How mothering impacts the way we connect to our emotions for well-being, grief recovery, trauma healing and suicide prevention.
Tuesday Trauma Healing With Tate, April 2025
I align my Tuesday Trauma With Tate posts with my book editing, I See You, a mother’s story of family healing after loss by suicide. This keeps me accountable to finish and self-publish. I write to heal and to release emotions so I can offer compassion to all of my past and present relationships. So I can live wholeheartedly and access joy. I share my writing as I want you to experience this too.
This month I’m editing my chapter on mothering and I include some of this chapter summarised here.
Our relationship with our mother or primary caregiver is our most important relationship as it serves as a blueprint for all other relationships so it seriously impacts our life.
Mothering may help and hinder how we connect to our emotions to release and ease them for well-being, healing, grief recovery and suicide prevention.
As a mother, I struggle to support my children with their complex grief recovery as I fear their emotions.
I explore where this fear comes from so I can heal my fear, better face my children’s emotions and support them. I unravel my story and I identify that my fear comes from how I experienced mothering.
As I tell you my story I recognise that the most challenging part is overcoming my fear of sharing such personal experiences. Many details have been hidden for decades out of concern for others' comfort and to avoid upsetting them. In my life, I notice that I often prioritise others’ feelings over mine because I sense it keeps me safe. However, that mindset is no longer helpful. I remind myself that I can share these experiences, even though it feels scary, and create a safe space for myself. I won’t abandon myself. The fear of abandonment and the worry of upsetting others have kept me silent for far too long. While those fears still linger, my adult self—now at 57 years old—will comfort the fears of my inner child.
To balance sharing personal details, I know it’s crucial not to write from a place of hurt. Writing from a perspective of compassion is essential. This is why writing is so important: it facilitates healing, and healing fosters compassion. It’s vital for you, as a reader, to feel compassion as only then can you consider change. Only then can I contribute to a cultural shift aimed at enhancing emotional connection and well-being, ultimately preventing suicides. This is profound wisdom I’ve gained from my professional and challenging lived experiences.
I’m also mindful that I include scientific insights, as they validate my story. In turn, my personal experiences provide context for the science. This adds to the complexity of writing, as it becomes another balancing act.
Furthermore, this post is just a part of my chapter on mothering, which is only a segment of the extensive reflection and analysis I’ve done throughout my life regarding my relationships with my mother, her mother, and my role as a mother myself.
I share all this so you can see the struggle I’ve faced in finding the right balance. It’s an ongoing journey, and I’m committed to continuing this path, hoping to engage readers along the way. My underlying mission is to improve emotional connections, enhance well-being, and reduce the incidence of suicide.
I experience mixed emotions for my late mum. There’s deep love and grief. But there is also fear, anger, blame, frustration and disappointment. There’s guilt and shame for even feeling these emotions. There’s an additional fear of abandonment as I admit these mixed emotions as I tell this part of my story. Fear that my family and friends will be offended and distance themselves from me. This is therefore by far the most difficult chapter to write so I reassure myself that I won’t abandon myself.
The guilt and shame compel me to explain why I write. I write because it’s only by writing can I release and ease my mixed emotions and heal so I can better support my children with their emotions and grief recovery. My children’s grief recovery is essential for their wellbeing, to prevent mental health struggles and most importantly to reduce our increased suicide risk. I’ve already suffered 2 bereavements by suicide. I’m therefore determined to reduce the risk of more.
In addition, I can’t write my book without sharing this important part of my story. The rest won’t make sense without it.
A short history of breastfeeding and the science of mothering for background information and context
The process of breastfeeding and the hormones oxytocin and prolactin that are stimulated with breastfeeding, biologically and hormonally enhance how we emotionally connect to our baby. Breastfeeding rates reduce to just 20% in the 1960s and 70s as the big pharmaceutical companies heavily advertise artificial milk. They persuade people, including health professionals that artificial milk is scientifically formulated and even superior. My generation mostly does not therefore benefit from the biological norm of breastfeeding. The World Health Organisation now control the advertising of artificial milk as advertising undermines breastfeeding. But a whole generation of mothers, including health professionals, paediatricians, midwives and health visitors, lost this biological way of mothering passed down from generations of women before them. Although breastfeeding rates are slowly improving, less than half of women breastfeed beyond 6 weeks even though 90% want to.
