Why Do You Feel Guilty Setting Boundaries? The Mother Wound Link
- Jun 21
- 5 min read
Why do I feel guilty setting boundaries when I know I’m allowed to have them? This is the question many undermothered women carry, especially when they’ve already done the therapy, read the books, and learned the language of “healthy boundaries.” But knowing you’re allowed to say no does not always change what happens in your body when you do. If you keep wondering “why do I feel guilty setting boundaries,” this post will show why guilt may be less about the boundary itself and more about the relationship where your “no” first became dangerous.
This is happening very soon:
FREE workshop: June 24th 5 pm CET (11 am EST // 4 pm BST)
The Invisible Weight of Undermothered Women
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Why Boundaries Feel Unsafe When You're Undermothered
I had the last session of a six-month journey with a client this week, and I want to share something that touched me.
She said something very simple, which is core to the way I work with women on healing the mother wound, and it was powerful to hear her name it without me ever mentioning it:
For the first time, she felt the strong sense of inner boundaries she'd always known were hers — simply because I was completely OK if she didn’t want to try out a practice or get into an experience she was having.
Growing up with a mean or volatile mother, she just never felt she had the agency to use them without being deeply affected by a rejection of her boundaries and her inner clarity.
If you're like most of the women I work with — women who've been around the block with healing their mother wound, who've collected a trick or two from their psychologist to explain their patterns eloquently — I'd guess you're not looking for one more explanation of the habitual voices that keep you from feeling confident in your choices.
What you're looking for is a deep sense of safety. And a genuine respect for your agency.
If you were a child with a strong spirit, a wild heart, and a passion for doing things your way — a complex relationship with your mother sits heavily on those natural, beautiful qualities.
Three Signs Your Guilt Is the Mother Wound Talking
Naturally, you brought this invisible weight into your relationships with therapists.
For many of the women I've worked with, it looked like this:
🍒 You performing "talking to your inner child" in a therapy session, because it doesn’t feel real, but you want to make the best of the time you pay for
🍒 When your therapist suggests an interpretation of an event, you don’t want to contradict her, concerned you'll offend her — because you're so sensitive, you can smell friction from miles away
🍒 Your mentor tells you what you should do with your mother, and you feel even more trapped because you don’t need another person telling you what to do
You didn't start working hard in relationships with your therapist or coach. It started long ago, when your mother — for whatever reason — was unavailable to meet you, to see you.
Being undermothered, you learned to compensate for the unnamed absences in your relationship with your mother.
You met them with strategic efforts. Over time, those efforts got internalised — folded into how you are with yourself, with others, and in the world.
That's what I call efforting.
Efforting is not who you are. It’s part of who you had to become.
And the moment you realise you've regained the freedom to act on your inner boundaries instead of performing is the moment you heal your mother wound.
What It Looks Like When Someone Is Finally OK With Your No
My aim in this work is not to give you a neatly organised theoretical map on which you can pin yourself.
This isn't about psychological labels.
In fact, my lifelong passion to see women in non-pathologising ways is what pushed me away from clinical psychology training and led me into the embrace of somatic practices — especially Hakomi.
Effort is a human capacity.
We all make efforts, especially toward the people and endeavours that matter to us.
But when you come from childhood trauma and wounds, those efforts bend — like a tree under strong wind.
Something in you — that once belonged to you — had to subjugate itself to earn belonging with your mother. To collect whatever drops of safety you could gather.
Something in you snaps before you can even name the rupture.
That's what my client felt during our sessions.
That's efforting: the imbalanced attitude in reaching for connection.
A set of beliefs and habitual patterns you cultivate in response to the rupture with your mother.
The mother wound is a rupture in your relationship with yourself, others, and the world.
Since you’re inherently wired to bond with your mother at the start of your life, this rupture is internalised and, over time, becomes the gap between you and yourself, and between you and others.
This gap is bridged by restoring a sense of having a choice about the trajectory of your life, your connection with people, and how you talk to yourself. So you can:
🍒 Stop storing your rage or exploding without control, because you've found ways to release the anger you’ve been carrying since childhood
🍒 Let go of being the good girl because you’ve found a way to be direct without waiting for rejection
🍒 Finally relax the familiar anxiety and overwhelm because you trust your "no" will be respected — the way my client felt, the moment she realised I was completely fine with hers.
How to Trust Your Boundaries Again
In releasing efforting, you get to unlearn the survival strategies you developed in a strenuous relationship with your mum — and start trusting, the way my client has, that your clear sense of your value and place in relationships doesn't bear a price tag.
Here’s everything you need to know:
🕦 The call is 45 minutes—including a Q&A time
✅ Recording available
🎥 It’s always more connecting to see faces than black squares, but you can have your camera off if you need to
✨ At the end of the workshop, I’ll open for you a special 3-session offer
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
See Also: Is the Mother Wound a Disability? Like Her Mentor Said
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
