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, it's Brittney, your host. Welcome back to another episode of the show. In today's episode, I want to answer a question that I've been asked, and I kind of just see the phrase floating around a lot. Also, I say it a lot too but when they say you have to do the work. What does the work mean? What does that phrase mean? You have to do the work. You have to be ready to do the work that, so that's what I wanna talk about today and I wanna talk about it through the lens of working with me. 'cause I don't want to answer that question for anybody else but myself because doing the work with someone else might look very different than. Doing the work with me. So I'm gonna answer what does doing the work mean? But then I really want to answer through the lens of what does it mean to work with me? Okay, so let's jump in. You the phrase you have to do the work. Just do the work. You're gonna have to just do the work. I don't say that phrase to mock it. I just know that it's something that we use a lot, but don't really, don't always describe what it means. So when it's time to do the work, and we're talking about mental health, we mean on a very basic level that you need to heal. But then again, what does that mean? That means you have to take the steps to understand what are the underlying memories, triggers, traumas, experiences, whatever word resonates with you better. You need to understand what those are that are causing the painful behaviors and patterns today that are not serving you. Inside of your relationships serving you in your work? Maybe like, and by work I mean like what you do for a career or activism work or anything that you do for others or for the award of money things like that. You have to understand what's causing, what's underneath that's causing you pain today. And the pain can be physical sometimes, or mental health can cause physical pains. It can be emotional pains, it can be behavior patterns that just are not serving you, but you don't know how to break. You don't know how to get out of, and it can be cycles of. Relationships that are painful, but you're struggling to find healthy relationships or create healthy relationships that would serve you better, but you don't know why you keep doing these things. That's what it means to do the work. So now knowing that I'm a licensed therapist and a coach for mother and daughter relationships, let's just jump into what it means to do the work with me. There are two primary ways that I work with clients currently. One is individually, so one-on-one sessions with, one person. It can be the mom or the daughter who's coming in by herself to. Work on her own healing. She can be healing from a mother wound. She could just be healing from painful dynamics or trauma or anything that, things that happen to her that are affecting her current relationships today. So any woman, mom or daughter that's coming in alone, that would be a one-on-one service with me. And then there is my program, reconnection Rescue. Where I work with moms and daughters together, a mother-daughter pair or couple coming in together, they start together. So you listening to this, if you were to do reconnection rescue, you start together with your mom or daughter and you end together with your mom or daughter. And through 12 weeks we work. We do the work on healing and reconnecting your relationship, so rescuing you from the pain and reconnecting you to something more joyful. And that work looks like the first few weeks we are breaking down this relationship. I wanna understand what happened where things broke. What are the painful dynamics? What's not working? Like I, I want a full breakdown in understanding of the relationship and where each party feels that it broke and or what was just, what was the last straw, what was the last thing where it's like, Nope this thing is blown up. Or what has just been the patterns that have kept this relationship in a painful dynamic? I wanna know all of those things. And then from there we work to rebuild it back up. And the first step to that is learning a new communication pattern, something that's gonna work better for you. So I help to break down. I help to break you out of the communication cycles that are not working and put you into a communication. Type or cycle that's gonna work for the two of you and teaching you how to hear each other. That way both parties feel heard, and feel seen, and feel supported inside the relationship. Teaching you how to listen for emotions and not just listen to respond or listen to be reactive or combative, or to defend yourself. I wanna teach both of you how to listen for what the other person might be feeling because that's. A big part of what's missing when communication styles like break down and they just don't work, is that you're completely missing each other and you don't fully understand the emotion the other person's trying to convey. And so instead of really hearing each other and supporting each other to get to a better place, you're kind of going at each other because no one is fully being heard. So we work on that communications. Um, breakdown and we build, rebuild that back up so that you can actually communicate in a healthy way. And once we do that, and we talk through the painful dynamics, so while we're working on communication, we, now that I understand the relationship through working on communication, I have you guys talk about the painful dynamics and the things that don't work for you and what would work better for you and what you need from the other person. And through that, I help you to break the communication type or pattern that's just not working for you. And when these conversations maybe go left or they start to not be effective, I jump in and I stop you and I try to redirect and fix what just messed up in that and make sure that you're both hearing each other. There are sessions and sometimes these are really hard sessions to get through, but there are sessions where only one party. Where I, I only allow one person to talk and the person has to listen until the other person is done. They can't interrupt, they can't interject, they can't defend themselves. They can't try and like tell their side of whatever story is being told. They just have to listen, and it's me and one person talking. That way I can pull out all of the pain and the hurt while the other person has to listen to it. And then in that same session, I don't you, I wouldn't make anyone leave the session just listening to painful things and not being able to talk. So later on in that same session, then I bring in the other person. And then we all three get to talk about it. And one of the first things that the person who was quiet and listening have to do is they have to repeat back what they heard, and they also have to pull out what emotions they think the other person, so the mom or daughter that they have to pull out what emotion they think that person was feeling throughout that experience that they were sharing. And until that's done, then once they get that part done and they get it correct. Then they can jump into what may be their side or how they experienced it or what that same experience was like from their point of view. And then from there we go. Two boundaries. 