Episode Details

What do you actually do when the mother you’re healing from is still calling, still coming to Christmas, still in your life every week? This episode is the practical one:  how to set boundaries with a toxic or emotionally unsafe mother without going no contact, and without losing yourself in the process.

Most advice on narcissistic or unsafe mothers treats this as a choice between cutting her off or accepting her. This episode refuses that binary. Most women aren’t going no contact, and that doesn’t make them weak. It makes them people with grandchildren, fathers, siblings, and forty years of complicated love.

Instead, we build a protocol.

In this episode:

∙The drive; why you become eleven years old on the way there

∙Change the metric; scoring the visit on your own regulation, not her behavior

∙Name the impossible goal; why hoping for an apology leaves you starving

∙Don’t send a nine-year-old to the meeting; a 90-second parts practice for the parking lot

∙The contact protocol, before; your exit, your ally, your two sentences

∙The contact protocol, during; body checkpoints, the information diet, and why “grey rock” can backfire for trauma survivors

∙The contact protocol, after;  who not to debrief with, and why you need 48 hours

∙When it gets worse before it gets better;  the escalation that follows a new boundary

∙Ambiguous loss;  grieving a mother who is still alive

∙Inanna and the seven gates; taking yourself back on the drive home

∙A GLOW™ practice for the car, after

Journal prompts from this episode:

1.What am I actually going for in this relationship — the real, achievable thing?

2.What’s my exit, and who’s my ally?

3.What do I need to take back at the gates on the way out?

Free download: The Contact Protocol: a printable  guide with the before, during, and after steps, plus space to write your own exit plan. https://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub

This is part two of two. Part one, The Mother Wound Revisited: Finding the Mother Within, covers the wound underneath the boundaries. https://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub

Work with me: Trauma-informed, neurodivergent-affirming coaching, available anywhere in the world, with healing yoga woven into our sessions. https://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub

Connect with me about this episode!