is essential in your own healing journey. And it may be essential in your child's healing journey as well, to be able to say, Yes, I can see that those things that I did, those ways that I showed up weren't healthy for you. The same way as if you had a parent who truly came to you and said, I can see that I didn't give you what you needed. I was so caught up in, you know, XXXXX, not as justification, but as, you know, a holding of truth that I completely fell short of being there for you in the way that you needed. It feels validating to have a parent see like that. And it isn't about this doing it with each other because maybe your parents are gone and you're and you're working on these things yourself. And it's also not about having these conversations with your kids unless it's a healthy conversation to have and the right time to have it. These are the conversations we have with ourselves. Self and with our higher self and our souls, to allow yourself to not beat yourself up and blame yourself and cause yourself harm by aggressively saying, you did these things and so you mess this up. No, you didn't. No, nobody does. We don't harm anyone. We all harm, have harm, but there's this in spirituality, there's this different way of seeing it that is more of a what is, and the complexity of us as human beings and how so often we just show up in our reactivity out of our pain, out of our not knowing how to handle it, out of our wounds and our hurts and our anger. And we do and say things that later we regret. But if we live from those regrets, if we live from that pain, if we keep dragging that blame and that anger at ourselves with us, we can't move forward to be who we are here to be in our healed state with those people in our lives. We have to forgive ourselves first. Their forgiving is their work. Just like you're forgiving your mother, your parents is your work. First, you need to forgive yourself and to recognize, just like we're doing as the child, to be able to go in and say, Yes, as a child, I didn't get these needs met. And there's that younger self that's saying, Yes, me, I needed something. But what if you actually gave your younger woman self permission to have not done a great job because of where you were at? That it was the best that you had at that moment, and it wasn't all that great. People choose every moment how they're gonna take what happens in their life and what they're gonna do with it. We are all completely responsible for how we choose to see it, how it moves in our body, whether we're gonna be um awake in this lifetime, or whether we're gonna be full of resentment and anger. They're all okay. Every single path that anybody can choose is the path that their soul is going to experience this time. But you get to choose right now how you're going to be. And for us to do this work, it means that we are deciding that we're going to look at things from a more loving, compassionate, whole space and allow ourselves to release what no longer serves us. So dragging around a lot of weight and blame and guilt and shame within ourselves for anything that we've done in the past is not healthy. If you need to make an amend, if you have forgiven yourself, and forgiving yourself spiritually means that you stop seeing that something was done wrong, and you witness it from a more what was perspective, and you allow yourself to see that maybe even this is part of something bigger, is part of a system that was bigger, that you are being able to break that system by loving it, feeding it compassion, feeding it grace, seeing how if you can hold it in a more healed space right now, it will actually, in the quantum field, in all the super woo, it does release what happened in the past. Because all we have is right here in this moment right now. And the more we're dragging with us all of this old woundedness, our own woundedness, our own guilt and shame of how we showed up, we cannot move forward in the new energy. We cannot do it. So part of this journey is to really open space for everybody, every situation, every mother, every part of you that's a mother, and to release the attachment to what we think it was or should have been. And we open it up and we hand it over to spirit. We hand it to our higher self, we hand it to the source, to the divine, and we ask for healing. We ask for it to be released. We're willing to let it go. And forgiving yourself means that you release the energy from it and you step in the now in your most healed whole state space. So that might mean that you make an amend where you have an opportunity that arises. And I think it's really important that we don't go force conversations, they will come where maybe you have a conversation with your mother or as a mother to your children, to be able just to, without any justification, without any of the shame or guilt, to be able just to go to somebody and say, I recognize that there were things that I said and did that were harmful to you. And I I am so sorry. I'm so sorry. And I want to be a whole loving person in your life. And if they have things to tell you about it, you just listen. You don't have to um, you don't have to agree with everything that they say because they too have the complete um, they need to tell you exactly what it feels to them. And just like how we may not understand what our parents did, we do not need to see where they're coming from either. We just need to give them space to be able to say it, right? They're responsible for their own healing. So you might have a child that's filled with anger, who blames you and says horrible things. You don't take that on. This forgiveness is within yourself to understand that they're entitled. That was the word I was looking for, they're entitled to these feelings, but they are responsible for their feelings. And they are responsible for their healing of whatever this is in their life. We came here to have all this sticky complexity. As souls, we came here to have all this wildness, sometimes weirdness, sometimes discomfort, sometimes upset, sometimes rage, right? And one of the questions that I had about wanting to hear what they wanted to hear on the episode, one of the responses was, it's hard to say this, but I want to talk about hate. What do we do with hate? Hate is a response to pain. And it's a very stark way to push away what doesn't feel good. And the hate is actually the the tightness of protection. And there is something underneath the hate that can be a softness for yourself because you are also entitled to these strong feelings, either to what happened to you in the past, what's happening to you now. We're learning how to actually let those feelings move through us to give us the information that they're trying to offer us so that we