With its intense physical and emotional demands, motherhood often provokes extreme emotions, including unpleasant ones, such as rage, fear, or shame. For this reason, motherhood often introduces us to the darkness within, made up of those despised and repudiated parts of ourselves that are sometimes frightening to know, and that we can think of as our shadow.
A Big Emotion is Not an Emergency: Helping Teenagers Manage Their Emotions
I learned early in my daughter’s toddler days that savvy moms don’t gasp or shriek when the baby falls and ...
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When Connecting with Kids is Hard
Last week, I shared a fairy tale which explored a parent child relationship in which the parents are ashamed or ...
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When We Are Ashamed of Our Kids
What an uncomfortable feeling to become aware that we are disappointed with or ashamed of our child, even momentarily. I ...
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Humble Gifts: On Knowing We’re Enough
I had a conversation with a mother in my practice this week that brought up something important. As usual, I ...
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What Happens When We Don’t Like Our Kids?
I am always a little surprised when a mother tells me with great shame and in great secrecy that she ...
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Helping Our Kids Become Whole
“The right way to wholeness,” Jung wrote, “is full of fateful detours and wrong turnings.” And yet many mothers worry ...
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When Parenting Reveals Our Shadow
Discussion with Lourdes Viado, Ph.D, MFT on the "Women In-Depth: Conversations about the Inner Lives of Women" podcast. We cover ...
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Helping Teens Manage Big Emotions
Research indicates that emotional regulation is one of the most important skills we can teach our children. Teens who lack ...
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What if I Feel Envious of My Kid?
Janice had been seeing me for a few years, but I had never seen her quite this uncomfortable before. She ...
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How Motherhood Helps Us Value Our Flaws
We all have aspects of ourselves we would rather not know about. As kids, we may have been taught that ...
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Can Motherhood Make You Badass?
My mother was never very good at saying “no.” When as I teenager I would ask her for something she ...
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Am I Raising a Narcissist?
Recently, some research on parental overvaluation created a stir by suggesting that treating our kids as “special” can lead them to ...
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Can Mothering Help Us Love Our Worst Qualities
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “shadow” to refer to all those part of ourselves we would rather ...
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Managing Adolescent Volatility
If we are parenting an adolescent, we realize that the teen years come upon us as a second storm after ...
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Parenting When Depleted
Kathryn’s eyes filled with tears as she related to me how worn and spent she felt caring for her twin ...
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Is There a Right Way to Parent?
My Facebook feed abounds with articles and book reviews about parenting. Apparently, we are overvaluing, overscheduling, and overprotecting our children. The underlying ...
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Why Does Motherhood Make Women So Judgy?
Christine was uncharacteristically upset when she arrived for our appointment. She had just gotten off the phone with Marni, someone ...
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Does Anyone Ever Regret Having Kids?
The answer is “yes,” as discussed with great honesty in this article. Most of the time, no matter how ambivalent we ...
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The Dark Mother
I love Neil Gaiman’s wonderful short novel “Coraline.” It seems to me that this terrifically frightening book shows how the ...
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Carrying Authority — The Legend of the Gargoyle
My mother was never very good at saying no. When as a teenager I would ask her for something she ...
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