Growing up with a Mean Mother Is a Full-Time Job for Your Nervous System
- Jun 6
- 5 min read
Growing up with a mean mother is a full-time job for your nervous system, and the exhausting part is that most women don’t even know they’re still doing it. It doesn’t always look like stress or anxiety from the outside. Over time, it becomes your baseline: scanning for tone, shrinking your needs, becoming what she needed you to be, and hiding your true feelings so the next emotional bang doesn’t come. In over fifteen years of working with women on healing the mother wound, I’ve seen how deeply growing up with a mean mother can shape a woman’s nervous system, and how much energy gets spent, every single day, on a job that was never hers to do.
BEFORE I get into it, I’ve got news:
On Wednesday, June 24th, I’m offering a FREE workshop:
The Invisible Weight of Undermothered Women
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For a few months, I’d travel once a week for an hour by bus to have a one-on-one sitting with my Dzogchen Teacher (Tibetan Buddhism).
Getting off the bus, I’d walk ten minutes, pass by a construction site where new flats were coming into life, then a big avocado orchard where his house was nestled.
We’d go up to the second floor in Johnathan’s family home and sit on meditation cushions in his carpeted practice room.
There’s something so fine and sharp about this meditation practice that I’d have experiences as translucent and resilient as rice paper.
I still remember how, in one of the sittings, a sudden loud bang echoed from the construction site, a few blocks away.
I could see through the layers of my nervous system how the uninvited sound of wooden slats falling punctured a little hole in my sense of connection, driving my whole body into high alert.
It was just a single moment of interruption to the continuous thread of my nervous system before it went back to its ground zero — connection.
Had I had to host these unexpected interruptions continuously from a young age, over years, my nervous system would have been a total wreck.
But that’s what happens to your nervous system when your mother keeps making cruel, judgmental, denigrating comments.
When the emotional connection with your mother is repeatedly ruptured by a mean mother’s comments, your nervous system is on a full-time job.
What Growing Up With a Mean Mother Does to Your Nervous System
It’s not until the age of three that your nervous system begins to gain the capacity to regulate itself—meaning, to find a balance in connection to yourself, others, and the world.
When your mother’s presence is characterised by volatility, unpredictability, abruptness, or dismissiveness, you have to work to figure out a way to connect by yourself, leading to constant tension.
That constant high alert doesn't stay in the body as tension alone. It becomes a way of moving through life — efforting your way into safety, connection, and belonging.
The mother wound is a rupture in your relationship to yourself, others, and the world, rooted in your relationship with your mother.
A mean mother’s comments rupture the very connection that was supposed to hold you with encouragement, support, and safety.
If this characterised your connection with your mother, your nervous system lacked the guidance for moving into and out of connection with flow.
Instead, you’re on constant high alert, working hard behind the scenes.
When High Alert Becomes Your Baseline
In your daily life, you might not notice it much because it has become your baseline.
But it’ll look like:
🍒 Being extra sensitive to what your friends might say when they hear you’re planning to get a divorce
🍒 Climbing up the corporate ladder fast, only to end up with repeated burnout
🍒 Struggling to stay away from sugars and carbs, even though the weight you’ve gained has already put your body at risk
Growing up with a mean mother, you lose not only a safe protection inside your own home, but also a sense of home within yourself.
If you learned to live with a daily dose of comments about your looks, your creativity, and your playfulness, it’s as if your nervous system was hit with a constant loud bang, or you were on watch for one.
You get into the habit of gearing your energy toward being what she needed you to be, investing a lot of your attention in trying to decipher what she needs you to be, or making efforts to hide your true feelings and personality.
The Three Efforting Patterns of Undermothered Women
What started as an adaptation turns into a lifelong habit of efforting:
🍒 The effort to be
🍒 The confusion of being
🍒 The effort to hide
These are the three common efforting habits that undermothered women get caught in.
In a 1:1 healing the mother wound session, I once said to my client:
“We thrive on predictability.”
Her response was so sharp and astute that I remember her words vividly:
“I feel like I’ve just discovered a secret that everyone knows, only everyone pretends that we don’t need predictability.”
Women who grow up with mean, volatile, aggressive mothers often don't know that this is one of the basic conditions of healthy mothering — and that without it, lightness and satisfying connection feel like hard work or remain just out of reach.
How to Put the Job Down — Healing the Mother Wound
There are many ways to lose the habit of efforting, but underlying them all is re-learning how to feel safe again.
Rebuilding that inner sense of safety can happen in many ways. Sometimes, it’s in discovering how to create more predictability, stability, and reliability in life:
🍒 Spending your time with people you can lean on
🍒 Working in environments that know how to appreciate you
🍒 Setting boundaries that protect you from your mother’s meanness
I’d like to share with you what it takes to heal your mother wound in ways that I’ve helped many women like you over the past 15 years.
You were never meant to work this hard to exist.
You can learn to put that job down and find your way back to a nervous system that rests in trust, that doesn't brace for the next bang, and knows how to stay in satisfying connection.
That’s why I’ve created a free workshop:
The Weight of Undermothered Women
Three Mother Wound Efforting Patterns & How to Move Beyond Them
Wednesday, June 24th, 5-5:45 PM CET
(4-4:45 PM BST / 11-11:45 AM EST)
In this workshop, you’ll:
🍒 Discover what the three efforting patterns look like in your life
🍒 Understand what it means to move beyond them
🍒 Receive an efforting-releasing practice and time for Q&A
Got any questions about the works?
You can reply directly to this email or DM me on IG
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If you need more reassurance that you & I can make a genuine difference to healing your mother wound, here's something you'll enjoy:
Learn how to stop making an effort to fill in a hole in the heart with healing the mother wound in my private podcast, BirthRite. Add your details below, and you'll get immediate access to your free episodes 👇
Shelly is a trauma-informed, certified Hakomi therapist helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother discover the hidden impacts of the mother wound 👉 so they can recentre back into the life they're meant to live
