By: Holly Dudley, Resident in Counseling, NCC
There are certain questions that seem to come with motherhood, even if no one says them out loud.
“Did I yell too much today?” “Am I spending enough time with them?” “Am I working too much?” “Was I on my phone too much this week?” “Did I handle that meltdown completely wrong?” “Are they going to remember the time I lost my patience forever?” “Am I too strict?” “Am I not strict enough?”
The list goes on, and underneath all of those questions is often a much bigger one:
“Am I messing them up?”
For some moms, those thoughts come and go. You have a hard parenting moment, feel bad about it, repair it with your child, and move on. Moving on doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means some part of you trusts that the relationship can hold a hard moment, and that coming back together afterward matters more than getting it right the first time. But for some of us, the thoughts stick around.
You replay the interaction while you are trying to fall asleep. You wonder whether your child looked hurt because of something you said. You question whether you are giving them enough attention, enough patience, enough quality time, enough of yourself. You may even know logically that no parent gets it right all the time, but there is still a part of you that worries you are getting something terribly wrong.
Motherhood has a way of making those fears feel very loud.
Motherhood Can Bring Old Things to the Surface
We do not enter motherhood as blank slates. We bring our own childhoods with us, our relationships with our parents, our fears, our expectations, the ‘picture perfect moms’ we see on social media, and all of the messages we have absorbed about what a “good mom” is supposed to be.
Sometimes becoming a parent brings experiences to the surface that we had not thought about in years.
Maybe you grew up feeling like you had to be perfect. Maybe conflict in your home felt unpredictable or scary. Maybe you learned to take care of everyone else’s emotions before your own. Maybe mistakes were met with criticism instead of repair. Or maybe you spent years thinking, “When I have kids, I will never do that to them.” Then motherhood happens, and one day you lose your patience.
You raise your voice. You snap. Your child is upset with you and instead of thinking, “I wish I had handled that differently,” your brain goes somewhere much bigger.
“I’m failing.”
“I’m not a good mom.”
“If my child is struggling, I must be doing something wrong.”
When those thoughts show up, it can feel like the stakes of every parenting moment are incredibly high. Clinicians have been writing about this for decades. In 1975, Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues described Ghosts in the Nursery meaning the painful experiences from a parent’s own childhood that can quietly show up in how they care for their children. Years later, Alicia Lieberman and her colleagues added an important counterpart, Angels in the Nursery, our memories of feeling deeply loved, understood, and safe as children. The hopeful part of both ideas is that the past doesn’t have to write the rest of the story. Understanding the ghosts and reconnecting with the angels can both help shape what we choose to do with our story.
Sometimes You Already Know the Thought Is Irrational
One of the frustrating things about anxiety is that knowing something logically does not always make it feel true. You may know that healthy relationships involve rupture and repair. You may know that one bad day does not define your child’s entire childhood. You may even be the person reassuring your friends that their kids are going to be okay after they lose their patience.
But somehow the rules feel different when it comes to you.
You can tell yourself, “I know I’m not actually ruining my child’s life,” and still feel the anxiety in your chest. You can know, “My child is allowed to be disappointed in me,” and still feel desperate to fix it. You can understand, “I am allowed to need a break,” and still feel guilty the entire time you are away. At that point, the question may not really be, “Is this thought rational?” You may already know that it is not.
The more helpful question can become: Why does this feel so true anyway?
Where EMDR Can Help
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a type of evidence-based therapy that can help people work through experiences, memories, and beliefs that continue to feel emotionally unresolved. People often hear EMDR and immediately think of major trauma, but the experiences we carry are not always dramatic or easy to identify.
Sometimes they are quieter. They may not even feel big enough to “count.” You might think, “Every mom feels this way,” or “Nothing really bad happened to me, so EMDR probably isn’t for me.” But EMDR is not only for one kind of experience. If something from your past still shapes how you see yourself today, it may be worth exploring, whether or not you would ever call it trauma.
You may have grown up feeling responsible for keeping the peace. You may have learned that mistakes were unacceptable or that love had to be earned. You may have had emotionally unpredictable caregivers, felt like you needed to grow up too quickly, or spent years putting everyone else’s needs before your own. For some women, pregnancy, birth, postpartum experiences, relationship changes, or the transition into motherhood itself can also leave a lasting emotional impact.
Motherhood may not have created these beliefs. It may simply be the season where they started showing up more clearly.
What Might This Look Like in Therapy?
