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. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. It's your host, Brittney. Today we're gonna talk about the symptoms that I notice in my clients who are working with me to heal their mother wound. If you ever noticed something was off in your relationship, but you just couldn't name it, you knew that maybe some of your behaviors just weren't really making sense, but you didn't know what to name them, or what they were called, or really what you were doing. We're gonna go through the ones that I noticed often in my clients and we're just gonna chat about them. So if you're ready, let's jump in. So we'll start with how I describe the mother wound. It is an attachment trauma. there was a rift or conflict or something that didn't feel good between mom and daughter it's an attachment trauma because it shows up when there's a disruption in how the daughter's able to attach to her mom and how she's able to emotionally connect to her mom. And how the daughter is able to emotionally feel supported by her mom. So when a mother wound is present, there was some kind of disruption in connection, emotional support, and nurturing in how a daughter attaches to her mom. In essence, a daughter with a mother wound, maybe had a mom who was emotionally unavailable, was highly critical of her, was inconsistent in her availability to her daughter, was inconsistent in her. Nurturing or care support for her daughter, things like that. I want to normalize that. If you're listening to this, please know that you're not alone. I am able to do the work that I do because this affects many women, and oftentimes my clients feel as if. They're alone in this. So I do hope that by, creating this podcast and talking about this issue and helping women heal and also helping some moms and daughters reconnect that I'm helping you to know that you're not alone in this and that healing is possible. So let's jump into the signs that I noticed. The first one would be people pleasing imper perfectionism. The woman that struggles with people pleasing and perfectionism usually had to perform for her parents. You got love and adoration when you accomplished something they showed up and were proud of you and celebrated you and talked about you highly when you did something well and when you weren't doing well. Maybe there was. Negativity. But usually with perfectionism, it just means that you, there was no acknowledgement. The only acknowledgement or praise you received was when you did something well. And so you keep reaching for that. You keep performing. And in order to get their love, it was a performance. And so in your adult life and. In your adult relationships, you continue that performing. You want to be the perfect friend. You wanna be available to everybody. You don't want to upset anyone. You don't want people to leave you. And so you always say yes. You fear saying no because you don't want others to be disappointed in you. Sometimes you struggle with not ever feeling good enough, and so you just keep trying and trying, and this just creates exhaustion. This gets tiring. No one wants to be on or performing at all times, but this is one of the biggest signs that I see in women who struggle with the mother wound and the behaviors that they're doing in their adult life. The second sign that I notice in my clients is struggling to trust other women. You have a difficult time getting close to other women and having friendships with them. You often feel like an outsider in these groups. If there are a group of friends, you feel like you're the one that may not really be fitting in. Women who struggle here probably had a few things happening in their childhood. They had a mom who didn't have very many friendships at all or they had a mom who did have lots of friends, maybe or a few close friends, but she talked very negatively about them when her friends weren't around if you're listening to this and resonating in any way, you may have had a mom that taught you how to not trust other girls saying things like, oh, that girl's just jealous of you. Don't listen to her. Or, oh, don't trust girls, and don't get too close to them because they wanna hurt you, or. They're gonna talk about you or they're not really your friend. No one would really be your friend. You can't trust these people. And so your mom probably taught you to not trust other women by her words, or she taught you to not trust other girls or women by her actions and either how you saw her treat her friends. How you saw or heard or talk about them when they weren't around or that she really didn't have any friends herself. And so you had no example of what friendships in adulthood between women look like. The next symptom that I notice in my clients is internalizing blame. So it's the, what's wrong with me, what. It's not good about me taking responsibility for other people's emotions and assuming that in any conflict you are the problem. If you hadn't done something wrong or you hadn't said something wrong, or you hadn't messed up in some way, then this conflict wouldn't be happening. So it's you internalizing and blaming yourself every chance you get. And this is not the same as doing some self-reflection and maybe working through behavior change. This doesn't sound like, Hey, what could I have done differently in that or what? Could I be changing about this behavior that would make my relationships feel more joyful? It's more what's wrong with me? Why would I do these things? I must be a bad person? If I wasn't a bad person, then people would like me more, or things like that. I hope you can hear the difference and those two things. It's not self-reflection, it's self blame, and you struggle to remove yourself from any blame really of the situation. You blame yourself in anything negative that happens when you are not likely always the cause of things like I would find that hard to believe and I would want to help you work through seeing how you're not wrong, you're not bad, there's nothing inherently wrong with you. So let's remove that style of thinking and how you view yourself. So that you can actually do true self-reflection and be confident in who you are and who you're always trying to become. 'cause I do think we're ever changing, but being confident in who you are. That way you're not internalizing negative things about yourself because something goes wrong between you and someone else. The next symptom that I've noticed is abandonment fears. So feeling anxious in your relationships and thinking, are they going to leave me? Am I gonna do something that makes them not want to be in relationship with me? Again, whether this is romantic, platonic, doesn't matter. Testing people before they can hurt you or pushing people away before they can hurt you. Not really allowing people close enough in and that way all of your relationships remain superficial and surface level. You never really get deep with anybody because you're so afraid that they're going to leave, that you don't let yourself. Or sometimes people are on the opposite end of this. And abandonment fears are there. If they're clingy. So you attach onto people really quickly and you wanna make them like you, and you want to convince them to stick around, and so you appear clingy. And that's the opposite of pushing people away. But both of those symptoms fall under fear of abandonment. This can stem from your childhood if your parents or mother did actually