“Becoming a mom when your mom stopped talking to you: The pain and confusion of estrangement”
By Emily Bitner, MS, LCPC
She said it quietly, almost as an aside.
"Being a parent now reminds me of my past."
She is a physician — accomplished, warm, deeply committed to her patients. She has spent years building a career she is proud of, learning to trust her own voice in rooms that didn't always make space for it. She is, by every external measure, a woman who has figured it out.
And yet. Parenthood cracking something open that she thought she had sealed.
Her mother stops speaking to her in cycles — months at a time, unpredictably, without resolution. It started as a teen. It still happens now. That past still feels alive in the present — in how she moves through female relationships at work, in the hypervigilance she wears so naturally it gets reinforced by being so detail oriented and dedicated to others.
"Disappointing others is a trigger," she told me. "Because of my mom."
She drew that line herself. I didn't have to.
According to the Institute for Family Studies, mother-child separation is considered one of the most painful life experiences, yet it is accompanied by a silence not only between family members but among those outside the family as well. It is tough to talk about the sadness, shame, guilt, or deep sorrow that accompanies an outcome that diverges so widely from societal norms.
And yet here it is, shaping the professional lives, the leadership styles, and the relational patterns of some of the most accomplished women I know.
As a psychotherapist specializing in high-achieving women who suffer from the crushing and confusing loss of a mother who has cut off from you and as a woman who has navigated this myself, - I have come to understand that underneath so much of that exhaustion is something that rarely gets named.
It is the wound of being unmothered.
Not necessarily the loss of a mother to death, something quieter and in many ways much more confusing — a mother who was present but not emotionally available, at least not consistently. A mother who was alive but somehow unreachable, through estrangement, through reasons not fully understood or diagnosed, through a relationship that quietly broke and was never fully repaired. And it doesn't matter how old you are. Whether this happened when you were 17 or 37, you never stop wanting a mother. That longing is not a weakness. It is one of the most human things about you.
I have my own version of this.
When my mother stopped being in my life, it felt like losing the emotional roof over my head and the floor beneath my feet. Like driving in an ice storm with no windshield. You keep moving because you have to. You learn to navigate without the protection or nurturing you were supposed to have. And eventually you become so skilled at forward motion that almost no one can tell what it cost you to get there.
Almost no one.
The physician I spoke with named something I hear consistently: leading other women carries a particular weight when your earliest experience of a woman's love was unpredictable. When you learned early that warmth could be withdrawn without warning, you develop relational hypervigilance. You read the room constantly. You people please not from weakness but from a deeply intelligent adaptation — because once upon a time, managing her mood kept you safe.
That adaptation may be part of why you became so good at what you do. But it is exhausting. And it follows you into every professional relationship you will ever have with another woman.
Rosjke Hasseldine, licensed clinician and founder of Mother-Daughter Coaching International, describes this as "the river of nurturance flowing backwards" — the daughter who grows up emotionally caretaking her mother rather than being nourished by her. It is a reversal so subtle, so normalized, that many women don't recognize it until decades later, when they find themselves exhausted, overgiving, and wondering why they can never quite feel held.
Clinically, this is ambiguous loss — grief without a clear event, without closure, without social permission to mourn. There is no funeral for a mother who is still alive. There is only the ongoing negotiation of hope and disappointment, and the quiet work of building a life around an absence that was never supposed to be there.
What I offer in my clinical work, through Relational EMDR, psychodynamic therapy, attachment-based approaches, and an integration of the spiritual and somatic dimensions of healing, is something beyond awareness. It is the experience of a relationship with Self, with others, and with the natural world around us that doesn't withdraw. That stays. That can hold the full weight of what she carries without flinching or disappearing.
For women who learned early that love comes with conditions and silence comes without warning, that is not a small thing.
It is, for many of them, the first time they have felt both the floor beneath their feet and something warm above them. Not just stability — but the experience of being held. Of coming home to themselves.
Things you can do now.
De-personalize the choice your mom took to step away from you. This takes work, but consider that this is not about you, even though it’s directed at you.
Talk about it with others, other women have been through this. Know you’re not alone, this exists regardless of culture, socioeconomic status, family “closeness”.
Work with a specialized therapist, one who understands attachment trauma, mother-daughter dynamics and complicated grief. We exist, it’s worth finding someone who can really speak this language with you.
Emily Bitner, MS, LCPC is a licensed psychotherapist in Maryland specializing in high-achieving women navigating the unmothered wound and the relational complexity it creates in professional and personal life. She sees clients in-person in Baltimore and virtually across Maryland.