Sometimes the starting point is something happening in motherhood right now. Maybe you notice intense guilt every time you leave your children. Maybe bedtime turns into a mental review of whether you gave everyone enough attention that day. Maybe your child’s tantrum instantly makes you feel like you have failed. Maybe when your child is angry with you, you feel an overwhelming urge to make it better immediately.
Or maybe one small parenting mistake stays with you for days. As we explore those reactions in therapy, we may begin to notice the beliefs underneath them.
You may realize that the thought is not really just, “I yelled today” but instead, it is, “I am failing.”
It may not really be, “My child is upset with me” but instead, it is, “ If someone I love is upset with me, I have done something wrong.
It may not just be, “I need a break” but instead, it is, “ A good mom should not need this much space.”
Those deeper beliefs are often where the work becomes meaningful.
EMDR can help explore where those beliefs came from, how strongly they still show up in the present, and whether your nervous system is responding to what is happening now or to something older that feels familiar.
EMDR Is Not About Becoming a Perfect Mom
Therapy is not meant to turn you into a mother who never loses her patience, never gets overstimulated, and never needs space. That mom does not exist. There are still going to be nights when everyone is tired, someone is crying over the wrong color cup, someone cannot find the shoes that are directly in front of them, and your patience is running low. The goal is not to remove every difficult parenting moment.
It is to change what those moments mean about you.
There is a big difference between thinking, “That was not how I wanted to respond. I can repair that,” and thinking, “I am damaging my child.” One leaves room for accountability, connection, and growth. The other leaves you buried in shame.
You Are Still a Person Inside of Motherhood
A lot of mothers carry an unspoken belief that being a good mom means needing very little. You should be able to handle more. You should want to spend every possible second with your children. You should not need space. You should not feel relieved when everyone finally goes to bed. You should not enjoy going to work. You should not feel frustrated by motherhood when you love your children so deeply. But motherhood does not erase the rest of you.
You can adore your children and still need time away from them.
You can love being a mother and still feel overwhelmed by it.
You can be grateful for your family and still miss parts of yourself that existed before motherhood.
You can be a good parent and sometimes handle things poorly.
You can repair. You can learn. You can grow.
Your relationship with your children does not depend on you getting every interaction exactly right.
When “Am I Messing Them Up?” Becomes a Constant Question
There is a difference between reflecting on your parenting and constantly analyzing it. If you find yourself replaying conversations, feeling consumed by guilt, worrying about how your children will remember you, or treating every parenting decision like it could determine their entire future, therapy may be a helpful place to explore what is underneath that pressure. Sometimes the work is about what is happening in motherhood right now. Sometimes motherhood has opened the door to experiences that happened long before your children were ever here. Very often, it is a little bit of both.
EMDR Therapy for Women and Mothers in Virginia
I work with women who are navigating anxiety, negative beliefs, painful experiences, relationship wounds, motherhood, and the parts of themselves that still feel stuck even when they understand logically where those feelings come from. As an EMDR-trained Resident in Counseling in Virginia, I use EMDR when it fits a client’s needs and goals. The work is individualized, and we move at a pace that feels manageable rather than rushing into difficult memories and feelings before you feel ready. I also have training in Child-Centered Play Therapy, which has given me a unique window into how children experience their relationships with the adults who love them. One of the things it has taught me is that children don’t need perfect parents. They need parents who come back, repair, and stay connected. You do not need to know exactly where a belief started. You do not need to have one specific memory that explains everything. You do not have to wait until things feel unbearable before asking for support.
Sometimes therapy begins with something as simple as:
“I know this probably is not rational, but I cannot stop thinking about it.”
That is enough of a place to start.
If you spend most of your energy taking care of everyone around you, therapy can be a place where you get cared for. Maybe that looks like EMDR. Maybe it looks like a Person-Centered space where you can bring all of it - the joy of being a mother, the hard moments, and everything in between - without having to tidy it up first. Either way, I would be honored to meet you where you are.
If you are interested in learning more about our therapy services for mothers, call us at: (703) 249-6878 or fill out our online contact form: https://integratedplay.clientsecure.me/contact-widget. Someone from Integrated Play Connections will reach out within 1-2 business days to talk through what’s been going on and answer any questions you have.
References
Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387-421. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)61442-4.
Liberman, A.F., Padrón, E., Van Horn, P., & Harris, W.W. (2005). Angels in the nursery: The intergenerational transmission of benevolent parental influences. Infant Mental Health Journal, 26(6), 504-520. https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.20071.
