The Nourished Woman with Keri Marino

How to Heal Mother Wounds while Mothering

• Keri Marino • Episode 12

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Some patterns don’t start as choices—they start as coping. We open a brave, practical conversation about the mother wound: how the gap between what you needed and what you received shaped your nervous system, and how to gently, steadily change that wiring now. Without blame or rehashing every painful moment, we map the real terrain—attachment, attunement, and the lifelong echoes that touch everything from stress to body image, money, intimacy, and spirituality.

Drawing on years of somatic yoga therapy, I share how acknowledgement regulates the system, why nurture–protect–guide is a powerful framework for self-repair, and what reparenting looks like off the page and in the body. Expect concrete, doable tools: orienting practices to signal safety, breath patterns that downshift urgency, micro-habits that build capacity, and boundary scripts that protect your energy. We also talk about the role of privilege and safety, when professional support is vital, and how to interrupt the myth of “no time” with two-minute rituals that actually stick.

For mothers healing while raising kids, we lean into presence over perfection, the magic of repair, and the surprising power of play during hard moments. You’ll leave with language for your inner world, practices for your daily life, and permission to move at the pace of your inner knowing. If tenderness is rising as you listen, try the simple question we return to again and again: What do I want, and what do I need, right now?

If this conversation serves you, subscribe, leave a review or share it with a friend who’s ready to feel different in her life. Your voice helps grow a community where we all rise and thrive together. 

