have you ever heard yourself say something to your child and thought, oh my God, I sound just like my mother. Or, lost your patience over something small and then felt crushing guilt because you swore you'd never parent that way. If that's you, keep listening. 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. This episode is why your mother wound gets triggered the hardest when you're raising small children and what you can do about it. Parenting young kids is probably already the hardest thing you've ever done. Pair that with also carrying a mother wound. And every tantrum, every boundary test, every moment your child pushes back can send you right back into your own childhood. You're not just dealing with your kids' big feelings. You might be dealing with your own resolved pain or triggers from the past. Nobody prepared you for how much motherhood would bring all of this to the surface. Today we're talking about why motherhood activates your mother wound like nothing else. What happens when you try to just power through without healing and why? Healing a community with other moms doing the same work can change a lot. Your mother wound gets triggered when you're parenting because you might be reliving your childhood in real time. Every developmental stage your child goes through could be reminding you of that same age in your own life. if you weren't nurtured at age three. Watching your 3-year-old need nurturing can trigger deep pain. You're simultaneously trying to meet your child's needs while grieving that of yours that were never met. When your mother wounds are triggered during parenting, the patterns can be automatic and seemingly out of your control. Your brain defaults to what it knows, even if what it knows hurt you. Your brain develops the most as a child, which is probably when you experience the most pain or neglect from your own mother. This is the programming your brain knows. When you're stressed, tired, or overwhelmed, you revert to your mother's parenting style. You revert to what your brain knows from childhood. And it doesn't know new parenting. It knows what happened to you. These aren't conscious choices. They're your nervous system responses. That's your brain going back to, it's like factory setting, I like to call it. What it learned while you were growing up is what your brain resorts to when it's like, oh, I've seen this behavior before. I remember it from way back when. And what it remembers is your childhood. And so you respond in the way that it knows, which is usually what your parents did. The stakes can feel impossibly high because you wanna get it right. You desperately don't wanna repeat the cycle. You know how that ends already. It ends in pain and hurt and confusion. So every mistake could feel like proof you're going to damage your child the way that you were damaged. The pressure to get it right when you don't have a healthy template is crushing. How do you mother when your own childhood left you needing more? The isolation of motherhood amplifies everything. your home alone with little kids and big triggers, big tantrums, big emotions from you and from them. You can't just take a break from parenting to process your feelings. I mean, you can try, but the kids are probably coming to the other room with you, knocking on the door, asking you how much longer you're going to be, or they're gonna need a snack. All of that, plus the exhaustion of motherhood just makes everything harder. My husband deployed for six months. When my daughter was two, I still had a full case of clients that I was seeing daily and parenting all on my own Now. The tantrums at the end of the day would make me spiral. I felt like I was losing my mind while also feeling lonely. I cried right along with her. At times, I learned that the more I tried to stop the tantrums, the longer it would take to end. And that also would just drive me crazy. 'cause it's like, girl, can, can we please get it together so this can just stop? And of course that didn't work. I began sitting down on the floor in the same room. She was having the tantrum in. Maybe her bedroom or the living room, or the kitchen, wherever she was having a tantrum. I just sat down on the floor and I told her that I was available for a hug. When she was ready, I no longer asked her to stop. I didn't walk away from her and go to another room. I didn't cry anymore. I really didn't do anything. I just sat down on the floor. Somewhere in the same room. So I wasn't right next to her. I gave her some space, but we were in the same room. I sat down and I said, Hey, when you're ready, mommy will give you a hug. And at first nothing really happened. But then she noticed she started coming for a hug faster, and the tantrums got shorter. I found a way to take care of both of us. I was frustrated and I was being triggered and I was getting heightened with her, and I was getting angry, and I was frustrated that I was stuck doing all of this alone and that I couldn't make her stop and I didn't know what to do. And if I just tried to pick her up, it would just continue. And that was frustrating. And so I sat down. That experience was isolating and I wish I had a group of other moms in that same stage to share this with. I did turn to social media and found some things, you know that helped, but I