'cause every relationship doesn't matter who you're in a relationship with. Every relationship needs boundaries to be effective and to be healthy and be supportive because you have to be able to take care of yourself in every kind of relationship that you're a part of. So then we go into boundary setting. And what kind of boundaries do both of you need in this relationship to keep it functioning, keep it healthy, and also keep it joyful? What's going to help you show up as your best self and your happiest self inside of this relationship? And what's gonna help you get the most support from your mom or daughter, whoever, whatever position or role you're playing in this duo in this dynamic. And then the same for the other person. What do they need? What's gonna help them show up as their best and happiest and most joyful self? And what's gonna give you guys the relationship that you've been looking for? And so as we, as we start the 12 sessions, the first six are probably the most difficult. I've had clients leave crying. I've had them come back and say like, they never wanna do this again, because the last session just left them so broken. It left them hurt and in pain, and I have to remind them that I didn't create. That pain, you're just feeling it because you guys are talking about it and talking about it isn't always easy, like it brings up a lot of pain and we're talking about heavy memory sometimes, and it's not fun. Those first six sessions are very difficult for some people, and of course they are like, you know, we're talking to your mom or your daughter. This, this is a relationship that means so much. And when there's trauma involved, it hurts. So of course these are hard, and so I like to remind all of my clients that you don't get to the other side. If you stop, if you decide that session three was just too hard and you never wanna do this again, then you never get to the relationship that you want. You have to finish. And that's why I have these outlined as 12 sessions because the first half of them are difficult because we're talking about relationship breakdown, we're talking about the painful memories, we're going through the hurt. We're talking about the generational patterns in your family specifically. We're breaking down the women that you come from, and we're looking at what's been passed down, what didn't start with you, and what has just. It's been repeated in your family without anyone noticing or anyone doing anything about it until now. You know, doing the work means that you're doing something about it now, and you can get through the painful parts, and Reconnection Rescue is my favorite program. I, I love running it. I love when I get to work with a mom and daughter together and help them. To get to the other side, to something that feels better. It's my absolute favorite. So now what does one-on-one work really look like and fully entail? One-on-one work gets more personalized to the woman that's, in front of me on the other side of the screen. It really is personalized to what she needs and where she is. I have some one-on-one clients that are truly focusing on healing their mother wound. They're doing it without their mom and they're just working through the painful parts of that relationship. What left them damaged? What left their. Attachment style, unsecure. What are the traumas? What are the triggers and the memories of that from their childhood. So we're working on healing those things so that their relationships today can feel better and be healthier. There are some clients I have that are working on their own motherhood, so their own parenting journey. So they are. I try not to repeat the patterns of the women that came before them. They don't want a mother, like their mom mothered them. They don't want to parent like the women that came generations before them. They don't wanna pass down the patterns that hurt them. And so they're working on understanding what patterns run in their family, what has been passed down, what's painful, and. How do they choose something different? Because often what I hear is people are like, I'm gonna be the opposite of my mom. I'm gonna do the opposite of what she did. And the opposite is not always the answer. Sometimes the opposite is just going too far left or too far right when the answer is somewhere in the middle. And so just doing the opposite isn't the answer either. Um, that's more of a reaction to what happened to you. You're just reacting in sometimes the only way you know how. And so what I help clients do when they're doing the work with me is I help them figure out what the answer is so they know they don't want to repeat. X, whatever this is, fill in the blank. They know they don't wanna repeat that, but they don't actually know how to fill that in or what to do or what they wanna do instead. And so we talk about their desires. Um, what are their dreams? What do they want for themselves and their own motherhood? How do they want parenting to feel? What do they want it to look like? So basically we go through like dreaming. Like, tell me the perfect parent scenario and who do you want to be? Like, who are you inside of this? How do you treat your kids? How do your kids interact with you? What do you hope for the future when their children are adults? What are they looking for? What are they desiring in that relationship with an adult child? And from there we get to design and make decisions that are going to help get them there. So what is the end goal in parenting? How do you want parenting to feel? How do you want your motherhood to look? How do you want your child? Hopefully, you know it's a daughter. I'm biased, of course, but how do you want your child to talk about you? How do you want them to experience you? Who, when they tell their friends like, oh, that's my mom. Who is that? Who is that woman? What are they gonna tell their friends? So we talk about those things and then we help to make the right decisions and work through the triggers. So if there's a decision that they