Welcome to the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Show the podcast for mothers and daughters who want to build stronger bonds, deepen their understanding and transform their relationships. I'm your host, Brittany Scott, licensed therapist and mother-daughter relationship coach. After years of working with hundreds of daughters. And mothers. I've developed strategies that help break generational patterns, heal wounds, and create the loving relationships you've always wanted. Each week I'll be sharing insights from real clients, expert interviews and practical tools you can use immediately to improve your mother-daughter dynamic. Whether you're struggling with communication breakdowns, navigating major life transitions, or simply wanna take your already good relationship to the next level. The show is for you. And yes, the transformation I guide my clients through can be yours too. I'll share more about how you can work with me. It's time to experience the relationship you both deserve. Are you ready? Let's dive in.

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. It's your host, Brittney. Last week's episode, we discussed the six symptoms or behaviors that I notice in women who have a mother wound. And today we're gonna jump into how many times have you been told that you need to forgive your mother to move on? I see this topic come up a lot on social media about forgiveness and it's, you know, forgiveness is for yourself and you need to forgive in order to heal and to be able to move on. And it seemed like there's a lot of pressure or guilt around forgiving your mother for the things she may have done or didn't do. So lack thereof in your childhood and what you needed from her. And I'm noticing that some women. Struggle with forgiveness because they don't actually want to, but they feel like they need to or they're supposed to. So that's what we're gonna dive in today. So if that interests you, stick around and listen to the whole episode. So let's start with defining forgiveness. I wanted to go and grab like an actual Webster Dictionary version of forgiveness, but when I went into Google to type in the search that way, I could just read it to you. What came up under Google I thought was actually interesting to share. So define forgiveness. It says in the Bible, in psychology for kids in Christianity in Greek, and then define forgiveness and love. So very interesting that even forgiveness, the act of it or the meaning of it can change or will differ depending on who you're asking, what group of people you're asking, or if you're even asking for kids or adults. The idea of it or how it's supposed to happen is going to look different. And so I want you to hear that and I shared that because I don't think that forgiveness is a one way road, like a one way street where everybody does it the same and it all means the same thing to everybody. Forgiveness gets to mean for you what it needs to mean. For some people, it is the act. Accepting this person back into your life, forgiving them for their transgressions or their hurtful actions or behaviors and moving on together. For some people, it's, I forgive you for what you've done, but I'm not allowing you back into my life, but you're moving on without them. And there may be different variations that fall in between those two. So forgiveness when forced and not something that. Person actually wants, can retraumatize you. It invalidates your reality. Someone just told you to forgive, like it dismisses the real harm that was done. It sends a message that your pain doesn't matter or it's not valid, like forgive the person and and let it go. Kind of messaging this can mirror the original trauma where you know your feelings are dismissed or they're minimized and it's not taken seriously and it can just make you feel unheard. I also think forgiveness when it's forced bypasses necessary grief, healing requires processing and grieving what was lost. You can't jump over this step and trying to force somebody to hurry up and forgive is making them jump over this step. It would be creating a reality that never fully acknowledges the depth of your wound. It's like, all right, look, we don't have time to even look at this. It really doesn't matter. I'm ready for you to just let go and move on with me. And unprocessed grief gets stuck in your body. It gets stuck in your psyche. It creates anxiety, it creates fear. It can create PTSD or complex grief. You have to move through the grieving process. It's important for healing, and you can't just jump over that by forcing yourself to forgive forced forgiveness, recreates powerlessness, if you're told that you should just forgive. That takes away your choice and agency, which probably happened during the original trauma or pain anyway. It's probably going to mirror a childhood experience of having no control, and it puts you back in a position where others are deciding what's best for you. Like this is probably already been happening for your entire life, and now you're being forced to forgive or being encouraged to hurry up and forgive somebody. It's gonna put you right back in that same position. You get to have the power in this. You get to decide when, or even if forgiveness occurs. If you're a spiritual person, using forgiveness is a way to avoid feeling difficult emotions. It's a way that you pretend that you're over it. You know, in religion or in spirituality, we're often told that forgiveness is something that we're supposed to do or something that we should be doing, and I think it just creates a false sense of healing. It never addresses the root issue, and it can lead to