was still largely on my own. When you try to heal alone, the shame spiral deepens. You think you're the only mom yelling at our kids and then crying in the bathroom. I promise you aren't. You might believe that other moms have it all figured out. Again, we don't, and we search for things that may help and sometimes it works. In my case, sitting down and just offering her the hug did work, and now even when she does get upset or she's getting in trouble, she does ask for a hug. So that stuck and she remembers that. But I promise we don't have it all figured out. And maybe you start to think that you might just be broken and maybe you shouldn't have had kids. I really hope that you don't feel that way because you're the best mom for them. And I know that if you're listening to a podcast like this, you want to be the best mom for them. So you definitely should have had them. Band-Aid solutions don't work. You read all the parenting books, but for some reason you still can't implement the strategies. Something in between is missing. You know what you should do, but you can't seem to do it, and then guilt and frustration pile up again. Something there in the middle is missing. You aren't doing it wrong. You probably just aren't giving things time to work, and you're being too hard on yourself. Or you're reading all these things that may work, but inside of your home, they just won't because your home is not set up that way. And so something is missing. There's a disconnect between the strategies that you're learning or you're reading or you're seeing other people try. And then it just does not, translate into your own home. And maybe you don't have a group of people or a therapist or a coach or somebody to bounce this off of to say, okay, this is what I think I wanna try, but for some reason it doesn't work. And There's no one or nothing that's helping you to kind of dissect that theory or that strategy and figure out what you can take from it that's actually gonna work in your own home. you may be trying to get from an empty cup, knowing that that never really works. You can't neglect your own needs. By trying to be a good mom, you're going to run out of energy. Self-care becomes another thing on the to-do list that never happens. When you're running on fumes and everyone feels it, especially your kids, you're going to drive yourself crazy. The cycle continues despite your best efforts. Knowing why you react the way that you do doesn't stop the reactions and understanding your triggers doesn't automatically heal them. I wish that was all it took. That would make it easy, and that would make this a much faster process. You are gonna need more than awareness. You're going to need the step between awareness and then behavior change, and that's actually the practice and the support and the community and you believing in yourself more. When you heal alone, you don't get all of those things. When you heal in a community, you realize you're not the only one. Every mom in the group is carrying her own mother wound and no two mother wounds look the same. Hearing other women share similar struggles breaks the shame and guilt you may be feeling. You aren't uniquely broken, and you can change patterns. When you heal in community, you learn new patterns together. When one mom shares how she paused before reacting, or how I sat down instead of reacting. You get to try that too. A group becomes a practice space for new ways of responding. You get to see real examples of what break in the cycle might look like, what's working in somebody else's home, or what worked with someone else's child that maybe sounds a little similar to yours. You try something and then you're able to share it with the group about what worked or what didn't work, or how your kid responded and it wasn't what you expected. You get a group of people cheering you on. When you heal in community, you get permission to take care of yourself. Other moms validate that your needs matter. You don't need validation. But sometimes it's nice and it makes it easier to believe in yourself. The group holds space for your healing, not just your kids' needs. You learn that taking care of yourself makes you a better mom, not a selfish one. Your kids need you whole, not fragmented. You need people you can lean on. When you heal in community, you get accountability that feels supportive, not judgemental. The group expects growth, but also knows healing isn't linear. The momentum of the group keeps you moving forward. Even when it's hard, you may feel like you're taking steps backwards while trying to move forward. But change in healing never look like a straight line. It's always up and down. And so even in one of those down moments, know that you are still moving forward. When you heal in a community, your kids benefit from your healing. As you heal, your nervous system regulates. When you're regulated, your kids get a calmer, more present version of you. That's you actually breaking a cycle, not just hoping to do it. This is why I created the groups that I did for 2026, and this is why I'm now introducing safety and sisterhood and eight week coaching groups specifically for moms with young kids who are healing their mother wound while in the. Thick of parenting littles. So this isn't teenagers, this is the littles