know they want to not do something, but they get triggered in their parenting. Then we work through those triggers. What is the emotion that's coming up? What is the memory that your brain is recalling? What happened to you in that, that you're trying so hard not to repeat, but sometimes it just, the reaction just comes out and we work through all of those things. So we help to, I, I help clients who want to parent better or parent different. I help them to do that and to actually make. Intentional choices, not just, I'll do the opposite. I won't be my mom. I just won't do what my mom did. All of that really means nothing to your brain. Your brain needs specifics. It needs you to get intentional because what happens when you get triggered is your brain recalls the memory that it has from the past, and then it goes into doing what it knows how to do. And that is what your mom did when you were a child. Your brain knows what mothering looks like by how you were mothered. If you want a mother differently, you have to give your brain intentional actions to say, no, we don't do this. We do this specific thing instead. Not, we'll just do the opposite. Or I just won't be like my mom, or I'm gonna be a better mother than my mom. And having that thought is going to make you a better mother than your mom. But if you're triggered and you don't tell your brain to do something different, it's going to recall what it knows. And that happens to be what happened to you when you were a child. So that is. That would be two things that I would help a one-on-one client work through. So healing the mother wound, just getting through those painful dynamics from their childhood and their relationship with their mom that is still hurting them today and causing their current relationships today to be painful, whether it's romantic friendships, platonic work, relationships, being in some kind of leadership role, but you're struggling to be. An effective leader for the people below you, whatever, you know, it may be. We work through those wounds so that you can be, you can be the person that you desire to be. Okay. Whatever role we're talking about. And then, we're helping that, helping another woman work through being the parent, being the mother that she desires to be. And. Some clients are just coming to work on trauma. Maybe it's one specific trauma. Like, look, this is something that I can't seem to get past and I need to work through this memory or this experience, or this trigger 'cause I really don't know how to handle it. And once we get through that, then sometimes they're done. I have clients that work with me. For three months. I have clients that have been with me for five years. And the ones that's been with me for a few years now are not meeting weekly any longer. They maybe do monthly check-ins. I have like two clients that do check-in three times a year, so they just come back quarterly. Or just a few times a year to check in. How are things going? This didn't go well. What could I have done here? How can I do things differently? And just kind of keeping a pulse on where they are to make sure that they are, they're on the path that they desire to be on. Um, so I see them a couple times a year and they just send me an email whenever they'd like a session. But yeah, some clients are, are brief, three months. Some clients are longer term and it'll stay for a year, a year and a half. And then I just have, a few loyal clients that just come back. Maybe 'cause they love me, I guess. I don't know, but I'm kidding. But they come back to that way, they know that they're on the right track in that. You know, they're doing things that are intentional for them, and if something kind of slips through the cracks, they'll come and talk about it. And it's like, okay, I don't really know how I even fell into this. I don't know how it happened, but what could I have done? How can I handle this better next time? And then I don't see them again for a few months. So I hope that explains my version of what doing the work means and what it can look like. Like I said at the beginning I don't want to answer the question. Well, not that I don't want to, I can't answer the question for anybody else because another therapist or coach's work will look different. It will feel different because they're a different person and we can have the same. Kind of fundamentals and ideas on what healing, will look like for a client. But all of our personalities are different. So there'll be things that get approached different, there'll be responses that sound different. Questions sound different. How they guide a client will sound different. So it's hard to say that this work will look the same with everyone. This is what it would look like with me and yeah. I don't know. This doing the work kind of just popped into my head and it's like, I never explained what that means. And I actually get that question a lot. Like, people say, well, you have to do the work. Yeah, but what does the work mean? Like, what does that mean, do the work. And so I just thought I'd answer that for you guys today. Now to end this episode, I wanna tell you about two free guides that I have that you can download today or join today. One is a download is a boundaries guide. And through this quick document, I teach you my framework on how to create healthy and effective boundaries for yourself. The other one is an email challenge. It's seven days. It's really five. The first day is just like an intro. The last day is the end cap, but a seven day email challenge on healing your inner child. So it's the start of doing the work and the emails just guide you through. Different steps and different things you can do to start to work on healing your inner child and understanding what your inner child needs and maybe where you still might be feeling some pain and start to explain it. It's fully self-guided. You just have to follow the emails and you kind of get inside my brain without directly working with me. You're doing this by yourself, but I designed it and I wrote it and scripted it, and. I walk you through the steps that I think will help you to heal your inner child. So I will leave the link to that in the show notes. Both are totally free. You just have to go and put in your email and download it or join the email challenge where the emails will just come to your inbox, every day for seven days and then it stops. But yeah, so if you wanna start doing some of the work and you want one of these free guides. The link will be in the show notes. Thank you for hanging out with me today, and I'll see you in the next episode. 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.