Connect with me on Instagram @the_nourished_woman or through my website.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Nourished Woman Podcast, a space for women on a growth and healing journey who want to experience more joy, play, and pleasure while feeling deeply rooted within themselves, body, mind, and spirit. I'm your host, Carrie Marino, somatic yoga therapist, mentor, and mama of three. Let's dive in, love. All right, love. Before we dive into today's podcast, I want to go ahead and give you permission to skip this one. This is a little bit more of a meaty topic. It could be a sensitive topic for you. And if you're not in the right headspace, if stress is high, if you're already feeling triggered, or maybe you're at work right now, this perhaps is not the best episode for those situations. Today we're going to be talking about mother wounds, what they are, how they impact us, how we heal them, and then about the experience of mothering your own children while mothering yourself. This is a topic that is very personal to me in terms of my own growth and healing journey. Working on mother wounds has been absolutely essential to my own evolution and for me feeling more whole inside. And I can say that it's a common denominator in every woman that I have ever worked with one-to-one over the past 16 years. And I say this not to speak negatively about my own mother or your mother or any mother out there because I genuinely believe that people do the best they can in terms of being parents with the skills and resources and healing and safety and support that they have. So I believe that our mothers did the best that they could for us. And I also know that the reality is that there were parts of the way that you were mothered, most likely, that didn't feel good or didn't feel supportive or aligned. And that that makes an imprint on you, on me, on us. And that imprint basically forms a neural pattern in your nervous system. And then that forms some adaptive responses inside of you, some ways of thinking about things, some ways of being present in your life and behaviors that are rooted in experiences from childhood. And so when we talk about mother wounds, we're really talking about acknowledging that impact of the way that you were mothered on how you feel in the here and now. Mother wound work is not about rehashing every single painful memory, although that can sometimes be an important part of processing your story and validating yourself and growing and healing beyond it. It's really about looking at the version of you that you feel like you can embody now and whether or not that matches up to the desires that you have for yourself. Because in my world, as a spaceholder and as a guide and mentor for women who are growing and healing from a holistic approach, like mind, body, spirit, yoga, life, all of it woven in, I can tell you that if you're like my other clients, or maybe you are one of my clients, that you have really clear desires and expectations for yourself. And those might be that you want to be a more patient mom with your children. It might be that you want to feel less stressed as you're moving through your days. You might feel like you want to have more ease in different areas of your life. You might want to feel more relaxed in your nervous system as opposed to being in a fight or flight mode all of the time or most of the time. It might be that you want to feel less sucked into what other people are feeling and to have more clarity and connection to your deepest truths inside of you, right? Or more trusting in relationship or whatever it is. Like the women that decide to do mother wound work are not doing it because it sounds fun, right? It's not, it's not uh, it's not particularly fun work. And it's also for a purpose of alchemizing pain in order to create liberation within yourself. And this is a cyclical process. For me, I have gone through many different rounds of tending to my mother wounds and reparenting myself and arriving at new thresholds of possibility within me each time I have done that. And I can share just as a woman who's committed to doing this work for myself, that really working with mother wounds has actually been one of the most beautiful healing experiences of my life. Sometimes as I'm moving through the world and I think about all of the women out there who are wanting to grow and heal and embody this vision and desire that they have for themselves. Like what would be the most important needle mover that any one of them could work on? And I'll be honest, I kind of feel like this is it. I kind of feel like it all points back to here. It all comes back to how you were mothered because that wires up your nervous system. That creates the default programming in your nervous system that you will carry throughout your life, and that can change. You can change the default setting of your nervous system. You can change that sort of wiring. And that piece, your nervous system, in case you don't know, the way your nervous system is wired impacts everything, love. It impacts the thoughts that you have. It impacts the emotions that you have. It impacts the behaviors that you feel you have the possibility to do. One of the things that I hear from women are, I feel like I don't have time for myself. Life is too busy. How do I squeeze in my yoga practice? And the reality is that's a past version of you that you might be overindulging when the present moment you know that her yoga practice offers her a space to be held and supported and to feel at home within yourself, body, mind, and spirit, and to be nourished and to offer you a quiet transformation that ripples out into every part of your life. And so is this an illusion of there not being time? Probably. That's just your nervous system telling you that. Resourced you, the nourished woman you, whole self you, she knows how to claim this. Let's talk about how mother wounds can manifest so that you know how to spot them in your own experience of being a child. And by the way, if you're listening to this podcast today and you're a mom yourself, please put yourself in the headspace of a child who is an adult now. Because I want you to look at this from the lens of what your own experience was growing up rather than how you're currently raising your own children. Let's resource back in. Mother wound healing is about you healing from your own experiences so that you can then be the version of yourself as a mom that you want to be. Mother wounds ultimately arise in that sort of gap between the needs that you had and the response that your mother had to those needs. The needs that you had and the response that your mother had to those needs. Some examples of this would be needing to have physical proximity to your mom and her not being around. Maybe she was working a lot of hours and prioritizing work over time with you. Maybe she was physically not part of pieces of your life. Maybe she was not a part of your life from birth onward. Maybe your mom was not emotionally available and attentive to your needs in the way that you really needed her to be and wanted her to be. Perhaps she ignored your emotions. Perhaps she invalidated your emotions. Perhaps she didn't help you to nurture your interest. She didn't pay attention to you. She didn't pour her presence and time into you. Perhaps your mother disregarded how you felt. There's all these different ways that a mother ultimately does not respond to a need that you have. And it's different for every single person that listens to this podcast. So I don't want to get too much into this category because it's something that I think is best unearthed with a person that you trust and feel safe with that can help you to guide, to guide you through it. But it's basically just this core knowing that the way that you were mothered didn't line up with the needs and