It takes an extended family and a social network to support a mother in raising a child so she can readily respond to her baby's emotions. This type of support is rare so women are left to cope alone which makes breastfeeding and mothering isolating, lonely and difficult.
Mothers can therefore struggle with the overwhelming task of mothering alone. Well-meaning health professionals therefore advise mothers to not respond to their baby’s emotions as readily to prioritise their rest instead. Leaving our baby to cry is therefore normalised and the risks are not mentioned as health professionals try to protect the mother’s mental health, rest and sleep. An informed choice is therefore not made about mothering and sleep management methods that advise us to leave our baby to cry.
A mother is therefore encouraged to emotionally disconnect from her baby. A baby disconnected from her mother becomes emotionally disconnected from herself.
A mother is often concerned about her return to paid work before she even starts her maternity leave. A mother’s work outside the home is the only work that is really valued in our society. A mother can therefore feel lonely and invisible when she is at home with her baby so it's understandable that she is keen to return to paid, more valued and seen work as soon as she can.
Mothers are then blamed and criticised when they distance themselves, don’t respond to their baby emotionally and don’t breastfeed. However, an individual mother should not be blamed, shamed, judged or criticised. A mother should instead be better valued and supported by her community so she can mother in an emotionally connected way.
A short history of how we manage emotions
Tears and emotions are considered manipulative and naughty. A ‘good’ baby sleeps through the night without waking, crying and disturbing her mother but this is not the biological norm.
As a child, you are punished, dismissed, criticised, humiliated, mocked or ignored for crying. You are told that you are too sensitive, silly, moody, weak, spoilt and dramatic. Both a mother and a child avoid this criticism and therefore suppress tears.
My personal experience of being mothered
My mum is just 18 when I am conceived. Just a child herself. She nearly dies during childbirth due to a postpartum haemorrhage. We are separated as she is sent in an ambulance as an emergency to the nearest acute hospital 20 miles away. As a newborn baby, I am left behind in the cottage hospital. There is no awareness of the essential need in the 1960s to protect the mother-baby dyad and the risk of separation. My brain rewires for survival and shuts down emotionally as my mum is unable to respond to my tears during this crucial bonding time as she is 20 miles away and fighting for her survival too.
My grandma, Ma is unable to emotionally support my mum with her early mothering and our birth trauma as she lives 100 miles away and she has a small child herself, my mum’s baby sister. Ma struggles to offer emotional connection to her children as she grows up as an orphan and doesn’t experience emotional connection herself. She is raised in a convent and never meets her mother.
I am sexually abused at age 8 by an elderly man who I visit for tea and sweet treats as my mum, with her kind heart, fears that he’s lonely. I change into my ballet clothes after our tea party as I attend my ballet class nearby, immediately after the visit. He touches me inappropriately whilst I change upstairs in a bedroom. I am already emotionally shut down and I emotionally shut down even further. It’s less painful to pretend it isn’t happening than to tell and upset my mum.
At this time I am assessed for epilepsy as I suffer several blackouts when overwhelmed. The blackouts mostly stop when I stop visiting this elderly man.
As a child and now as an adult, I do not do well with emotions other than happy. I feel anxious. I feel tension in my spine, neck and head as I instinctively shut down my emotions as they don't feel safe.
I mask my uncomfortable, negative emotions. I internalise them where they cause an auto-immune disease and we need IVF fertility treatments due to my underactive thyroid. I am unable to cry at my husband’s and my parent’s funerals or show even close family and friends my struggles.
I recognise I need to connect to my children’s emotions to help my children’s grief recovery but this is a struggle. To do this I have to relearn how to connect to my emotions. I mostly do this through writing. See the article here.
