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The Place for Connection
Welcome to The Place for Connection, where I believe that connection is the CURE – the podcast where soul meets science, and healing takes centre stage.
Hosted by psychologist, breathwork practitioner, and all-around vibe curator, Melissa Beaton, this podcast dives deep into the art and science of connection – to yourself, your community, and the big beautiful world around you.
Each episode is a juicy mix of expert wisdom and heartfelt stories from healers of ALL kinds: psychologists, bodyworkers, doulas, yogis, spiritual guides, and even the ones who heal with music, art, and a bit of magic. We’re here to inspire, uplift, and get real about what it takes to live a connected, purpose-driven life.
This isn’t your average self-help podcast. It’s a space where radical authenticity meets practical tools, where curiosity replaces judgment, and where the real work feels less like a chore and more like a calling.
Why listen?
Because you’ll leave every episode feeling seen, heard, and ready to take the next step in your own healing journey. Whether you’re a professional, a healer, someone seeking growth, or just here for the good vibes – this is the place for you.
Want to work with Melissa?
Reach out via the website contact page at www.zensohouse.com or instagram @zensohouse
The Place for Connection
Embracing the Beautiful Messiness of Motherhood with Bridget Wood from Nourishing the Mother
How does motherhood transform us into more self-aware and profound versions of ourselves? We are thrilled to host Bridget Wood, co-host of Nourishing the Mother, as she shares her insight into the emotional evolution that comes with being a mother. Bridget's personal stories reveal how the journey prompted her to reassess her identity and embrace self-care as essential to parenting. We unpack how the pressures of conscious parenting, coupled with the influence of social media, often lead to feelings of shame and guilt, urging all mothers to accept their imperfections as a natural part of the process.
Emotions like anger and anxiety are more than just challenges; they are clues leading to deeper understanding. Together with Bridget, we examine the complex emotional landscape mothers navigate, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging these feelings. By sharing anecdotes from her own life, Bridget illustrates how facing these emotions brought long-buried aspects of herself to light, ultimately forging a stronger self-connection. Listen as we encourage mothers to cultivate internal awareness, fostering emotional clarity and nurturing a healthier relationship with themselves and their children. This episode is a heartfelt guide to embracing the beautiful messiness of motherhood.
Welcome to episode three of the Place for Connection podcast. I'm joined by Bridget Wood. Bridget is co-host of Nourishing the Mother. She's also a mother herself, and yet she's got her own history. So I'm just going to open the table for you to introduce yourself and just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what brought you into this space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks so much, melissa.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful to be on your podcast and, yeah, to be just hopping into a space to talk more about mothering and our journeys as women.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what really brought me into this space, I guess, was, like, I think what so many women experience when they enter a motherhood is just this cracking open of your sense of self, of your own identity, of this deep, profound longing to be almost all you can be for your child, like that was a huge catalyst, I think, for me, certainly, there'd been parts of my life or in my teens and 20s where I felt like I held back, you know, or I would retreat into maybe not putting myself out there because of, you know, all the parts that that get afraid of, you know, rejection and all those things, but I feel like having my son was just really I couldn't rest on those excuses or anxieties anymore. I think my, my wife, I suppose, became bigger and you know, of course, the the journey of motherhood and the sleeplessness and all the ways it kind of breaks you open. Yes, yeah, it's quite even more of that. Yeah, yeah, amazing.
Speaker 1:I guess I'm thoughtful, like what did you notice about that journey of motherhood in terms of that breaking open, like what came through for you that moved you more towards you know, nourishing yourself? It sounds like in all aspects of your life right. Yeah, what kind of showed up for you at that time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I took initially quite almost an academic approach to motherhood, right, like in the sense of like I want to read the books and I want to be prepared and, like you know, I did the breastfeeding class because I didn't know, I hadn't really been around that. Like I did all of the birth classes because I didn't have an experience of it and I wanted and I was very clear about what I wanted and I suppose I kind of took the same approach to how to raise a child and started off really with, like, what we all do, which is the right things that you need to say to your child and you know, the right things to put in front of them in their environment, to stimulate them. And I think, very quickly, probably within the first couple of months, I recognized like there's a whole piece of me that I haven't given any presence to that's being required to grow here. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:And I think that that was when I recognized oh, this is not something that we do or provide for a child, it's just as much what we do for and provide for ourselves to be able to rise to what we see our child is asking of us. And that was probably the real watershed moment where it became clear to me that we need to care for mothers in order to be able to provide the experiences that we want to provide for children.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting because I did an infant study when I it must have been when I first moved back to the Gold Coast and I had a supervisor who was a psychologist, who was just really interested in the psychological development of children.
Speaker 1:So she just set this up for us and I remember I was pregnant at the time with my second child and I remember the whole time I was just focused on but what about the mother Like?