the wants that you have. Because the the fundamentals of a mother are they nurture, protect, and guide. Nurturance takes on so many different forms, pouring into you with their time, with their love, with their energy, with their presence, feeding you, clothing you, helping you get your needs met in a school system, like all of these different ways that you are nurtured on every single level, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and in life. Then there's the protection piece. And protection is, you know, teaching you agency and consent around your body. It can be protecting your mental health from complex adult situations that are too scary for a child to be aware of. It could have been treating you like a friend rather than treating you like they were your mother and you're the child. Protection can take on so many different forms, especially in the abuse category, right? Were you protected from physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse? Were you protected from any number of things that you needed protection from? And you can look to Maslow's hierarchy of needs for this, but you can also just look within yourself. One of the ways that I see protection not happen is protection from a mother's own trauma and wounding. So if a mother is not addressing her mental health and she's not healing her own trauma and wounding, then that's a lack of protection for you as the child. The last fundamental aspect of a mother is guidance. And guidance is that real-time connection with you, seeing what you're navigating with a friend and being there to listen and talk you through how to navigate that in a way that keeps you resourced in yourself and helps you to maintain the friendships that are important, let go of the ones that aren't, things like that. Guiding can also be in the educational realm. It can be with nutrition, it can be with you becoming a menstruating young woman and ultimately a mother, right? Like sometimes I see when I look at books and resources about mother wounds that it all focuses on attachment trauma, which is related to the earliest period of your life. But I want to suggest that actually mother wounds are way more complicated than just what happened in the earliest areas of your life. It's what continues to happen as you're being nurtured throughout your life and protected and guided by your own mother. And so anything in that category, nurturing, protecting, guiding, how were my needs not met? And then how can I, as adult me, acknowledge that? Because if I don't acknowledge that on some level, I'm going to carry this programming with me. Because that little girl inside of you, she needed something that she didn't get. An adult you has the skills, resources, bandwidth, and accessibility to support that can meet those needs and liberate the parts of you that are still bound by those past experiences. One thing that I want to say here, because it is a privilege that needs to be pointed out, is that not every family has the same degree of security as other families. For example, if you grew up in a family where there was plenty of food in the fridge and you never had to worry about where your next meal came from, if you grew up in a family where you had a safe, clean bed to sleep in every night of your childhood, if you grew up in a family without physical abuse or sexual abuse in the home, then and emotional abuse in the home, then you have a great amount of privilege. And that does not minimize your need to recover from mother wounds just the same as somebody who did not grow up with those things. And it does change the fabric of what was going on in the situation. And so if you grew up in a home where you had that scarcity around food and physical safety in terms of home security and safety around abuse, like you did not have that safety around abuse, then these mother wounds are deeper. And I really just want to highlight that getting some professional support is going to be absolutely monumental. Sometimes when people listen to a podcast like this, and I don't want this to be you, it's this idea that you can then just read an article and listen to a podcast and dive into the depths of some of the most complicated material of your experience in this human version of your life. And it's just not like that. Sometimes we need people to walk through us so that we can do it intelligently. And this podcast is not a substitute for you getting that support. Let's talk about how mother wounds can impact you. Oh my gosh, love. I continue to be shocked, I think is the right word, by how many different areas of your being mother wounds can have a ripple effect in. And so let me try to summarize it for you, but also to let you know that woof, this is a really big category, and there's a lot going on here. And you can certainly go and give it a good Google and look up on the internet to find more and more details about this. But basically, mother wounds can impact you on every single level. They can impact your the way that you feel about your body and your self-worth. Mother wounds can impact your mental health. They can impact whether or not you develop eating disorders or emotional eating behavior. They can develop anxiety patterns, depression. They can obviously lead to trauma. Mother wounds can have so much to do with how you think and how you feel and how you relate to other people in the mental health arena and how you relate to everything from money to food to sex to friendship. Mother wounds can have an impact all the way around. Mother wounds can have long-term impacts on relationships, particularly in terms of what kind of romantic partners you choose for yourself. Are you choosing partners that mirror what you experience growing up? Are you recreating dynamics in your life in terms of any different kind of relationship with work or with friends or community or money or self-care that are actually just perpetuations of what you experienced growing up? So mother wounds can impact you on every single level, including spirituality. Sometimes I see women coming through my practice who have spiritual trauma from their upbringing and the way that they were mothered, purity culture, religious trauma, ways that religion was used to oppress the authentic truths of feelings of a child that was coming up, or to control or restrict your choices as you were growing up. And that can have such a huge spiral effect. I will say in my own personal journey that learning more about the ripple effect of mother wounds has actually been a great relief to me because so much of what I have struggled with in my life actually all points back to here. And that's what I was talking about earlier. And the fact that if I could pick one area for my female clients to focus in on that I think would be the biggest needle mover for them, for you, it would be this. And not everybody's ready for this. You may not be ready for this. This may not feel like the right fit for you, but I can tell you from my professional experience that I feel like the ripple effect is so big. The wiring in your nervous system is so strong that this is one of the places where I see women become free in such a big way. I want to talk to you about how you heal mother wounds. Part of the journey is largely related to the acknowledgement that this exists for you. Just like straightforward. I experienced these things and they impacted me in this way. And it impacted the way that I think and the way that I feel, and it impacted me here, and it impacted me there. I experienced these things. And so it's almost this job of sitting down and assessing what did you actually experience? What was it like to be the child of your mother? Was she there? Was she not there? Was she inconsistent? Could you trust her? Could you not trust her? What did you learn from your mother about your own body? How do you how did