A mother’s role
Without a mother’s unconditional love and emotional connection, we fail to thrive. We know logically that we are loved but we do not feel it fully in our hearts. Love from our mother is not unconditional as we feel that love is conditional on us not crying or disturbing our mother with our emotions. We learn that it is safer to internalise our emotions. They therefore remain contained in our body where they make us unwell. They activate an anxious or shut down nervous state. We are then more at risk of mental health problems. See more here
When our mother has passed or they are unable to offer us, unconditional love, we need to learn how to offer this to ourselves. Self-mothering, self-care, unconditional self-love and self-compassion are not selfish. Self-mothering fosters compassionate for others so this is far from selfish.
My personal experience of mothering
I feel a strong sense of responsibility and pressure to get mothering right as we conceive in such a purposeful and clinical way by IVF. But I struggle to breastfeed without my mum’s expertise. Luckily I find a group that offers me the support to enable me to breastfeed. I read and digest every traditional mothering book in the breastfeeding group’s library and it’s a natural step to go on to train as a breastfeeding counsellor with the National Childbirth Trust NCT. This work fits in beautifully alongside my NHS role as a dietitian with an interest in the emotional relationship with our eating. Our relationship with our eating is often impacted by how we are mothered.
For 10 years I run 2 weekly mothering groups to replicate in a tiny way the traditional support we need from other mothers to mother in an emotionally connected way.
John and I learn that leaving a baby to cry increases mental health struggles in the developing child. John struggles with anxiety throughout our 25 years together and suffers 4 episodes of emotional overwhelm/burnout previously known as mental breakdowns before our children are born. We are therefore unable to leave our babies to cry.
We are therefore, both fully committed to learn more about emotionally connected parenting.
In the summer of 2023, I read the book Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel, a counsellor and woman’s advocate. She describes ‘mother hunger’ and this resonates deeply. ‘Mother hunger’ is a pain and loneliness that comes from emotional disconnection due to our separation at birth, feeling unprotected as a child and inherited intergenerational trauma as my mum’s mum did not have a mother. ‘Mother hunger’ is a pain that causes distance and conflict between my mum and I which not only mum and I but close family and friends notice and find difficult to understand too. On the surface, we have a good relationship but my ‘mother hunger’ always lurks in the shadows, impacting it. We have many happy celebrations, holidays and meals together. We prioritise time together. I know I am loved by her love language of gifts, acts of service and feeding. For example, she uses the last of her energy, just a few days before she dies of cancer, to bake me my favourite birthday cake. We mean the world to each other and I strongly grieve for her.
My mum suffers her own ‘mother hunger’ so she’s hyper-vigilant to others’ ‘mother hunger’ and loneliness. With our close knit community and extended family she opens her big heart and attempts to mother everyone. However this further limits her emotional availability and connection for me and the my brothers.
It’s a relief to finally understand and have the pain of my ‘mother hunger’ validated so I can start to release and ease it. This allows me to better connect to my grief and our relationship is repaired even after she’s passed.
I can now grieve for my mum and what she gave and couldn’t give me and what her Mum, my Grandma could give and couldn’t give her due to her trauma. I therefore grieve and heal intergenerationally.
I will now rest after this enormous and vulnerable step of sharing my most intimate experiences and feelings. This is very challenging but I am determined to continue.
Please join Maddie and I for our podcast on Thursday 17th April where we will explore and discuss our experience of mothering together.
I will share my Tuesday Trauma Healing With Tate roundup post on Tuesday 29th April. It makes sense to share this on the last Tuesday of the month.
I will post my next Tuesday Trauma Healing With Tate healing post on 13th May. I write about the experience of the older child and the impact of parenting and our education system on our emotional connection for well-being, grief recovery, trauma healing and suicide prevention.
Thank you for reading
Much love
Piata
Further reading:
What Mothers Do: especially when it looks like nothing
Any reading by National Childbirth Trust and La Leche League.
Movie:
In Utero, world trauma expert Dr Gabor Maté and other scientists explain the impact of emotional connection at birth and in childhood. It’s an essential watch if you’re interested in mental health, trauma and suicide prevention.
Piata, this has been a very brave post and I would like to be the first to acknowledge this. You are doing amazing work, both personally and in supporting other mums to find the self-compassion which, as you rightly say, is at the heart of all healing after trauma. I am proud to call you my Substack friend 🤗
This was moving to read and have me a lot to think about, thank you Piata!