This week on the You, The Mother Podcast, I welcomed back my dear friend, Maggie Nick, MSW, RCSWI, who is the Founder of Parenting With Perspectacles. Maggie specializes in all things self-worth and all of the ways it can show up – feeling like you are never good enough, perfectionism, people pleasing, feeling the need to control everything, self-hatred, inability to set boundaries, etc. She teaches parents about parenting and reparenting, helps them to heal themselves and to recognize how to be the parent their child needs by figuring out what they needed, and pushing them through the parts that are damaged and heal from their own childhood so they can raise kids who feel like they are good enough and don’t feel the need to be perfect.
Maggie is also my co-founder of The Estrangement Project, which we will highlight down below.
In this episode, we talk about The Estrangement Project, and also share some of our experience of going no contact with our mothers, and healing the mother wound.
This conversation is real and raw as we both continue to walk together through this healing journey. In this post I will share some of the top highlights of our conversation, but I also encourage you to listen, especially if you yourself are thinking about or already in the process of estrangement. We are two friends who are talking about our own experiences, but I can assure if you are on a similar path, you will feel seen and heard here.
Estrangement can cause you to experience some real “Mind F’s” as Maggie and I like to refer to them.
The biggest mind F of estrangement comes with the understanding that we are biologically wired to need our moms, to seek her approval, and to need to know that you matter to her. When we go through a situation where we realize that this relationship is no longer serving you despite many attempts to talk about your feelings with your mother, you come to a place where you realize you can no longer do this anymore. Your future depends on your ability to cut out this toxic element.
It is a real mind F to not want your mother, but so desperately need her.
Then let’s add in being a parent yourself and deeply knowing what you needed and trying to give that to your kids, but it doesn’t come naturally because it isn’t what you got as a child. It can be so hurtful to give everything you needed to your kids, but realize that sadly that’s not what you got from your own mother. A real mind F if you ask us.
Then, let’s add in the family fallout. The judgement that starts to come in from family and friends who do not get you and say things like, “but she is your mother” or “she did so much for you.” These family members often come from a place of white knuckleing where they try to keep the status quo because rocking the boat is difficult. These family members start to gaslight us because if they allow any credence to what we are saying than that fundamentally impacts their relationship with the toxic person, but if they make it about the one speaking out (aka us), then they get to stay in their safe space. Another mind F.
But let’s take a moment to think about how freaking brave it is to stand up to your whole family. How brave it is to hold your boundaries knowing that others will not get or support it. There is something so powerful about believing that you deserve peace and you deserve a relationship with your mother that feels safe. And it is incredibly brave to be the person in your family to name it and say, “no more.” Say it with me, “I will no longer abandon myself to keep the peace for everyone else.”
It is so powerful that you believe that you do not have to be in a relationship that feels like a threat to your survival.
It is so powerful to finally choose yourself for the first time, when nobody chose you.
It is so powerful to say I deserve more than this, I deserve people who love me and show up for me and are safe for me, and spoiler alert, those people come on the other side of healing.
When you make the impossible choice to go no contact, to limit contact, to set boundaries, or to step out of the role in the family system that was benefiting from the system, it is not surprising that you may become the scapegoat, the villain, or “the problem in the family.” It can be really brutal, it is a grieving process, and there is so much work to be done. “Healing journey” has become a buzzword across social media and it talks in length about the beauty on the other side of the journey, but what isn’t talked about much are the messy moments that got you there and that you walk through along the way.
The journey is a really difficult road of trying to understand forgiveness. While you are being met with so many people asking you why you cannot just forgive your mom, you need to know the most important type of forgiveness here is forgiving yourself. There were so many times in my own healing journey that I asked myself why I didn’t leave the relationship with my mother long before I did. I used to think I should have left after this one time or when xyz happened but it wasn’t until I noticed my own son being hurt by the same things that hurt me that made me make the change. I had to come to terms with the fact that I can forgive myself for not walking away sooner. I had to forgive myself for knowing I am not crazy for being affected by these behaviors because they are really messed up behaviors. We all need to forgive ourselves for allowing these behaviors around ourselves, and even our children for as long as we did, because cutting off a family member, especially your mom is really hard and it can take time.
The only forgiveness that matters here is forgiving yourself. Maggie describes her relationship with her mother and the difficulty she had walking away from the relationship as well. There are so many damaging narratives out there about forgiveness and people work with therapists to do conscious levels of work and consciously think they forgive their mom and want to forgive her and then have confusing moments where they think “wait I thought I forgave her, I thought I was past this,” but truth be told there are parts of us that will never be past it and can never ever forgive her. There are spectrums of forgiving your mom, trusting her, letting her into your heart but when you realize that something is a repeated threat to your system, it is a threat to your survival and when there is a threat to your survival, you need to get out.
Now, it is important to note that while you may not ever be able to forgive your mom, there are parts of you that can have compassion for her and recognize she is a woman with unhealed trauma and that trauma hijacked her and that is why we are here. It is not because of who that person is deep down inside, in fact she may be a good person deep down inside, but that unhealed trauma made her the unloving unnurturing mother she is today.
The Internal Family Systems Theory Framework changed Maggie’s healing journey. It explains that we have parts of us holding pain that are called exile parts, they are a little us, and there are other parts of us that are trying to protect us when that pain gets activated, when we are in a situation that feels kind of familiar in a painful way that activates our nervous system and then there is our highest self. So now in her healing journey she listens to the protector parts when they get all activated and then follows that to the exile parts, the pain that needs to be unloaded and then moves to live in a self-led life. She has the forgiveness and compassion, but there are still some parts of her that are very loud and on the wall, and that is okay. There are parts of you that can get there and others that can’t. When you go through extreme trauma and neglect, it would be slightly concerning if you could just forgive.
So now that you know a little bit about our own journeys to estrangement, we would like to introduce The Estrangement Project, by your four new besties, myself, Abbey Williams, Maggie Nick, Dr. Michelle Deering, and Michaila Tyson.
The Estrangement Project is 15 on-demand, mobile-friendly videos you can watch as many times as you want, covering every angle we could think of about navigating the painful mind F of estrangement and healing the Mother Wound.
The Estrangement Project is a healing love bubble. There are videos that meet people where they are in estrangement, whether you are at the beginning of your healing journey, whether you are thinking about going no contact, you are starting to experiment with boundaries, you are already no contact, wherever you are we are trying to cover the whole spectrum. Some of the video content includes:
- Why your mother cannot be the mother you need her to be
- How to handle when people judge and shame you with the “but it’s your mother” BS
- The fallout within your family and how you can create your own chosen family
- People pleasing and seeing it has a stress response and how it impacts your ability to regulate your body, your relationship with your mother, your self-worth
- What is the mother wound and how do you heal it
- How to heal from abandonment
This is something that can truly change a healing journey. Community in your healing journey is so very powerful. It is time to be seen and heard and we are here to go on that journey with you.
Supporting You, The Mother,
Abbey Williams, MSW, LSW
