Marsha GillMay is mental health awareness month. Let’s make it a lifestyle. We’re dealing day to day. Much of what we deal with on a day-to-day basis can be symptoms of something deeper. So, if you’ve ever felt like you’re stuck in patterns you can’t explain—overgiving, accommodating, staying small at work, or struggling in your relationships—pause right here.
Because chances are, it’s not “just you.” It’s something deeper. It’s what I call emotional inheritance—and it often starts with your mother-daughter relationship.
Whether your connection with your mom has been supportive, strained, or somewhere in between, the emotional blueprint you received from her shaped how you show up in the world today. So naturally, healing that blueprint, it’s not just personal.
It’s transformational—for your mental health, your relationships, your career, and your future.
How Your Mother-Daughter Relationship Affects Your Mental Health?
So aside from the obvious. Our mother-daughter relationship is our first emotional classroom.
It’s where we learn:
- whether our feelings are safe to express
- how we get our needs met (or not)
- what love, boundaries, and self-worth look like
If your mother was emotionally unavailable, overly critical, or constantly overwhelmed, you may have internalized beliefs like:
- “My needs are too much.”
- “I have to earn love.”
- “Success means never making a mistake.”
These early messages can silently shape chronic anxiety, low self-esteem, perfectionism, or burnout—especially for high-achieving women in leadership and caregiving roles. My friend and I just had a similar conversation. I struggled with chronic anxiety (masked, of course) and burnout for most of my adult life. I now know that it was those early messages—from how emotions were handled (or ignored) to who was allowed to have needs—can quietly become the internal soundtrack of your adult life. You may have learned that love had to be earned or that asking for help was weakness, or that your worth was tied to how well you performed or cared for others. Over time, these beliefs don’t just stay emotional—they become embodied.
Showing up as chronic anxiety masked by achievement, a constant fear of being “too much” or “not enough,” the inability to rest without guilt, or the tendency to fix everything for everyone while ignoring your own needs.
Unhealed Wounds Can Show Up Like This:
- Overworking to prove you’re enough
- Avoiding conflict in your personal or professional life
- Shrinking your voice in meetings or relationships
- Feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions
- Struggling to say “no” without guilt
- Emotionally shutting down when triggered
But here’s the truth: what you learned for survival in childhood can be unlearned for freedom in adulthood. You’re not broken—you’re carrying outdated blueprints. And the good news is, you can choose a new pattern.
Transformation Starts with Awareness
As a certified Mother-Daughter Relationship Expert and Transformation Coach, I help women have lasting success in life and in their relationships. Women who courageously go from surviving on autopilot to living with clarity, confidence, and compassion.
We work on:
- Identifying emotional patterns passed down through generations
- Learning how to mother yourself without guilt
- Rebuilding emotional safety within and between generations
- Setting healthy boundaries and honoring your voice
- Reclaiming joy and softness as a form of strength
This inner work is sacred—and strategic. Because when you tend to your mental health at the root, everything else shifts.
7 Ways Transforming Your Mother-Daughter Story Can Create Real, Lasting Change in Your Life
Shifting your “mother story” isn’t about blame—it’s about understanding the emotional blueprint you inherited so you can heal, grow, and lead your life with clarity and freedom.
1. You Stop Accommodating and Start Speaking Up: When you shift your mother story, you begin to understand where the urge to keep the peace came from—and you finally learn to prioritize your own voice without guilt.
2. You Set Boundaries That Actually Stick: Many women struggle to set boundaries because they don’t know what they need, or boundaries were never modeled or respected growing up. Rewriting your story helps you see that boundaries are not walls—they’re self-respect in action.
3. You Feel Less Triggered: Healing doesn’t mean ignoring pain—it means holding it with compassion. As you process old wounds, your nervous system feels safer, and you’re less reactive in present-day interactions.
4. You Redefine What It Means to Be “Strong”: Many of us were taught to survive, not soften. I had to do a lot of “redefining” as a daughter, ablack woman, a wife, a solider there was some serious conditioning that I had to break up with. Shifting your story allows you to expand your definition of strength, making space for rest, softness, and emotional honesty.
5. You Stop Repeating Patterns in Work and Love: This is a game changer. Whether it’s over-functioning in the office or attracting emotionally unavailable partners, your mother-daughter story often influences what you accept. Healing helps you break the cycle and choose differently.
6. You Start Mothering Yourself with Compassion: My self-talk leveled up! The way you talk to yourself changes when you stop repeating the criticism, dismissal, or neglect you may have internalized. You learn to meet yourself with the care you deserved all along.
7. You Lead with Clarity, Confidence, and Purpose: Whether at home or in your career, women who’ve done this inner work lead differently. They’re more grounded, self-aware, and unapologetically themselves—because they’ve untangled what isn’t theirs to carry.
Changing your mother story doesn’t mean turning your back on her—it means turning toward yourself with truth and tenderness.
This is how we heal backward and forward.
This is how cycles end and something new begins—with You.
XoXO,
Marsha D. Gill