shame. Forcing somebody to forgive can also protect the perpetrator. Premature forgiveness can enable continued harmful behavior. It releases the other person from accountability if it happens too soon. And the shift focus from the victim's failure to forgive rather than the original harm. So now it's like you still haven't forgiven this person versus talking about you're still hurting from the things that they did to you. Those are two different things. Just keep somebody in a cycle of abuse. And I also think this last part on forced forgiveness. I think that it creates internal conflict when the mind says, I forgive, but your heart and your body's still holding the pain. How are you supposed to battle those two out? What's gonna win? Like you're gonna sit between these two thoughts and healing will actually never take place. It's gonna create internal confusion and self-doubt. You're gonna struggle trusting yourself. 'cause like, well, I said out loud that I forgive them, but also I'm still hurting very much. You haven't forgiven this person because. It wasn't your idea in the first place. You were probably being forced to do it, and basically you're doing healing all wrong. So forced forgiveness can retraumatize someone and create more lasting pain. It does not help on the path to forgiveness. Forgiveness is a gift that you give when you're ready, if you are ever ready and choose to give it. It should never be a requirement for your healing, and it should never be forced from other people that are not experiencing the pain that you are. And if you choose to forgive, I want you to know that forgiveness doesn't equal reconnection or a better relationship. You can decide to forgive if you've gotten there through your own healing and never reenter into a relationship with your mother or whoever it is that you are working to forgive. If this is a friend or a romantic partner, you know, whatever have you. I know that I talk about mother-daughter relationships, but. When mother-daughter relationships are painful, those behaviors and that pain can spill out into all of the relationships that you have. So you can take this lesson on forgiveness and apply it to any relationship that you're a part of. You don't have to reenter into a relationship with a person just because you forgave them. You get to choose if you wanna do that, and you can forgive and maintain very strict boundaries. You can decide that the relationship can. Resurface, but it's not going to be the same as it was before. Maybe it's a relationship from the distance. Maybe it's just check-ins or you know, whatever have you. Whatever feels good for you. Know that your forgiveness does not require anything new of you inside of that relationship. If you don't want it, you are in control of this. Let's transition into acceptance versus forgiveness. Accepting the mother you were given doesn't mean excusing her behavior. It's releasing the fantasy of who she could have been or who you hoped she would have been. It's grieving the mother you needed but didn't have, and it's accepting her limitations without taking responsibility for them. Acceptance looks, and sounds like she was less than what I needed. She wasn't the mother I hoped for. Her inability to mother me well, says nothing about my worth, and I can heal regardless of her awareness or her apology. I don't need it to be able to move on with my life. When you accept the things that you didn't get, you can actually start to heal the part of you that is still hurting. You can heal your inner child that is still sitting maybe in that room by herself, waiting for the love and attention and the awareness and the apology from her mother that may never be coming. When you can accept that you needed more than you were given, then you could start to heal forgiveness. Does not have to be a part of that scenario. Okay? Your healing, it doesn't depend on her. Take your power back from waiting. You waiting on her to acknowledge and have awareness of how she hurt you is keeping you stuck in this cycle. She doesn't need to be self-aware for you to heal. Your healing journey belongs to you and only you. It does not belong to her, and it's not dependent on her actions. You get to create this closure for yourself. And forgiveness gets to be a part of that if you want it to, and only if you want it to. If you're feeling relief from hearing this, trust that feeling. Okay. Maybe you've been trying to force yourself to forgive when you don't really want to. So if this feels like a relief, exhale, let out the pressure that was building and know that you can trust this feeling inside yourself. Let's transition to. What moving forward without forgiveness would look like. What does healing look like without forgiveness? Okay, so first it's acceptance without absolution accepting that this is who your mother is or was without ever excusing her behaviors, recognizing her limitations and wounds, but not taking responsibility for them. You were a child. There's nothing that you did that would have justified negative behavior from your mom. Even lack thereof. There's nothing you did that would justify her not doing something enough for you. Hey, don't take responsibility for her actions or her limitations, releasing the fantasy of who she could have been or might become. That keeps you stuck in this cycle because you keep waiting for it to happen. It may never happen. You are better off accepting what you've been given and then allowing yourself to be surprised, maybe in a good way, maybe in a negative way. If she does change later on and understanding the why behind her actions without justifying the harm. So that