The Emotionally Unstable Mother: Why Her Storm Is Within You

If you had an emotionally unstable mother, your emotions shaped in her shade. You can spend years understanding the connection between your hypervigilance, asticky loneliness or guilt, the tiring sense of being not enough or too much. But you didn't absorb your mother's emotional field intellectually — you've experinced it. So this is where talking about your patterns and jotting dots keep your stuck in knowign a lot and not feeling enough in teh way you want to feel. In this post I show you how somatic therapy for healing the mother wound rewires your nervous system first, then gives you the words you need to show up differently in your life.

Last Friday morning I sipped my green tea on the balcony, enjoyed the approach of crisp yet hot autumn air and marvelled at the tiny baby pumpkin that popped, before the cold days take over.

Just a couple of hours later, as I was by my desk deep into writing my book, the weather drastically changed without a warning.

A sudden strong wind quickly transformed into big raindrops, then into tennis ball size hail that wreaked havoc.

Roof tiles flew and smashed on the floor, trees lost branches, car windows snapped, the vegetables in the field across my balcony were shredded to pieces as well as my new baby pumpkin.

The storm lasted a short ten minutes — enough to leave an impression for life.

This is how it feels inside a girl whose mother was emotionally unstable.

You Carry your Emotionally Unstable Mother Into Adulthood Because of This

Your mother’s emotional instability leaves an impression within you for life.

It doesn’t simply go away just because you’ve moved out.

As a child, your mother is your emotional resonance — what happens in her emotional field happens in yours.

She set the tone when you were young, and it’s been your internal reference point ever since.

You can study the weather patterns your whole life and still get drenched.

Her instability could have come from various conditions:

🤍 Addictions

🤍 Her childhood trauma

🤍 Unprocessed losses and grief

🤍 Narcissism, depression or other mental illnesses

🤍 Repressed anger or holding to family secrets

🤍 Cruel or bitter character

If you’re like most of the women who come to work with me, you probably have already put the dots together.

You’ve been to enough therapy, and tried different healing modalities to know how to draw the line between your emotionally unstable mother and your current patterns of mind and behaviour.

But despite all that knowledge, you're still stuck.

You didn’t absorb your mother’s emotional storm through talking but through experiencing her.

The mother wound is a rupture in your relationship to yourself, others and life itself, rooted in the rupture with your mother.

Healing your mother wound is repairing the rupture in your emotional tone with another reliable, skilled person who’s dedicated to helping you fine tune what your mother couldn’t.

The Impact of an Emotionally unstable mother and What helps

Here’s how I help women with resetting their emotional tone:

🍒 Not enough, too much: There's a moment in our work together when you catch yourself dismissing something that actually matters — a wish, a feeling, a situation — and instead of letting it pass, we stay with it. Your system gets a feel for what's like when you take yourself seriously

🍒 Walking on eggshells, hypervigilance: We discover the beliefs that are keeping you small and we create experiences that make you feel step by step more comfortable in taking more space — in your own rhythm! so you can clean your system from tuning in to others' expectations

🍒 Guilt, shame: We explore the internal, invisible rules you’ve internalised from a ruptured bond with your mum that today make you feel you’re doing something wrong (=guilt) or that you yourself are wrong (=shame). Slowly, you unravel and set up new internal rules for what you're allowed to feel, want and decide

🍒 Isolation, loneliness, difficulty trusting intimacy: There are moments in our sessions when loneliness surfaces — and instead of you managing it alone as you always have, I’m present with you. You’re experiencing the power of sharing moments that you’ve never had the space or dared to share with another in safety

🍒 Fear of abandonment: We notice the tiny moments when you brace for being left, as if an expectation to be abandoned speaks through you. We create emotional validations so you acquire the taste of being held

🍒 Critical inner voice: We externalise the voices that have been running in the background your whole life — like holding up an X-ray of your bones — which gives more volume for compassionate voices that were previously too weak to hear

A Therapist's Role in Healing from an Emotional Unstable Mother

I trained for many years to come to a session with you with my emotional field clear and primed to spot not only when your pain shows up, but how you’re already doing the behaviours and patterns that you want more of.

Because how a therapist shows up for you is more important than what she has to say to you.

So if you’re craving to let go of hypervigilance, guilt, shame or perfectionism. If you’re yearning to trust connection, intimacy and that you’re enough, I’d love to help you.

And because I work in a body-first approach I’m offering you a complimentary call so you can experience this approach before you make a decision.

On the call:

🍒 You’ll tell me about what you’re feeling and how you want to feel — I’ll show you how that translates to every day shifts you celebrate

🍒 By the ned we’ll have mapped out what your life looks like in 4-month and you’ll leave the call already feeling the potential in your body

At the end of our time together, you can take the next step and book our 4-month 1:1 together or take your time to sit with it.

I’ll follow up either way with an email with our mapped out shifts so you can refer to it at any time

If you’re ready to shift from understanding this to experiencing this, I’d love to meet you.

Let's Do It

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NOT READY FOR A POWERFUL 1:1 HEALING YET?

START WITH THIS INSTEAD:

Three bingable podcast episodes to learn how to stop

making an effort to regain emotional stability👇

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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 into the life they're meant to live