10/10/2025
Last week, I received a positive response from an institution about something I really wanted and needed.
In truth, I didn’t need to work hard at all to get a YES! I didn’t make much of an effort, it didn’t require much preparation, or a long journey, exhausting journey to sweat may way towards a recognition, acknowledgment and a simple “yes, you can have it!.”
And here’s what happened to me right after:
🍍 I found it difficult to believe it actually happened
🍍 I walked around for a couple of days feeling as if I’d done something wrong— as if I had somehow cheated my way to a YES
🍍I felt shame, and as though I need to hide what I had received
🍍I was, somewhat, frozen inside
THIS is a familiar, common experience for many undermothered women as part of their daily lives.
Nothing dramatic needs to happen to trigger these experiences, which are manifestations of a nervous system and an emotional life wired to guilt and/or shame.
In fact, these feelings, sensations and states of mind are often activated not when something dramatic and obviously wrong occurs, but when something good happens— when you receive something positive, when you get exciting news, when you speak up your mind and ask for your rights and needs to be acknowledged, or when you begin to show up in life and for others in a way that is more fully and authentically YOU.
If significant aspects of feeling safe and care for in your relationship with your mother were missing, that absence was translated and internalised within you as something you did wrong (guilt) or that something about who you are is wrong (shame). In every life is shows up as “it’s your fault.”
It happened to you, it happened within you—you did not cause it.
So, I was super excited when picked up on that point in our conversation on her podcast, The Midlife Edit.
Go ahead and listen now 🎧
Link in bio