from birth to and like elementary school. The very young kids, the tantrum throwing kids. When I created this group, I thought about moms with young children. You know, babies through elementary age moms who catch themselves repeating their mother's patterns or saying things in the same way their moms did. Moms who lose patience faster than they want to. Okay? We all do it. Moms who feel guilty for not being enough, if enough ever even really exists, and moms who are exhausted from trying to do it all alone or trying all the things she sees on social media, and maybe only a few of them are working, but it's not things that you actually need. I wanted to design groups. Because I know that a community of other people can really help you to see yourself and help you to have a sounding board and give you just a new perspective from other people's eyes. This group is designed specifically for the intersection of mother wound and active parenting littles, where the stage is ever changing and kids are little firecrackers. It's designed knowing that triggers are automatic and they're going to take time to decrease. Just because you know the trigger is doesn't mean it's automatically going to go away. There is time in between that when that does happen. The group is led by me, someone who gets it, a coach, a therapist who works specifically on mother-daughter relationships, but also I am currently parenting a 5-year-old. We're not having big tantrums anymore, but we still have big emotions. We still have a kid that now understands a lot more, and she gets angry, so that's a lot of fun. At the end of the group, you'll understand what actually triggers you and maybe why it does what's, what's the direct trigger to your past. You'll have tools to pause before reacting, before emotions just kind of take over before you feel like you've lost control. You'll feel more in control and less like you're just surviving. I do hope that by the end of the group, you'll drop your guilt and give yourself permission to have needs and actually get those needs met. And most importantly, your kids will get the best version of you and you won't be doing this alone. So with kids this young, what if you can't get childcare? Hmm. All of these sessions are online. They're not in person. So you are in the comfort of your own home. You can join from wherever you need to join, and if your kid makes an appearance, so be it. We have little kids. They're unpredictable. Let them run in the room. Not a problem. What if sharing in a group makes you more emotional? That's natural. Probably going to happen. It's a part of healing. Let emotions come up and let them out. However, your body needs to do that. I like to think of emotions like energy, when. You feel the need to maybe shake your hands out, um, or stand up and like do something or move when you like, feel like energy in your body. I want you to think of emotions that way. Emotions are just energy in our body that want to come out. Sometimes they come out crying, sometimes they come out through yelling. Sometimes they come out through, um. I don't know, just frustration and maybe like grunting or like roaring, like, ugh, I'm just so frustrated. Things like that. Emotions are energy that want to leave your body, so let it leave. No reason to keep it stuck inside of there. However it wants to come out is how it should come out. The group is structured to be safe and supportive, where you get tools, um, and support to process what comes up in real time, and also what to do inside of your home and what you can go practice and things to do in between time. You don't have to heal your mother wound alone while raising kids. You don't have to keep repeating patterns you hate and then beating yourself up about it, and you don't have to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks and what's going to work there. You don't have to wait until your kids are grown to feel better, and honestly, I'd say that's actually waiting too long. Doing it right now is the greatest gift you can give yourself and them. If this interests you in any way, head to my website. Brittany and scott.com go to the group page and just fill out the interest form. Filling out the interest form does not mean that you automatically want to join the group or will, but it'll start our conversation with me. We can talk about it, see if this is the right fit for you, and then if it is, you can join the group. Um, safety and sisterhood is not starting immediately, so right now filling out the interest list is putting you on the wait list. But when it does come, you'll be ready and be the first to be notified if you're ready to break the cycle while raising your kids and not after. This is for you and it is happening this year. The perfect mom doesn't exist, and your kids don't need that. They need a mom who's willing to do the hard things to make changes for the entire household, and you deserve support while doing it. I've created that support. So if you're interested, please go fill out the interest form. That's all. It is an interest form. We're just gonna open up a conversation and we'll start talking and seeing if this is the best thing for you. But that's all I have for you. Thank you for listening and being here, 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.