Time goes so fast and yet so slow for a mother. A large part of your world, if not your whole world is centered around your children. In each stage of development, mothers experience a new version of the little person they are in love with however, with that excitement, they also find new struggles, obstacles, and challenges.

It is easy for a mother to consume her whole identity into the role of motherhood because it is such a big job.

Within each mother is her own True Self: a self that existed before the little ones, a self that still exists within the love and chaos of the little ones, and a self that will exist after they have gone on to create families and little ones of their own.

Mothers also have Hurt Parts. It is important to be aware of them, knowing where they come from, what their job or intentions are, and what they need or want. If a mom’s Hurt Parts parent for her, even though their intentions are good, they often cause distance in relationships, confusion, added chaos, and more self-detachment for her.

The Hurt Parts are running the household!

It is important to identify if Hurt Parts come from a traumatic event(s) in childhood or the past. Often children in certain developmental stages trigger a traumatic event a parent endured when they were in that same developmental stage. The mother can react toward the child from her Hurt Parts stuck in the trauma from her own past at that age. This confuses the relationship between the mother and the child. It can cause inappropriate child-rearing strategies, involve obscure boundaries, create rigidity and overprotectiveness, or even cause a neglectful environment.

Healing those experiences by doing ITR trauma work will cause awareness within the system of true-self and parts. This will reduce or eliminate the parent’s trigger. This allows for self-growth and stops “trickle-down” or transgenerational trauma.

Identify Hurt Parts that develop from the stress and the hardships of relationships and motherhood. These must also be recognized and relieved.

These can look like the following:

• The wine drinker (Teenager): Wants to escape from reality because she never gets time alone or to relax. Uses substances to escape.
• The Yeller (Toddler): has had many experiences of not being listened to or acknowledged. Needs desperately to get a point across and try to gain control of situations.
• The Exhausted Part (Dormatte/Do-it-All/Servant Part): Never gets enough self-care. Lacks sleep, nutrition, exercise. Doesn’t know how to express needs or make time for self. Just keeps doing and being there for everyone else.
• The Not Good Enough Part (Imposter): compares herself to every other mom, spends too much time on social media trying to figure out how to be like other moms. Constantly feeling like she isn’t a good mom and her kids don’t love her.
• The Self-loathing Part (Critic): judges body image and ridicules the body for not being what it once was before children. Lacks motivation to change because she feels overwhelmed.

This is definitely not an extensive list but just an example of some of the many Hurt Parts a mom could have in her inner landscape. If these hurt parts are stuck in a past traumatic event that relates to parenting, close relationships, or communicating within a family system, they are stuck and not based in logic and can not distinguish between the past and the present. They cannot reason and can only behave and feel or think from their very narrow stuck point of view. This can cause damage to the self-identity of the mother and the relationships she is working so hard to create and preserve within her family system.

Externalized Dialogue helps to relieve these parts of their jobs and negative beliefs and behaviors (Victim Mythology) and allows True-Self to meet the needs in a forward-moving positive way. It guides the mother to interact, make decisions, and judgments from her True Self. Trauma recovery with Instinctual Trauma Response® heals and ends any traumatic stories and helps recognize parts.

Mothers work hard, love, and care for their families. They deserve to be True-Self to themselves and their children. Mom’s True-Self needs to run the household.