she reflect that she felt about herself? What did she teach you about money? Like all of these different things that you're looking at. What was it like for me to be the child of my mother at that time in her life? And then it's about what are you gonna do with that? Right. So now that you know those things, now that you've done what I consider to be one of the most nervous system regulating things that you could ever do, which is to feel your feelings and acknowledge them and acknowledge what's happened to you, then it becomes what do I do with that? And so that what do I do with that piece is about you learning to meet your own needs and wants in real time. And not just from a heady space. This isn't just about you sitting with a journal. It's how do I nourish all of the parts of me? How do I nourish my body? How do I love on my inner child? How do I tend to my nervous system? How do I improve my mental health? How do I think about things differently? How do I make more expansive choices in my life that aren't just rooted in my past programming, that are really me in the present moment showing up differently? And part of this, my love, this meeting your own needs and wants in real time is actually you choosing to not keep indulging the same way that you were before. You're not gonna let yourself go into those emotional spirals anymore. You're not gonna spend your time thinking those same old thoughts that make you feel sad and depressed and heavy or isolated and alone. You're gonna choose different thoughts. You're not gonna scatter your energy and give it to this person who does not care what you think or feel. You're gonna pull your energy back. You might edit different areas of your life. You might stop indulging those past versions of you. You might change the way that you're showing up so that it is different and better aligned for you in real time. And this is you reparenting yourself. And of course, I believe as a somatic yoga therapist that you doing somatic yoga therapy is a hugely, hugely important way for you to do this because you all of this stuff that you're processing here, it actually lives in your body and it lives in your nervous system. And so if you're not tending to those two pieces of the puzzle, it's kind of like pulling a dandelion off by the head and then leaving the stalk and leaving the weeds. You've left the whole structure that's going to keep growing that same thing over and over again. And so tending to your body and your nervous system as a part of this is really where I see women making great strides in their freedom around the mother wounds and being able to show up differently in your life based on that vision that you hold for yourself of how you really want to be. The last thing that I want to touch on today is for all the women listening to this that are mothering children right now while healing from mother wounds and tending to your own inner child and breaking cycles. And the first thing I want to do is just congratulate you because you are doing the work. I'm dancing you can't see me, but I'm dancing, you're doing the work. Oh my gosh, love. One of the greatest predictors of our children's long-term mental health is that you address your mental health. And of course, mental health is not just about your mind, it's about your body, it's about your nervous system. And you're here and you're listening to this podcast right now and you are freaking doing it. Yes, honey, I am celebrating you in the biggest way. And oh my gosh, it's hard out there, y'all. Let's be real. Mothering your children while learning to regulate their nervous system and regulate your own and work with your own emotions and unmet needs while helping your children be nurtured and guided and protected. It's a lot of work, my love. It's really good work. It's hard work, it's worth it. It's the best investment you could ever make. And it's hard. And I see you. One of the things that I want to dispel is that you have to get it perfectly right all of the time because you do not. You do not have to get it perfectly right all of the time. I want you to focus on being present and awake and nourishing yourself and then showing up for your children in the same way. Am I present? Am I awake? Am I nourishing, protecting, and guiding them? And when you mess up, because you will, can you make a repair? Can you apologize to that child and say, hey, wow, I got really angry and I did this and that, and I bet that that scared you, and I'm so sorry that I did that. It's not okay for me to act that way. In the future, I'm gonna practice this calm down strategy, and I'm gonna continue to work on helping the part of me that got really triggered in that moment so that I can be an even safer feeling person for you, even when I have big feelings. So it's that simple dynamic that many of us didn't get growing up that you have the capacity to give your child. It's weaving in play in those hard moments for yourself and for the children that makes a big difference. So you make a repair when you mess up, you let go of the perfection, and then how can you play a little bit more? How can you play and enjoy your children more? How can you play and enjoy yourself more? And then how can you make those sticky points of parenting a more playful experience? And I'll be honest that for some people this comes a little bit easier than other, but I will say that it will make a bigger difference for you and your kids if you can learn how to weave and play amidst the hard. And many of us did not learn that skill growing up. We did not learn how to play when we were navigating something tricky for us. And I believe that it can be an important game-changing opportunity for you and your kids. The last thing that I want to share with you is that this mother wound healing journey is something that may or may not be for you. And that's that's totally good. You maybe have listened to this and you're like, oh my gosh, I feel like Carrie is telling me that I should be doing this work. I'm just telling you that this work is out there and that it might be something that you want to play with and explore the possibilities around. But first and foremost, my love, your own inner knowing knows what you need and it knows what is going to be the most supportive of it. So as you walk away from this episode, resource back into that, your own inner knowing. And if your inner child has a response to this, if you feel some tenderness coming up, if you feel some visceral responses in your body to what I've talked about here, I want you to do this one thing for yourself right now. And it's to pause and to ask yourself, what do I want and what do I need in this moment? And it could be something like, I need to go stand outside and feel the sunshine on my skin. Or it could be I need to get up and spend a few minutes stretching or breathing. Or it could be I need to go hug someone or something. It might be that you need to do something light and funny. Maybe you watch a video of a raccoon eating grapes. It might be that you want to have an emotional connection with somebody right now. Whatever it is, or with yourself. Just nourish yourself right now in this moment and know that you're doing it. You're loving on the part of you that has needs and wants, and you're meeting them in real time. And that is part of what mother wound healing looks like. And you just did it for yourself. If this podcast episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Instagram at the Nourished Woman or through my website, carry marino.com. And if you're looking for a space for deeper support, mentorship, or simply a space to feel helped, I'd love to have you join us inside the Nourished Woman Sanctuary. The beautiful music you're hearing is from Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band, and you can find them on all streaming platforms.