Mentor to women who wish to take the lead in the relationship they have with their mothers.
what – if anything – would change if you knew why...
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...your mother treats you the way she does? "My therapist once told me: Imagine being bitten by a snake and instead of trying to help yourself heal and recover from the poison, you are trying to catch the snake to find out the reason it bit you and prove to it that you didn't deserve that." ~ Safe.Journal on Threads That's good advice, but...if you've spent years (or decades even) trying to figure out why your mother is the way she is, and why she treated the way she did, it might feel a bit shaming. It makes sense that you have more than a passing urge to know why, because from the moment you were born, your nervous systems was constantly assessing whether you were "okay" and thus "safe" and then by calibrating your behavior. And if your own mother was/is consistently cruel, abusive, unkind...OF COURSE you think it's because of you. It's human nature to think you deserved it even though you're now grown and in charge of your own safety. So while you now logically know that the way your mother treated you is about her, not you, your body has a different experience. Making space for and unshaming the urge to catch the snake to find out why it bit you is part of healing and recovering from its poison. Much, much love, Karen P.S. Join me for a free event: A conversation about healing the shame passed to us through our maternal lineages, the impact it has had on us, and how we're changing our relationship to it. I am excited to share a new healing framework. There will be time for your questions and stories. Where: on Zoom (register for free here) When: on Thursday, June 13 from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. Eastern... Why: because there's nothing more powerful than women who have changed their relationship to the debilitating, dysregulating experience that is shame. |
Karen C.L. Anderson
Mentor to women who wish to take the lead in the relationship they have with their mothers.
Nothing feels safer than when we are in the presence of another who is attuned to the dark, shameful places inside of us and yet has a posture of kindness rather than contempt. ~ Adam Young Counseling I believe humanity is moving out of a biological, evolutionary "need" for shame. We've got a ways to go. In the meantime, we still experience it and it can be debilitating and dysregulating (ask me how I know), especially when we're not aware when it's running the show. We need to know: #1 how...
(this one rambles...TL;DR it's okay to decide you want your relationships to be easy AND I am hosting a free event next month) I live in a small (six-year-old) neighborhood with 14 homes and a Homeowner's Association (HOA), which is required because there are seven acres of common area that need to be maintained according to the town's ordinances. Everyone who lives here was the first to occupy these homes. From the get-go there's been ONE neighbor who seems hellbent on making trouble:...
Earlier this week there was an article in my local newspaper about a mother who paid ten kids $50 to "beat and humiliate" her 13-year-old daughter. After sitting with my thoughts and feelings about it, I shared this on Facebook: These words will probably never reach the 13-year-old girl who's mother paid ten kids to "beat and humiliate" her, but I am going to say them anyway: May you know that even if you were disrespectful to your mother, this shouldn't have happened. I am so sorry that it...