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. I'm a licensed therapist and I love my job and this career field, but this isn't what I thought I would be doing. Let me share with you how I got here. How I entered into this career field and why and how I work with moms and daughters and the mother-daughter relationship because it's probably not what you're thinking. I've heard from many therapists who talk about how growing up they were the therapist in their friend group, or they were the therapist in, in the family, and they loved helping people and listening to their stories and listening to other people's problems, and so they always wanted to become a therapist. That's not my story. I didn't set out to do this job. I was not the friend therapist or the family therapist. I was not. The great advice giver or the one that people came to like, I wasn't that person. I didn't think I'd be in this field, and I didn't even fully understand. How vast the field of mental health was and what the jobs that it consisted of. When I went to college, I wanted to be this big shot doctor that worked at Johns Hopkins and worked with children and cancer, and I also wanted to do cancer research, so therapy does not go in line with any of that. When I changed my mind on that and no longer wanted to be a doctor, then I wanted to be a chemist. Growing up I love science. That was my favorite subject. That was kind of where I came alive in experiments. And all of the things were really cool to me. So I wanted to major in chemistry and I thought I could work for Exxon in the oil companies, or I could work for makeup companies and help to, um, create makeup or create skincare, just work in the beauty industry as a chemist. So that was the second thing that I thought I would do. And then I changed my mind again, and I didn't wanna do that. Maybe I was lazy. It's probably more 'cause I was lazy. 'cause I'm still very interested in chemistry. But I didn't want to continue. I wasn't really enjoying the classes and I just, I needed to graduate. I got to the point where I was. Probably a year out from graduation and then changing my mind again. And I didn't know how I was gonna graduate. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I had enough credits in psychology and I really enjoyed the classes that I could go the psychology route and graduate and not have to stay too much longer in school and undergrad. And at that point I was done. I needed an elective to graduate, and my advisor put me in clinical psychology. I wasn't sure what to expect. I didn't really know what the class was going to entail. I was just at the point where I wanted to graduate and I needed to do something. I was ready to move on, and I fell in love. I fell in love with clinical psychology in a mental health world, and. It became just a big interest of mine, like science had been too. It kind of felt like a way to infuse science and people and art is how I view psychology. It's like all three of those into one, and it's integrating people So I went on to grad school and clinical mental health counseling, and I became a therapist. I started out with wanting to work with children, and I worked with teen girls and again. Continued to fall in love and dove deeper into this field and into the career. And working with teen Girls is what led me to working with mothers and daughters. Before I dive into the evolution of how I got into how Teen Girls led me to mother-daughter relationships, I wanna share a bit about my own. I usually keep a lot of this information close because I've been worried about how I'll come across or how it'll be received, but I'm done hiding my story or just sharing very little. Bits of my story, I'm just gonna share all of it. I do not do mother-daughter work because I have a painful mother-daughter relationship. I have a pretty good mother-daughter relationship and I'm happy in it. And it's a joyful relationship for me, which is what I want for all of you. And I want healing for all of you as well. So my story is not intertwined in why I do the work. My, my story and my experience is not why I'm here helping you. Through mother-daughter relationships, through painful dynamics and mother wounds and all the things that come from a hurtful mother-daughter relationship. That's not my story and that's not why I'm here. There are areas in my mother-daughter relationship where my mom could have done better, where my mom could have shown up differently, where I probably needed more from her and I didn't receive it. But it doesn't include trauma, it doesn't include pain, and it doesn't include. Her denying or deflecting or not accepting my experience. I have a mom who will acknowledge the areas where she fell short. I have a mom who will apologize and, and will take a look at herself. I have a mom who is self-aware to know that sometimes moms mess up. I have that and I know that that's a privilege, and the reason why I haven't really shared that is because. I have held onto the belief that most women who struggle with a mother-daughter relationship want to work with somebody who gets it from the experience of also struggling in a mother-daughter relationship. And because I don't have that, I have felt like that will hold me back from actually working with moms and daughters. But the work that I do has been so beautiful and amazing, and I love it so much. And I've reconnected many moms and daughters and I've helped. Daughters who just can't reconnect with their moms. 'cause I know that that's not always possible. I've helped them heal and I've created a platform where both moms and daughters are safe, where I'm not blaming and I'm not shaming anybody. My goal on all of my platforms is that moms take accountability. Daughters feel seen and reconnection and repair happen when they can, or healing from mother wounds and breaking cycles and being the change maker in their family happens with daughters who can't reconnect with their moms. I don't hold this fantasy that reconnection and repair is always possible. It's not. There are times where estrangement, no contact and no repair or reconnection is either possible or safe for the daughter to do. I know that there's times where. Daughters should not reconnect with their moms. There are moms out there that don't deserve it. There are moms out there that were deliberately abusive but that's not the story for everybody, and that's why I take a full approach to the mother-daughter relationship, and I want to see it from all angles. And I want to help from all angles because sometimes repair and reconnection is possible and sometimes it's not. Sometimes