Karyl McBride

Healthy self-care means finding fulfillment so that you have energy, love, and empathy for others.

Now that you have an understanding of how the behavior of your mother affected you, you can begin to heal by taking the following steps to recover from the pain:

• Accept your mother’s limitations and grieve that you did not have the mother you wanted

• Separate psychologically from your mother, and reframe the negative messages that you absorbed from her into positive ones

• Develop and accept your own identity, feelings, and desires

• Deal with your mother in a different, healthy manner

• Work to recognize your own narcissistic traits and refuse to pass them on to your children.

As a child growing up, you were likely very good at denying, numbing, or compensating for your own feelings rather than allowing yourself to feel them.

it is important to note that you cannot completely “cure” the scars of a childhood trauma. You work with them, process them, and learn how to deal with them differently so that you feel better.

Your trunk or development phase bears the scars, which don’t really go away; they are part of who we are. But recovery work helps us to treat any gashes, to fill them in, supply balm and seal them gently, and takes away the old and recurring pain, changing the original trauma, allowing you to grow around it and up and away from it.

The things that happened to us are important to acknowledge; they play into who we are today. Yet they do not define who we are today, and by working in recovery, you refuse to allow your past to tell you who you are. You accept and face your past as part of you, and you move on.

If you are used to keeping busy to avoid the pain, or to using a substance or some addiction to numb the pain, you will notice the feelings coming up when you slow down and sit quietly or allow yourself to be alone. This is very important to do. Set aside some time alone solely for this grieving process. Do it several times until you begin to feel relief.

Every little girl deserves to have a mother who is crazy about her. If you didn’t have a loving mother, you have a right to grieve the loss.

“As an adult, I am just learning to be in touch with my feelings. I certainly didn’t learn this from Mom. I can still picture her and how controlled she was with feelings. She would put on her sunglasses and get this stone-cold face. If I got emotional, she would say, ‘Stop it or I’ll slap you!’

When Lauren, Elyse, other clients, and I allowed this grief process, we began to see how we could finally let go.