is when I teach about knowing your story, so that way you can heal, knowing and going through your story and your lineage is not about justifying the harm that was done to you or the neglect, or just the lack of caring that you needed. It doesn't justify that. What it does is give you a roadmap to what your healing can look like. So understanding the why. It's how you don't repeat her actions. It's how you become the person you want to be without falling into the trap of becoming your mother. It does not justify the harm and healing without forgiveness means emotional freedom. You know, you're no longer being controlled by anger or the need for her to change. You're no longer feeling a pressure to be forced to forgive her or feeling guilty because in the back of your mind from society or religion or whatever, maybe group you're a part of, you don't feel. The guilt of something you're supposed to do or something that you should be doing, and it's knowing that your peace isn't dependent on her acknowledgement or even her apology, you get to create healthy boundaries. You get to create strong limits based on protecting your wellbeing and not punishing her. No boundaries come from self-love, not resentment, and when you can let go of the idea that you have to figure out how to forgive her, when you're not ready, you can drop resentment. You get to just love on yourself and create boundaries that are gonna keep you protected, because now as an adult, that is your job and you get to get clear about what you will and won't tolerate going forward. There will be no confusion about an an apology that came too soon when you weren't ready, which then will create resentment, and then it'll be really hard for you to set proper boundaries because you're struggling with resentment. You get to reclaim your personal power. You stop waiting for validation to feel worthy. Your self-worth comes from within and not from someone else's approval, and you make decisions based on your values, not her reactions. All of this already is sounding so beautiful to me. If you don't want to forgive, then don't do it until you're ready. If you ever become ready, you get to live authentically. You're no longer performing, you know, you're not trying to figure out how you're supposed to act. Once you do forgive, you don't have to figure out, okay, well I forgave her, so now how do I interact with her? How do I redo these things? You don't have to do that, and it just creates more compassion for yourself. You can feel sad for her wounds without taking them on as your responsibility because your focus is on your wound. You understand? She did her best. Then her limitations and that it wasn't enough for you. I think that's the part of that phrase that people forget to add on. Your mom did the best she can with what she had or with the knowledge that she had. Okay, sure. We can say that that's true, but it wasn't enough for me. And it wasn't enough for me. If you wanna use, but or, and it doesn't matter. Both statements can be true, but if we're not adding the part of it wasn't enough for me, then we're just dismissing your emotions and the wounds that you have felt and the things that happen to you. And when you don't force yourself to forgive and you heal without forgiveness, it reduces this feeling of resentment or hatred. So you don't need to hate her, but you also don't have to love her in a way that harms you. It's like acceptance. You can wish her well from a distance, if that feels better, or you can keep your relationship the exact same as it is now without ever having to change anything because it's going to appease somebody else. Forgiveness again is up to you. It should never be forced, and it's dependent on when you are ready to give it. Okay, so let's wrap up. I am trying my best to keep these episodes over the summer, short and sweet. Give you something you can take quickly and then apply it if it resonates with you. So I hope that this episode gave you permission to heal at your own pace, in your own way. If forgiveness is a part of that, that's amazing. If it isn't, that's amazing too. Your healing journey is valid exactly as it is. It can include forgiveness, but it also doesn't have to. And you get to decide at what point in this journey forgiveness gets to enter if you want it to. You get to choose what feels right for your heart. No one else gets to decide that for you. In the next episode, we're gonna be talking about breaking the opposite mom trap. The idea that I'm gonna do the opposite of what my mom did. So if you're intrigued, join me next week for the next episode, and I will catch you in the next one.

That's all for today's episode of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Show. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you picked up some valuable insights that you can start using right away in your own relationship to create deeper connection and understanding. If something from today's episode resonated with you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with the mother or daughter in your life who needs to hear this message. And while you're at it, please consider leaving a rating. And review so we can reach more families and transform the way mothers and daughters relate to each other. For those ready to take the next step, you can visit my website to learn more about my private coaching programs and my program designed specifically for mother-daughter pairs. Whether you're dealing with communication challenges, life transitions, or just wanna strengthen an already good relationship, I'm here to help. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next one.