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. Hello, beautiful souls and welcome back I'm your host, Brittany Scott, and I'm glad you're here with me today. If you've been following along with the first. Two episodes of this summer. You've been doing some really brave work. We've been looking at your mother, woman with new eyes. Maybe you've been giving yourself permission to heal without the pressure to forgive. That takes real courage, by the way, and I want you to know that I see you today. We're gonna talk about something I hear from a lot of clients, and also I just read online, and maybe you've said this too, I swore I'd never be like my mother. And here's what I've learned. That promise, while it comes from such a loving place in your heart, can actually keep you trapped. Because when we're so focused on being the opposite of our mom, we're still letting her control our choices. We're just doing it in reverse. Every parent and decision, every relationship choice, every boundary gets filtered through this question. What would my mom do? And then we do the opposite. Some people think that's freedom, but it's not. It's still a reaction. It's still letting her wounds drive your life. Today we're going to explore how to step out of the reactive cycle and discover who you really are, not who you're not, but who you truly are. When you're free to choose from love instead of fear. Let's start by getting really honest about what this looks like, because I want you to know that if you're living this way, you're not alone. You're not doing anything wrong. You're trying to protect yourself and the people that you love. Your heart is in the right place. A promise. Maybe your mom was really strict, so you've decided you'll never set boundaries with your kids, or maybe she was emotionally unavailable. So you share everything with your children, even things that might be too much for them to carry. Maybe she criticized everything you did, so now you never give any constructive feedback, even when someone you love could really benefit from gentle guidance, or maybe she had no boundaries at all. So you've become so rigid that there's no room for flexibility or grace in your relationships. Here's what I see happening. You're still using her as a reference point. You're still making decisions based on her just in the opposite direction. That's not freedom. That's still being controlled by her patterns. The opposite of dysfunction isn't the reverse of dysfunction. It's health. And health lives in the middle. In that space where we can make choices based on what's actually needed, not what we're trying to avoid. I know this can be hard to hear, but I'm going to say it with so much love. When you're living in opposition to your mother, you're still living in relationship to your mother. You're still letting her wounds and her patterns determine your choices. Think about it. Every decision becomes about her. She did this, so I'll do that. Your beautiful, precious energies going towards rejection instead of creation. Instead of asking, what do I want? What feels right for me? What does this situation actually need? You are asking, what wouldn't my mom do here? This is exhausting. You're going to become exhausted living in this pattern because living in constant reaction is draining. You're using up all your mental energy, scanning your behavior, making sure you're different enough, worrying that you might actually repeat the pattern. I really want you to remember and know in your heart that your children, your partner, your friends, they need you. Not the opposite of your mother. They need your authentic heart, your genuine love, your real presence. when you're caught up. In this reactive cycle, they're getting a version of you that's distracted by the past instead of connected to the present moment with them. You're not thinking about what they need from you and who you want to be. You're thinking about being the opposite of everything your mother was. Okay, so how do you step out of this? How do we find who we really are when we're not defined by what we're not? First, you have to get curious about your actual values. Not your anti values, you know the things you're against, but your real values, the things you stand for, and the things that feel good to you and that bring you joy. The things that light you up, that feel true in your body. And honestly, that just come from love instead of fear. Let me give you some questions to sit with and if you have a journal with you, write them down. Maybe journal about them later, or just be able to come back to them. And as you're doing this, I want you to notice what comes up in your body as you consider them, because your body holds so much wisdom. It knows more sometimes than our brain does. What kind of mother do you want to be? Not what kind you don't want to be. What kind do you want to be? What would that look like? How would that feel? What kind of friend do you wanna be? What kind of partner? What kind of daughter? If you have a relationship with your mother, when you imagine yourself living authentically. Just being yourself without any comparison to anyone else. What does that look like? What are you doing? How are you treating yourself? How are you treating others? Here's what I've learned. You have wisdom inside you that's completely your own. It's not your mother's wisdom, and it's not opposite of your mother's wisdom. It's yours and it's been there all along. Maybe just buried under layers of protection and reaction. I had a client a few years ago who realized she actually loved some of the same things her mom loved, like gardening, but she avoided that because she felt neglected by