Living Your Mother’s Life: The Borrowed Self
- Jun 23
- 4 min read
You can build a life that looks like your own and still be living your mother’s life in ways you don’t immediately recognise. It can hide inside your ambition, your drive, your inability to rest, your need to prove that you are worthy of the space you take up. This is why moving away, changing direction, or knowing where the pressure came from doesn’t always set you free. In this post, I want to show you what living your mother’s life can look like beneath the surface, and what begins to change when your body learns it no longer has to keep proving.
FREE WORKSHOP
The Invisible Effort of Undermothered Women
This Wed, June 24th 5 PM CET (4 PM BST // 11 AM EST)
🕦 45 minutes—including a Q&A time
✅ Recording available
🎥 I’d love to see you, but you can switch it off
✨ A special 3-session offer for participants
When Success Is Really A Borrowed Life
When Irma came to work with me, she was at home, trying to recover from a burnout.
I say “trying” because even though she had a paid leave, she couldn’t relax or rest, she suffered from panic attacks and felt like she had failed in life.
On the outside, it looked like Irma had a supportive home with an encouraging mother.
But the truth was that she was pushed by her mother, from a very young age, to work hard and become an outstanding, professional athlete.
What started out as a young girl's passion was curdled by her mother into a borrowed life.
How Living Your Mother’s Life Begins In Childhood
Imra pivoted, changed careers, and climbed the golden ladder of corporate life very quickly.
It was the same attitude she’d internalised from her mother that drove her to constantly push for more, working until the hours blurred into each other.
Eventually, her body made the decision for her, and she had to stop the chase.
Relocating to a different country, disconnecting from her mother, or pivoting to a new career didn’t teach her how to stop efforting toward feeling worthy and enough — because she didn’t really break free from her mother, she’d just moved away from her.
The Effort to Be Enough Never Satisfies Her
Maybe you too, grew up with a mother who looked like a picture mum on the outside but was cold and distant at home.
Or perhaps your friends think she's such fun to be around, but they don't understand she's using your social life to replace the emptiness she feels inside her, and you're suffocated.
When your mother uses your life to replace the life she never got to have — be it because she never recovered from losing one of her other children, she’s under the spell of her own untreated childhood trauma, or she never wanted to be a mother — it’s as if your existence comes to life only when you manage to satisfy her.
The problem is, that she’s never satisfied, and you never get to feel like you’re enough.
Because it was never about you. But as a little girl, you couldn’t know it, you couldn’t understand, and it was not your responsibility.
As a little girl, you needed your mother to make the effort toward you — not the other way around.
When your connection with your mother is predictable enough, safe enough and warm enough, you don’t need to make efforts to feel like your existence matters.
Irma knew that her mother’s voice lived inside her head, pushing her to go beyond her limits — but knowing it made no difference.
And creating a physical distance from her childhood life failed to uproot the habits she’d grown into, and she felt desperate, as she put it, “like trapped in a cage.”
So we started with rebuilding a sense of safety by connecting to her body so the voices in her head wouldn’t take over all of her experience, keeping on humming messages that ended up with “you’re not enough,” “you’re not doing enough.”
This reduced her panic attacks after only a couple of sessions.
She was then able to find answers to her questions about her mother: “Should I answer the phone when she calls?” “What should I share with her when I talk to her?”
Now, instead of outsourcing her ambitions, her decisions, and her life direction, she could stop living a borrowed life and trust her own.
When you know what to do — not just what you want to do — the confidence to follow suit is natural and effortless.
Returning to Your Own Life - You Deserve It
And I want you to have the same level of clarity, the same level of confidence about yourself, as Irma does now.
You can’t have it if you secretly or unconsciously keep seeking out your mother’s attention, love, or approval — whether directly from her or through other people in your life you thought would fill the hole she left in your heart.
My free workshop this coming Wednesday will walk you through this effort to exist and other efforting patterns that undermothered women get caught in — and how to move beyond them.
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-release 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
