Women's Wellbeing

When Mother’s Day Feels Complicated: Honoring the Mixed Emotions

May 8, 2025

Mother’s Day is everywhere this time of year. Pink cards. Brunch specials. Social media posts of glowing tributes. For many, it’s a day of gratitude and celebration. But for others, Mother’s Day brings a tangle of emotions—grief, resentment, longing, confusion. If your relationship with your mother is complicated, estranged, painful, or unresolved, this day can […]

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Mother’s Day is everywhere this time of year. Pink cards. Brunch specials. Social media posts of glowing tributes. For many, it’s a day of gratitude and celebration. But for others, Mother’s Day brings a tangle of emotions—grief, resentment, longing, confusion. If your relationship with your mother is complicated, estranged, painful, or unresolved, this day can feel more like a spotlight on what’s missing than a celebration of love.

And you’re not alone.

The Myth of the Universal Mother

There’s a cultural script that says all mothers are nurturing, selfless, and unconditionally loving. This idealized image is powerful—but not universal. Some people grew up with mothers who were emotionally unavailable, controlling, critical, neglectful, or abusive. Others had mothers who were kind but distant, overwhelmed, or simply not equipped to meet their child’s emotional needs. Some people lost their mothers early, or watched them suffer. Others are mothers themselves now, trying to reparent themselves while raising their own kids differently.

When society insists that all mothers are heroes, it can feel invalidating. It erases the complexity of real lived experience. And it can make people feel guilty for having less-than-rosy feelings about their own moms.

What Mixed Feelings Really Mean

If Mother’s Day stirs up anger, sadness, or ambivalence in you, it doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful or broken. It means you’re human. It means your nervous system remembers. It means your story has layers. You might hold love and pain in the same breath. You might miss the mother you never really had. You might feel relief and guilt at the same time. You might be parenting yourself through emotions your mother never helped you name.

These are not contradictions. They’re truths that coexist.

Finding Your Own Way to Acknowledge the Day

You don’t have to pretend. And you don’t have to perform a version of the day that doesn’t fit your reality. Here are some ways to honor Mother’s Day on your own terms:

  • Grieve what never was. If you feel loss, even for something intangible—an emotional connection, a sense of safety, a role model—that grief is valid.
  • Celebrate your survival. If you made it through childhood with a mother who harmed or failed you, today can be a day of honoring yourself.
  • Recognize other mother figures. Maybe a grandmother, aunt, mentor, teacher, or friend gave you the nurturance you needed. That counts.
  • Break the cycle. If you’re a parent now doing the hard work of healing and parenting differently, give yourself the acknowledgment you deserve.
  • Allow joy where it exists. You can love parts of your mother, or certain memories, and still hold boundaries or protect yourself. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Permission to Feel Everything

Mother’s Day doesn’t have to be erased from your calendar. But it also doesn’t have to be celebrated in a way that feels false. You can rewrite the narrative for yourself. You can opt out of the brunch. You can light a candle. You can cry. You can laugh at how weird and contradictory it all feels. You can make peace with not having peace.

Your experience matters—messy, bittersweet, and honest.

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Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict. SE facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotion.


SE offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. It provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others— Excerpt taken from SETI.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders resulting from multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Excerpt taken from SETI

An Embodied approach to healing

Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict. SE facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotion.


SE offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. It provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others— Excerpt taken from SETI.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders resulting from multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Excerpt taken from SETI

An Embodied approach to healing

Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. 

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a complete treatment modality to heal trauma and attachment issues. SP welcomes the body as an integral source of information for processing past experiences relating to upsetting or traumatic events and developmental wounds. SP incorporates the physical and sensory experience, as well as thoughts and emotions, as part of the person’s complete experience of both the trauma itself and the process of healing. Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.  


An Embodied approach to healing

SP seeks to restore a person’s ability to process information without being triggered by past experience. SP uses a three-phase treatment approach to gently guide the client through the therapeutic process – Safety and Stabilization, Processing, and Integration. The therapist must pay close attention to the client to ensure that they are not overwhelmed by the process while simultaneously engaging their own abilities and capacities for healing.

It is thought that SP strengthens instinctual capacities for survival and assists clients to re-instate or develop resources which were unavailable or missing at the time the trauma or wounding occurred. Once resources are developed and in place, the traumatic event can be processed with the aid of resources. SP is a well-developed approach with decades of success in the treatment of trauma and developmental wounds. — Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. 

Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. 

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a comprehensive multi-diagnostic, modularized behavioral intervention designed to treat individuals with severe mental disorders and out-of-control cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns. It has been commonly viewed as a treatment for individuals meeting criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) with chronic and high-risk suicidality, substance dependence or other disorders. However, over the years, data has emerged demonstrating that DBT is also effective for a wide range of other disorders and problems, most of which are associated with difficulties regulating emotions and associated cognitive and behavioral patterns. 

radical acceptance and change

As the name implies, dialectical philosophy is a critical underpinning of DBT. Dialectics is a method of logic that identifies the contradictions (antithesis) in a person's position (thesis) and overcomes them by finding the synthesis. Additionally, in DBT a client cannot be understood in isolation from his or her environment and the transactions that occur. Rather, the therapist emphasizes the transaction between the person and their environment both in the development and maintenance of any disorders. It is also assumed that there are multiple causes as opposed to a single factor affecting the client. And, DBT uses a framework that balances the treatment strategies of acceptance and change - the central dialectical tension in DBT. Therapists work to enhance the capability (skills) of their client as well as to develop the motivation to change. Maintaining that balance between acceptance and change with clients is crucial for both keeping a client in treatment and ensuring they are making progress towards their goals of creating a life worth living. — Taken from DBT-Linehan Board of Certification. (click to learn more)

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