These Women Stopped Making an Effort: How Healing the Mother Wound Opens the Door to Ease
The mother wound creates patterns of overcompensation and striving. If you can’t stop making an effort, getting caught in the drive to prove your worth, meet expectations or make an impression you’re probably motivated by unmet needs from your relationship with your mother. Learn how healing the mother wound opens the door to ease through real-life stories of these women who stopped making an effort

Before I tell you all about it, I'd like you to know that I'm offering a workshop on January 31st on SHIFTING FROM EFFORTING TO REST
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Before I started working directly on healing my own mother wound, I did not have a clue that I couldn't stop making an effort - what I call efforting.
I’d make an effort to sound smart because I always felt not intelligent enough. I’d make an effort to show up as someone who know things, even in areas I‘d never had a clue about or interest in before, such as politics.
My efforts went in different directions and manifested in different ways but they mainly pointed to one direction — I wanted to belong.
I wanted to feel I have a valid place in the world, that there’s at least one group of people in this life with whom I could feel comfortable, without having that constant itch inside myself that if I showed up just as I am I’ll be laughed at or criticised. So i couldn't stop making an effort to just be.
Living with a mentally ill mother meant that I never felt comfortable inviting anyone into my home. With the level of neglect I’ve experienced and the lack of guidance and support, I also didn’t have many friends.
How can you find a belonging when you feel exiled in your own home, your own family, with your own mother?
My story is no different from those of the women I work with (I’m aware that there’s a potential of comparing your story to mine, thinking that you didn’t have it that bad — please don’t, because your story and your pain has its own integrity and legitimacy).
The details may change, but the underlying flow is the same:
There’s a yearning to receive something necessary and significant which you haven’t received from your mother and you’ll make the best efforts in order to find it.

Just like I was not aware of what propelled me to invest excessive effort in achieving a heart-filling experience that is vital to our well being, so do many of the women I work with. Here are a few examples:
Breaking Free from Toxic Productivity
Irma came to me after a burn out. She was on paid leave but she couldn’t rest or relax.
Irma felt like a failure and that life was moving on without her. She’d lost a boyfriend with whom she expected to get married. On top of the burn out she’d had a complex abdomen surgery. She felt lost, without direction and without a future worth fighting for. No matter she was still in her late 20’s.
Used to being active and overachieving, Irma was forced by these life events to reconsider some aspects of her life.
Who was it that pushed her to an exhausting level of performance and productivity?
Long story short — it was her mother.
Irma was groomed by her parents to become a competitive athlete. Her mother, as Irma told me, “lived her unfulfilled dreams through me”.
Her mother pushed and pushed and pushed but when her dad passed away she quite professional athletes and moved to the other side of the world.
“I travelled all that way but she’s still here,” Irma said in a chocking voice.
Her mum’s pushing lived like a separate entity inside her own body. It kept pushing her and she didn’t know how to stop.
My work with Irma started with breathing techniques I taught her to rebuild a connection with her body, to equip her with tools she could use by herself to retrain her system to operate at a different rhythm, and to clear out some of the noise.
Once some of the noise under the surface was cleared, we worked to process a lot of the sadness and grief over what she had lost as a little girl.
At the end of our work together, Irma felt like “breaking free from a cage. I always felt I had this cage around me that I couldn’t break free from”.
Irma learnt efforting as a way of belonging. If she’d effort she could give her mother a sense of purpose and validate her life. Irma didn’t choose that, but with our work together she made the choice to reorient her sails in the direction of freedom.

She Stopped Proving Herself to Feel Adequate
Kim has had experience with therapy since she was a teenager. By the time she came to me, not only had she had enough talk therapy to fill entire encyclopaedias with words, she had also discovered the worlds of meditation, plant medicine and some somatic healing.
She wanted to make a shift in her career and start offering more healing support for the women she worked with. She had her own design studio and had just partnered with another woman to take the business to its next level.
But she was blocked.
Kim’s soft and compassionate eyes, her feminine energy, her slim, gentle body would tense up for a long while before she was able to tell me something about her mother, who suffered from substance abuse.
She didn’t think that she needed any more therapy, but her business coach, who’d done some work with me years ago, had referred her to me, knowing that her professional life couldn’t move past what her inner life could do.
Throughout our work Kim was surprised to discover that she felt inferior next to her business partner because her partner‘d had a healthy childhood with a healthy relationship with her mother.
This discovery was a major breakthrough for Kim: she got her first peek into how efforting had settled into her emotional body.
Most of our sessions were meditative, with spaciousness for witnessing in the unfolding of the process.I leaned into Kim’s experience with healing and offered like a gentle tap of the finger upon her soul to set the waves of discovery, processing and releasing in motion.
By the end of our work, Kim felt no longer responsible for saving her mother from her substance abuse. These efforts, “to do the right thing,” as Kim said, “meant that I’m actually not letting her take responsibility over her life, keeping her dependent”.
Throughout our process Kim felt more and more full next to her business partner, no longer needing to make such efforts to prove that she deserved her as a partner or that she could match up to her skills and capacity.
After working with women for more than a decade on healing the mother wound, I have many examples to share of how efforting becomes almost a part of who we are.
But only ‘almost’, mind you, because there is a way to disentangle from it and find a greater sense of lightness, ease and joy.
These examples above are taken from my 1-on-1 work, which over time has allowed me to distil certain key points that I am now offering to you in a workshop:
An insight into your inclinations towards efforting
Tasting the satiating experience of ease
Engaging the wisdom inside you that trusts lightness
Igniting the movement of disentangling from efforting
A precious companionship of women like you on the journey of healing the mother wound
FROM EFFORT-ING TO REST
Friday, January 31st, 6:30 - 8:00 PM CET
Online, live Hakomi-based practices
Women only workshop
Limited to 30 spaces
25CHF
Not sure yet? No problem!
Here are a couple of ways to learn about healing the mother wound:
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Shelly's helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother and want to unplack the way it shaped them so they can become unlimited in their personal or professional life
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