can integrate what is happening in our life. We're not bypassing anything. We are learning how to be present with what is. And in that, we're able to open up our hearts, to release all of this tight holding onto control and to how it should have been and why wasn't it like this? And this is what I'm trying to do going forward, and move into your higher self and into your spiritual balance, have more clarity about what works for you and what doesn't, how you can set boundaries. Oh, this is setting up next week's episode perfectly. So that's good. Thank you, spirit. How to set boundaries in your life, how to say no, but mostly how to be in your own skin without holding on to grievance and resentment and pain from the past of how you were mothered or how you have mothered. We are in a new paradigm. And the new paradigm is resetting how relationships are. We've been in a paradigm that said this is how relationships should be, and that is changing. This is part of, I think, the great awakening is that there is a new way of being in relationship. We come through a body to come here to be the soul that we are here to be. And there's been an attachment to these relationships with a level of expectation that no longer serves anyone. So to re-establish the relationships within your life means that you start seeing your mother, your parents, your father for who their souls were, and that this gift that we have to have this connection, and that of course there is an expectation that is set up around how people care for each other, and there is ideal that would be beautiful if they were met, right? But this work that we're doing right now is shifting and changing and healing the paradigms and the systems that have been going for a long time that we're no longer serving to try to move us into a place where we can be more compassionate, more loving, more open, more aware, and releasing who are our children out of that role of our children and into the role of their souls having their own experience and resetting what that relationship looks like that is something that could be completely different than anything we've ever seen before. And I'm here for it, but it hurts, and it means that we have to be with our feelings. So on this day after Mother's Day, it's this opportunity to check in with yourself in a way that gives you permission to feel whatever you feel, whatever you feel. You know, I have a couple friends who are taking care of their parents at end of life. And there's a lot of feelings that come with that. There's a lot of gratitude, there's a lot of um really beautiful moments, but they've both shared with me that there's also this awareness that they're giving this incredible loving attention to a human being, to a soul who didn't provide them with the same in their childhood, in their babyhood, in their youth. And I think that's such a powerful, powerful awareness to have. And it's this opportunity for us to validate that truth as they're showing up in their whole healed self. Because when we reparent, and I'm gonna close because it could go into a whole other thing in reparenting ourselves, but when we come from our higher self and we attend to our younger selves, that will allow us to be present for situations like this, where yes, absolutely, that parent did not provide you with the same level of attention and care that you are giving, but you're giving that because that's who you are, because that's who you are. And what a gift to be able to give to your own soul in your own awakening. In the retreat that I had in April, one of the people who attended pulled out this AI picture that she had created that was her now holding her young self. And I thought this was so great. And everybody ended up making one because what we're doing in this work is we are giving ourselves what we need at each moment. Our higher self is showing up for us in every step of our life, from infant to child to young adult, to you know, being the young mother or the mother that was struggling and having a hard time. We're allowing ourselves to love ourselves and to give all those parts of ourselves what it needs to be able to let go, to forgive, to relax, to release the energy. And so everybody had these beautiful pictures. And so you can go into AI, into Chat GPT, or whatever you use that makes images, put in two images, one image of you today, and one image of you in that childhood that may be where you have your deepest wound, and ask it to create an image of your now self holding your younger self. And it's beautiful, and it's beautiful because you are as your healed whole self, holding and caring for this younger parts so that they can be quiet and at ease, not quiet like being quiet because you need to be quiet, but quiet as in they're at peace, they're at ease, they're at rest. And there's lots of work that we can do. I'll do another episode around this. But this is really about you looking at this mother wound that is ready to be healed. And the guidance that really comes through that I wanted to share today is it's really about us forgiving ourselves. No matter what you did or didn't do, there is space for giveness. And there is space, and it was incredibly important that you forgive yourself and you stop blaming yourself for what is another soul's journey. Show up in who you are today and your wholeness. Shine your light, be your most awakened self. Your healing does indeed heal your family, maybe in ways that we don't understand, and we let go of what that looks like, but show up in it. Until next time, Namaste. If something that you just heard resonated with you, I want you to know there's a whole community waiting for you. The recovery soul process is a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life, and there's many ways to walk it together. Start with the free mini workbook at recoveryoursoul.net. It's a beautiful first step. You can join us for the free monthly support group on the first Monday of every month. And if you're ready to go deeper and work the nine steps, you can join the self-study collective or a soul circle or come to one of our in-person retreats or workshops. And if you want to work with me personally one-on-one, coaching is available. You can also find bonus episodes every Friday on Patreon, Apple Podcasts, and I'm on YouTube with new videos that are posted weekly. And grab your copy of the new Recover Your Soul Spiritual Memoir. It is a spiritual journey of healing from addiction, codependency, and people pleasing available on Amazon, and it's our journey of healing through this process. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and all of it is recover your soul. Just remember you're not alone in this. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.