her mom because she's spent so much time in the garden without her and didn't really allow her to enjoy that space with her. So. Her mom would garden often, but there was no invitation or even just space for my client, the daughter, to join her mom in the garden, and so she actually stayed away from creating one and having one herself because of how her mom treated that space. When she finally gave herself permission to just explore that interest and see if it's something she would love because she had the desire to, she just wouldn't let herself. She found so much joy in it, and she had a daughter herself, and this time she actually brought her daughter in with her. Her daughter didn't actually like it, but the space was open. Whereas for her, when she was a child, it wasn't open for her to enjoy with her mother. She. Learned along the way that she wasn't becoming her mom. She was becoming herself. She let herself enjoy something that she just happened to have in common with her mom. Sometimes the healing isn't in rejecting everything about your mother. Sometimes it's in taking what was good and leaving what was harmful. Sometimes it's recognizing that you can share certain traits with your mother and still be completely authentically yourself. So what does this look like practically? How do we start making choices from our authentic selves instead of from reaction? First, I want you to slow down when you're about to make a decision, especially around parenting or relationships. I want you to take a deep breath. Ask yourself, is this choice coming from love or from fear? Am I choosing this because it feels right or because I'm trying to avoid being like my mother? You know, this face is always judgment free. Sometimes you'll realize you're in reaction mode, and that's okay. The awareness is the first step. I want you to just start noticing when you are in reactive mode and slow down. Second start asking different questions instead of, what would my mother do? Try. What does this situation actually need? What would love do here? What would I do if I was actually the mother? I wanted to be? and here's something really important. It's okay to not know the answer right away. You've been making decisions in reaction mode for a very long time. Learning to make choices from your authentic self is a skill. And like any other skill, it's gonna take practice. So give yourself some grace if you mess up along the way. And third, give yourself permission to change your mind. Maybe you've been parenting certain ways because it was the opposite of how you were raised, but now you're realizing it's not actually serving your family. You can adjust at any time. You can try something different and decide that's not it either, and then change your mind. Again, growth means being willing to evolve and to allow yourself to change. Okay, so as we start to wrap up this episode, here's what I want you to know. You're not doomed to repeat your mother's patterns, and you're not doomed to live in reaction to them either. There's a third option. Living authentically to yourself. This means you might actually use some of the good things you learned from your mother. Hmm. Yeah. I said that it's possible that there were some things she did well, some ways she loved you, that were beautiful. You don't have to throw everything away to be free. And it also means you might do some things completely different than she did. Not because you're trying to be opposite, But because it's truly what feels right for you and your family. The goal isn't to be nothing like your mother. The goal is to be authentic to who you are and that self might have similarities to her and some differences And some completely new ways of being that are uniquely yours. When you start living this way, something beautiful happens. You stop being exhausted by constant vigilance. You stop analyzing every choice through the lens of your childhood. You start being present. You start trusting yourself. You start enjoying your life and your motherhood and your relationships in a way that maybe wasn't possible before when you were stuck in the opposite. So I want you to know that the fact that you care so much about not repeating harmful patterns shows what a beautiful heart you have your desire to do better, to love better, to be better. That's never something you should be ashamed of. That's something you should honor. And I also want you to know that you already have everything you need inside of you to make authentic choices. It's always been there. You don't need to keep looking over your shoulder at your mother's choices or at anyone else's choices for that matter. You don't need to keep measuring yourself against anyone. You are free to be yourself. Next week we're gonna talk about learning to trust yourself when foundation was shaky, because once you start stepping out of reaction mode, you need to rebuild that inner compass that tells you what feels right and what's true for you. Until then, I want you to practice one thing. When you catch yourself making a choice based on being opposite to your mother, just pause. Take a deep breath and ask yourself, what would I choose if she wasn't in my head right now? You don't have to change anything immediately. Just notice. Just get curious about what your authentic choice might be. What might your value be in this situation? What matters to you? You are doing brave work already. Your willingness to grow and heal is changing everything for you, for your child, for your relationships, for the generations that come after you. I'm proud of you. I hope you're proud of you too, and I'll see you next week. 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.