a daughter's going to heal. On her own, and she's healing for herself to go on to have better and healthier relationships, either romantically with her friends in the workplace as an aunt with her siblings, like whatever we're talking about. She's gonna go on to have better relationships because she healed this broken part of herself. That was her very first relationship, the very first person that was supposed to love and protect her, and they failed in that department. And then there's times where a daughter is coming to me to heal for her own daughter. She's, she's working to be the cycle breaker. That way her daughter has a different experience from what she received. So I try to take a full on approach to the mother-daughter relationship. And I don't center myself or my story. I'm not here to tell other women what I did and what worked for me and how I healed and, and how I got through it. None of that is part of my work. My work is purely about attachment, about acknowledgement. About listening to the stories of the women that are in front of me because no two mother wounds are the same. No one is sharing the same story. And so hiding my story and, and not sharing that I don't come from a painful background. I think it's just holding me back from just sharing more. And so this is the first time I'm fully sharing and stating that and just being honest in that fact that. That's not why I'm here. I'm not here to help you heal because it's also helping me heal. I'm not here to help other women heal because I did it too and I want it for them. I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is so important. It is also so powerful in the way that it affects daughters for the better or for the worst, depending on what happened, but. I know how integral this relationship is. I know how important this relationship is, and I know how it can shape a woman and it can shape her life and her relationships for the rest of her life. And that is why I do the work, because I wanna be a part of changing these stories. I wanna be a part of changing the dynamics that women experience and what relationships look like for them and how they walk through the world. Hopefully with their head held high after meeting me and working with me and knowing that they don't have to hold on to the things that their mother said about them. They don't have to hold on to the dynamics that hurt and broke them. We can let go of that. We can unlearn that. You can break free from that and you can go on to have relationships that are joyful and healthy and have boundaries and light you up. So. That's a bit about my story and why I do the work with mothers and daughters and why I believe in it so much. But I wanna go back to how Teen Girls got me here, because I also did not go into therapy thinking I'm gonna do mother daughter work, or I, I wanna be a mother daughter therapist, or, this is the relationship I wanna work with. None of that was on my mind. I didn't know this was a path. It kind of just landed for me. It just, it evolved. And now I'm here. So let me go back a little bit and tell you how working with Teen Girls landed me to doing mother-daughter relationship work. Okay. While I was working with teen daughters, I. Sometimes had their mothers or parents involved and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes they were in foster care. Sometimes they lived with their grandparents. The, the stories and the their home lives were all vastly different. It just depended on the teen girl in front of me. But one thing that rang true once we dug deep, 'cause that has been a part of my work. Since I started is really figuring out the root, like root work has been my thing. I believe that all behavior makes sense and nothing is really happening in a vacuum or like. Spontaneously, everything makes sense. If we look at behavior, we should be able to connect it to something in humans. It, to me, in my mind, it just makes sense and if it doesn't, you just haven't found why. So helping get to the root and really understanding what has happened and what has taken place and why behaviors are the way that they are. What started happening was we started getting down to finding mom was at the center. No matter what the story was, whether mom was there. Whether mom had passed foster care, mom in the home, just not a good relationship. Mom, and they have a great relationship, but other things outside of them are happening. Whatever the story was, mom was at the center and she was always at the center no matter what the story being told was, but I didn't know what to do with that. I, I didn't know how to help daughters heal from that. I didn't know how to fix that. I didn't even know how to address it. I just realized that it was a thing and it was starting to become a thing with every girl that I worked with. And then I was working with young, young adult women. So 18, 19, 20, maybe in college, maybe not, but the story was the same. We, we are doing root work. We're trying to find causes, we're trying to find triggers and, and what's at, what's at the base of this behavior or this experience or the emotion, you know, whatever. Have you, and mom was at the center. Mom continued to be at the center. No matter what girl or young adult woman I was working with, and I really didn't like that I had a knowledge gap. It was bothering me. It was really driving me insane. I, I basically got my clients to one place and sure, we learned a lot of information. They learned a lot about themselves, but then it was like I was leaving the stuck. It was like, okay, what do we do now? What does this mean? Like what is happening? And. All the teen girls weren't really asking me that question, but I could see that it was just like, okay, I don't know. I don't know what that means. It was more like they kept looking to me for what's next, what, what happens now? What? What do I do? And I didn't have the answer and I didn't like that I didn't have the answer. And it was really frustrating. And so that kind. Build me into the world of mother-daughter relationships. I need to go learn about attachment. I needed to go learn about why moms and daughters break and what happens, what, what are these patterns and what are the dynamics? Um, what's happening because school didn't teach me that. School teaches it's about family, but we learned from a patriarchal like standpoint fathers at the center and everything kind of happens around him. A lot of what happens in school is patriarchal, but this was matriarchal and I didn't know what to do with it. Um. So that is what connected me to mother-daughter relationships.

