On today’s On-Air Coaching call you’ll meet Stephanie who feels like she is in between two important people in her life (her mom and her daughter) but she doesn’t know how to navigate this struggle and how to show up as the mother she wants to be and guide her daughter through her challenges as a 10-year-old. This was such an important coaching session as I know many of you are struggling with something similar so I hope this conversation will give you a lot of clarity and clues as to where to start to remedy this.
As you listen, consider these questions:
- Do you feel like you are caught in between your daughter and your mother where your daughter is struggling with finding her voice and your mom is not familiar with personal development work? Like Stephanie said she feels like there’s “a mess above me and a mess below me and I don’t know how to position myself in this”, in other words, she doesn’t know how to play this role in a constructive way that doesn’t bog her down.
- You don’t know how you can best guide your daughter?
- You are coming from a home where there was a lot of co-dependency?
- Growing up were you also not allowed to have feelings? Were you always were shut down, yelled at, told that you were overly dramatic and to stop exaggerating and simply to be quiet and not interrupt?
- Do you feel like this made you disconnected from yourself? Or from who you thought you are?
- Are you driven for success, achievement, having more, doing more and feel like you’re not prised and appreciated by your external world?
- Growing up how did you learn to soothe your emotional pain?
- Are you also into personal growth and do “all the things” right, but still feel like you don’t know how to take care of yourself?
Keep all these questions in mind as you listen to my conversation with Stephanie.
Can you relate to Stephanie?
- Did you see how Stephanie has a lot of self-awareness and has done a lot of work on herself but she is still stuck in a place of needing and hunger for approval and words of affirmation?
- Do you also struggle to forgive your parents for not providing you with what you needed the most growing up?
- Do you struggle with wanting to change your mom? Or dad? Do you feel like your past is still chasing you?
- What is your love language? Is it also “words of affirmation”? Do you also feel like you need someone else to say something nice about you to you? Do you feel like your wellbeing and your doing well in life depends on external confirmation?
- Do you also don’t know how to give love to yourself? How to self-sooth? In Stephanie’s words, “how do I create “words of affirmation” that will resonate and will help me to love myself?”
- Do you also feel like your own pride of yourself is not big enough? Not good enough, not validating enough, not sufficient to do the job of pushing you through the hard times?
Stephanie’s key insights and AHA’s:
- Self-love begins from the inside (even though it feels really good to get it from the outside world). On this call, Stephanie learned that this is not a sustainable way of self-care as it depends on external sources and circumstances that not always are aligned with your current needs. What if the person who used to tell you these things is having a bad day, or not feeling like you deserve it, or like in Stephanie’s case this person has passed?
- The difference between self-love and narcissism is that narcissism is destructive and hurts people around you. Self-love is self-giving as well as giving to others because when you take care of yourself you are filling your cup and when your cup is full you can give to others.
- To mother our daughters really good we must first learn how to mother ourselves. Loving yourself and providing self-reassurance for yourself is a form of self-mothering and self-nurturing. A great question to think about is how can we embody love for others when we haven’t yet learned how to love myself?
- We do the work of embodiment to feel full but it actually helps us feel lighter, and as Stephanie said herself so beautifully, this fullness doesn’t have a mass because this is being “full of light”.
Here are some practical and tangible suggestions Stephanie can try so that she can start embodying self-trust and feel connected to herself again:
- Whenever you feel disconnected from yourself get quiet with yourself and start breathing the ujjayi breath. And then create visual imagery to help you see the shape, color, texture, smell, and all the sensory imagery you can think of to help you connect to the pain and ask it what does it need? It is a great idea to journal about it and access your own wisdom and guidance.
- Also, when you feel like you need something that someone else cannot give you tap into your own reserves and speak to yourself in that same matter. Like you’ve heard today, Stephanie had a loving grandmother who loved, nurtured and soothed her pain in her childhood. And now, as a part of becoming an adult grown woman, it is her job to give it to herself. Also, let’s be honest here for a moment, it is no one’s job to soothe us and provides for us. People don’t owe us anything and we have to stop expecting this from people. It is no one’s job to stroke our egos when we need that stroking. That would be narcissism. Although it feels very good let it be something my feeling good about myself not depend upon. You 100% have the power within you to give to yourself that which you need the most. You are self-giving. You can sustain yourself. You can survive on your own. You can.
- Now you might be thinking “if that’s true, why do I need other people in my life?”. Well, the answer to that is simple. We are human beings and we are social beings and when we interact with people let it come from a place of enriching and strengthening each other as opposed to neediness and perpetuating co-dependency. This is the best, most sustainable way to have healthy and thriving relationships in your life. No matter with whom.
- Stephanie’s mom is triggering in her something that is something many of my clients have as well and that is a great clue!! This is how we become the mothers we wish we’ve had, this is at the core of my work with women and mothers. That nagging feeling of ‘not this’, of ‘I don’t want to relive or recreate that same suffering I’ve had for my own children’. I encourage you to look at this with courage and clarity because your daughters need you to. Show up for yourself so you can show up for them, fully.
- BTW I have connected with Stephanie after this session and she shared with me that her heartbeat reading was the most stable after our session in months. This doesn’t surprise me, and by the way, can you see how the heart is a recurring theme and symbol in Stephanie’s life? Mentally, emotionally and physically the heart is a common thread which is a great clue for her that she needs to do some work around self-love and self-nurturing, self-sustainability and self-giving. And by the way, this is super important for her as I know she’s working on building and growing her business. In order to be successful in business, we must learn how to believe in ourselves, in our ideas and then getting paid for a product or a service we provide is a form of receiving and accepting energy from the outside world. This is a reciprocal process. This will help her reclaim her own power as a woman, mother and also daughter. So to answer her question at the beginning of our call, how to thrive within this messy dynamic she’s present in between her mother and her daughter? Claiming yourself and loving who you are truly, authentically, for real, without doubting your own existence, judging yourself or your actions – this is your health mission Stephanie, and it begins with you.
- Ladies, I’m super pumped to invite you to join The January round of The Health Begins With Mom Mastery Experience which is a 6 months incubator to help you break free from anything that is holding you back from shining your true light. In Stephanie’s case, she’d join to learn how to cultivate self-love, self-acceptance, self-giving. This can be done! This is my sacred work and how I help mothers to raise healthier families starting with themselves. What you’ve heard today is an example of how I work with women and how each coaching session sounds and feels like. In this program, I am going to hold your hand and together we are going to do the work you are afraid to do on your own. I will mother you, love on you, nurture you, teach you how to eat in alignment with your feminine energy, balance your hormones, expand your emotional mastery container, learn how to negotiate with your inner critic, heal your mother wound and become the women, wife and mother deep down inside you know you are destined to be. This work is sacred and it is dedicated to your healing. I want you to take a stand for yourself courageously so that you can show up your very best as a woman, wife, and mother. If this is something you would like to explore, head of over to www.healthbeginswithmom.com/apply and we’ll get on the phone to see if we’re a good fit.
If you enjoy this show and feel called to help me share this message with more moms and women please write an honest review on iTunes! This is the best way of showing your appreciation and also showing me that you care about this message and these words help you become a better version of you as a woman, wife and a mother. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for being a listener and for showing up for choosing yourself every single day, because guess what, you matter. You are worthy. You are divine. You are a child of God. Sending you much love and healing. See you next time!