abandon you and leave you for someone else to raise. So maybe your grandmother raised you and your mom did not. It can be like that actual true form of abandonment. Or it can be a mom that would use silent treatment when she became upset with you and you had to figure out a way to get her to talk to you again. That feels like abandonment. It can be that your mom was very inconsistent in her physical presence, maybe your mom would just leave for a few days. You were either left alone, or you were left with an aunt or grandparents or whoever was in your life and then your mom would return. Abandonment can also come up when you are counting down the days leaving home, so maybe 17 or 18 and you leave. And from then on you are on your own to figure out life without any guidance through those early adult years. That can also create abandonment, fears and issues around abandonment. So even though you are the one that left 17 and 18 year olds, don't leave home because. Home was just so happy they rushed to leave home because things at home were not good, and so that still can create abandonment fears and abandonment issues. The next symptom that I see in clients is eating disorders, body issues, or just struggling with their relationship with food. So using food for control or comfort. Having your body image tied to your self-worth and how you view yourself or what you think about yourself, and having your mother's comments about appearance echoing through your head. So eating disorders and body issues are usually going to stem from a mom who made your weight or your appearance a. Huge thing that kind of set really high on the pillars of what she deemed important. You needed to look put together at all times. You needed to have a certain appearance. Dress a certain way. Wear your hair a certain way. You should not leave the house looking a certain way and go change your clothes because I don't like that. Or you need to go on a diet because your weight is increasing. Or even being as mean as calling you fat and telling you to lose weight and saying hurtful things to you about your appearance and about your weight, creating an issue that you have with food. Let's pause here for a bit and take a deep breath. Eating disorders are a difficult topic to bring up and one of the hardest mental health issues to really get through and get control of. So if you are struggling with this I do encourage you to seek help if you have not already and get a professional to help you through that because it's very difficult to manage on your own. And the last symptom that I see come up with my clients often is struggling to create and enforce boundaries. So not knowing where you and maybe others begin feeling guilty for having needs and actually wanting to get them met. Struggling to say no. Feeling unsafe or uneasy in certain relationships, but not really voicing what you need in order to feel good in them, not. Really not putting yourself first, letting other people come before you. And in childhood you probably were not allowed to say no or to have an opinion or to voice when you felt uncomfortable. You may not have even had the space to voice emotions. You just had to suck it up. There was no room for crying or to feel bad what your mother said goes, and so you deal with it. And also this can come from. A childhood where you were completely enmeshed with your mom. And so she wasn't the mom that left, she wasn't the mom that abandoned you. She wasn't the mom that was not around. She was the mom that hovered. She, your life and her life were so intertwined that you guys probably looked more like friends. So enmeshment is on the opposite end of abandonment, and neither one of those are good. And so enmeshment also causes. Confused lines, blurred boundaries, struggle. Actually having boundaries and having a life that feels like your own. It feels like your life and your mom's life become one. And that makes it really difficult to create boundaries in your adult life because you really know how to be codependent on somebody else. It's a struggle for you to view yourself as an individual that has relationships with other people. Okay, so let's recap here for a sec. The six things that I notice show up most in my clients who are struggling with the mother wound are people pleasing and perfectionism trust issues with other women, internalizing blame, abandonment, fears, eating disorders, body issues, or just struggling in a relationship with food. And boundary struggles. Now, this is not a complete or exhaustive list. I don't think when we're talking about relationships, it's hard to conceptualize all of the things that can happen because everybody responds to things differently. Even when you're talking about trauma, it's so hard to tell somebody that. Oh, if you experience that's gonna leave lasting trauma. We can't make that determination for humans because everybody experiences things in a different way. So for example, a car accident might be very traumatizing to one person, but the next person might get in a car the next day and start driving as if nothing ever happened. So I can't say car accidents are traumatizing. Car accidents can be traumatizing, but that doesn't mean it will be for everyone. And so the same thing with mother-daughter relationships. When there is a mother wound, it's hard to say, oh, you should look for these six things because this is how you'll know if you have one. You get what I'm saying? That's really hard to say because everybody is going to experience and respond to their relationship with their mom in a different way. Someone might manage a bad behavior from their mother in a way that someone else just can't. One thing might hurt somebody, but it may not hurt the other person. But these are six things that I notice. In my clients that show up again and again. I just wanted to talk about them and go through that. But with this, I want you to know that abnormal situations can bring up a lot of different responses. Knowing that your mom hurt you, you don't have to respond in one specific way. So if you don't hear your behaviors in this episode. I had love for you to maybe leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify or email me and tell me what you've experienced in your symptoms and in your behaviors from your mother wound. I'd like to know what other people are experiencing that I haven't seen, come up over and over again in my own work and. I do want you to know that healing is possible. These patterns can change. They don't have to be your story forever. It's just been your story for now, and you get to choose what the rest of your life looks like and what your relationships feel like, and who your chosen family gets to become and know that you deserved better. You deserve the loving, nurturing, caring mother you deserved to be emotionally supported and listened to and believed like you. You deserved all of that. But now if you're listening to this, I want you to know that you can give those things to yourself. You don't have to wait for her, and you're already on the path of healing just by seeking to understand. What you've been through and why these behaviors or why these responses in yourself have come up. You deserve to pay attention to that and then change it for yourself. You deserve to have relationships that feel joyful, and if it didn't come from your mom, there are other people out there who will give it to you. 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.