Speaker 1:And so you know she would always say Mel, like it's actually about the infant, and it was just interesting that I kept thinking, oh, but you know, like, in a way I'm also wondering, wondering, like how this mother is coping and and like we're watching the child's personality develop and if it's, it's true, like a, like a dyad right, like like to the mother and child, and then obviously the the co-parent as well, if there is a co-parent in the picture, then I'm like how, how are we also documenting how the mother's psychological, emotional, sexual safety is kind of being held? And I think what really resonated with me about your work was not only the emphasis on the child but also on the mother, and then how that translates into better parenting, more present parenting, and I think there was an episode I listened to on the weekend it must've been a recent episode and you talk about this experience of, also like the imperfections.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, absolutely, because I think also too, we I mean my oldest child I have three children. They're between five and 11, so five, eight and 11. And my oldest child. You know Instagram was very much in its infancy then. There wasn't this ability that we had as mothers to just become consumed by all of the content that tells us how we should do things and how to get it right and how to be better. Sure, we could find that on blogs, but it wasn't so everywhere then, like it is now, and so I think it's really important. And I joked to many of the women in my community. I said I feel like sometimes I'm here to help rehabilitate women who've gone so far down the conscious parenting like rabbit hole, you know and almost need to be rebuilt because there's so much shame and guilt from how they think they need to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just got goosebumps actually, like I just in my practice, like working, working with women, because I work with a lot of new mums and often first-time parents and um, and and there is just so much shame. Yeah, and I like to differentiate shame from guilt, because guilt's when you actually fuck up, right, whereas like shame is all of those critical thoughts and like what are some of the myths or, I guess, stories that get perpetuated about conscious parenting, that that you have encountered in your work with women that you think would be helpful, you know, to kind of debunk yeah with me today, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think, I think the imperatives really, that your child should never feel like they're not a priority in your life or your child should always be able to feel safe with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, like that's an idealism, because the reality is, as long as you have a nervous system, your child's going to have experiences of safety and a lack of safety with you. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and I think that that's really important and and also, too, for mothers to understand that our children are learning. First of all, they're patterning their nervous system on ours. Yes, that's how they learn their foundational sense of how to be in the world, but also they're learning how to be human from us, and if we didn't need anger as an emotion, it would have become extinct. Like we have an evolutionary need to feel anger, yeah, but yet so many mothers and women have a complicated relationship with it. They either deny it and push it down and you get passive, aggressive, or you know it stirs up and creates problems in their own body, or they're ungoverned with it and they can't track it until it becomes explosive.
Speaker 2:But both of those are byproducts of not having a healthy relationship with it and they can't track it until it becomes explosive. But both of those are byproducts of not having a healthy relationship with it and also knowing you know what your boundaries are, what your needs are. And I think often for women, internalizing this ideal of being this good mother and the good mother does and the good mother says and have that constant narrative running which can, for some women, take them so far out of their authentic selves that, like the body, like the nervous system, will fight you if you try to disown yourself right, like your nervous system is designed to dysregulate you enough to help. You see, you're losing yourself.
Speaker 1:I, like, am so aligned on the repressed anger trajectory and I guess, for listeners who perhaps don't understand what we mean when we say anger, do you have a simple way that you tend to describe it for your you know?
Speaker 2:I think what we have is a spectrum right, so we have little frustrations you know, frustrations that aren't unpacked, understood, met, can then stack to become anger, and sometimes that anger is just something that bubbles up and you release it and you move through it and you process it, or it can become a way of being right.
Speaker 2:So we have simmering anger or, you know, a constant kind of habitual response more to anger or feeling resentful, like feeling resentful maybe to a partner for not stepping up, or feeling resentful to your children's constant needs, and those ones are when it becomes like a state of being, like a dominant way of feeling. That's when it's really difficult to get ourselves back from there. It often requires a. I like to consider it like a sociological understanding, like you know why am I angry? You know what have I internalised around being a mother that is making it so difficult to feel like I'm leading my life? Because if we feel like we're a passenger in our life, then it's really hard to feel inspired by that. It's really hard to wake up and feel energetic about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, I guess the space that I'm aiming to create in here is that women can feel autonomous and sexy and powerful and liberated and, I think, part of healthy anger. So I like to differentiate like aggression from anger. Like aggression is an act that usually is triggered by our anxiety about our mixed feelings. Right, the love and the anger concurrently gets us anxious and then maybe we might externalize it in words or behaviors. Right, and we all have those moments Like I certainly subscribe to that. I'm not perfect. I actually shared with a client yesterday like just to normalize, like, yeah, we all blow our fuse and it's just our capacity then to also feel guilt and apologize. But I think the problem when we tend to repress anger as well for women is then we don't really get to to do what's best for us.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and we don't get to listen to the message of it because anger, anger. There's a sacred part to anger, right it? Sometimes it's, like you know, clarion call to like our deepest selves yes, and if we don't allow it to exist, like if it's shrouded in shame, we don't allow it to have a space, then we're not also then giving ourselves permission to hear what it has to say yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:I really like that, yeah, that link to, to kind of our own innate knowing and that intuitive response in terms of linking it with that sociological approach, because in essence that means we're looking at it, you know, as a complex, you know kind of family system and dynamic and there's people you know who have different wills and wishes and feelings and urges, and so you know, as a psychologist, working with one person is like hard right, and then you add a partner or a child and then it just becomes way more complicated In your work with women.