And once I opened up this world and I went down this path of women and girls and the lineage and the things that are passed down between moms and girls and how when grandma is pregnant with mom, moms eggs are forming. So grand-daughters already being formed inside of mom. And so if grandma has trauma, then. Daughter, granddaughter can also probably experience some remnants of that trauma without really having the knowledge of it, but our bodies remember. And so just that intergenerational trauma and how things are passed down, it just opened up a whole new world. And that is how I'm sitting here telling you the story today. That is why I'm here today because. It all made sense and I now believe if you work with women in any kind of mental health capacity, maybe even physical health too, but if you work directly with women in wellness, in the wellness space, you can't leave out the story of her mom Her mom and her grandma tell a story that's important to her. They tell a story that shapes who she's become. They tell a story about how she sees the world and how she moves through the world, whether it's good or bad, or criticism or praise and cheers. Like it. That story tells a huge part of who she is and we can't leave it out. So if you listen to my podcast, if you start to watch my YouTube videos, if you follow me on any platform. And you come into my world and maybe you get the, the chance to work with me directly in a private one-on-one setting, or you download my resources. I have a boundary guide that teaches you how to properly and effectively set boundaries with your mom. If you join my Inner Child Healing Challenge, which is a free seven day email challenge, walks you through the steps of healing your inner child in seven days all through email or if you download my workbook, um, it's a full guide and workbook on how to break the cycle of the painful dynamics that may have happened in your mother-daughter relationship. So if you enter into my little corner of the internet where I talk about mother-daughter relationships, I, I talk about mother wounds and dynamics that are painful and how to heal them and how to reconnect and how to keep moms and daughters together they know that you're coming because I want to share things that work. I wanna share things that help, and I want to teach moms and daughters how to fix the generational patterns, how to break them, how to change them, and how to do things differently from what you experienced. And also how to reconnect back to each other if that's possible for your relationship. Nothing about my little corner of the internet and my world of mother daughter relationships is about me. It's not about my relationship. It's not about how I've been hurt. I'm not centering myself in this. This is about you and your story and what you need and what you need to heal, and I'm here to teach you how to do that and walk you through that path and. Do what works. I have a framework that has worked for many mothers and daughters, and I've connected many of them back together, and I have a framework that helps daughters to finally see themselves and know that healing is possible and, and understand their wound, and understand who they are and what they need. I have created. Multiple products. I have a resource library. Some products are free. Some products are paid along with the products and the things that you can get from me. I work with moms and daughters. Privately in one-on-one sessions. I work with them in like a one to two session, so it's me and mom and daughter together, or just a daughter by herself, and I also run groups. That way you can heal alongside other women who are in the same path and walking the same path as you. Who may have experienced the same kind of hurt as you who who may know what it was like. Who may be able to resonate with your childhood and what you experienced and what you've went through. So that is a bit about me and my story and how I became a therapist and why I've landed on mother daughter relationships and why I continue to do this work. I believe in it. I believe that healing is possible. I, I think that cycle breaking is a real thing and it can happen if you're intentional about it. And if you understand the women that came before you, you're not gonna break a cycle if you don't know what the cycles are. And those cycles are told in the stories of the women that came before you. So thank you for being here. I hope that you stay a while and I hope that you have an open heart and are learning something from me. Whether you're a mom or a daughter, I want you to know that here you're safe

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.