Speaker 1:you know, if you were to impart something to listeners, where do you think women can benefit from starting in terms of building this relationship with themselves? And I don't necessarily mean it has to be with anger straight away, but even just, perhaps, to cultivate more internal awareness of what they're feeling, what their thoughts are, just moment to moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think that there's what comes up for us in motherhood, which is quite complex often, is that we find long buried parts of ourselves which we're trying to make sense of. So, for an example might be like with myself when I had my son and I could not bear to hear him cry. I would not leave him. I wouldn't I mean, it went against my instincts to sleep, train him, but so to the point, though, where I couldn't even hear him grizzle because it was so deeply uncomfortable for me. And so I remember, like rocking him and trying to kind of breastfeed him at the same time, my mom saying to me, gosh, like how do you, how do you do that? Like I would have just put you in the room and close the door and I'm like there it is, oh man, and so what?
Speaker 2:so what I recognized was like, okay, so there's a part of me like baby me is really struggling being with my baby and these feelings that it stirs up in my nervous system you know that are really old, like feelings of abandonment or feelings of of terror, right, which is really normal for for an infant, and so I think it's important for us to recognize, as mothers, like you know, if I'm having these disproportionate feelings in response to, like, what's happening in front of me, then it's likely not about this moment, it's about whatever the I'm making this moment mean that I'm conscious or unconscious of yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100.
Speaker 2:So, and this is why I think we need so much gentleness around ourselves and around the other mothers that we're around and that we work with, because this process of discovering that, especially when it's things that happened to us pre-age three, when the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that can think and recall memory we can't recall the moments, we can only feel the nervous system activation that maps to those experiences and so then what tends to happen is we start to build a new narrative sometimes, or an old one that we rekindle about our parents and our parentage, and then what that then creates is this desire to parent differently or to have a different experience for our child, which can often move into more protective out of fear of our child experiencing what, what we experienced and then, and that that creates a perfect storm then for the instagram, perfect, conscious parenting. You know, I will never harm my child, ever. You know my child is sacred. All of the above stuff, and that's part of the sociological picture of the perfect mother myth.
Speaker 2:So this almost unspoken but very real set of rules that mothers start to feel conditioned by when they enter motherhood as an institution, which is, you know, that the child's needs come first and that the mother should dedicate you know that the child's needs come first and that the mother should dedicate you know endless hours and resources to the wellbeing of her child, that she should also prioritise her self-care and her fitness, because you know that benefits the child as well.
Speaker 2:And she should also look after her relationship because, of course, like we know that, like children who are, who are maybe by-products of broken relationships, struggle right Like whatever the things are that we perceive are written on this wall, essentially, of rules around mothering. And so what is this? This woman who's running away from her past towards this idealistic future which is propped up by what she sees around her, what she's consuming on her feed, what she sees in movies, how she sees women able to keep these perfect houses and these lovely children who don't talk back or who aren't aggressive, or who don't hit, or you know whatever it is. And so you can see we've got this incredible, impossible, unicorn version of mothering that we're trying to practice. That is a highway to burnout, essentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fully, as I hear you talk about that, I just feel like almost like pressure, yeah, yeah, like on my chest, like this huge weight and just like you just kind of want to. I don't know about you, but like with my mother's, I just want to like unfurl all the pressure and like, just almost like, go throw it in the bin.
Speaker 1:You know all these stories and lies you've been told about how you're meant to be, like, how would it be if you could just do what feels right for you and what feels intuitive for you, rather than what you think you're kind of meant to do, meant to do? Because I think all the messaging also becomes so convoluted and confusing that that also interrupts intuition. It's kind of like oh well, if my intuition is contrary to like this data that I'm receiving from parents or friends or the internet, then it's like I have to forgo my own like thoughts or reactions. Or even I see that in partners, perhaps, where there's different parenting methods. Yeah, do you see that too?
Speaker 2:yeah, I do.
Speaker 2:There's a quite a phenomenon where, like, the more um kind of gentle or permissive or struggling to hold boundaries a mother is, the more harsher and punitive a father becomes, essentially because a child needs a balance of both, and if you over-function and over-support, the universe needs that child to have an experience of challenge.
Speaker 2:But this is also why it's important to look at you know, in parenting dynamics, how much of how I'm parenting is to save my child from my experience of my father, right, because we can have a father wound that shows up in how then we want to parent our children, and so we can struggle with, you know, our partner's anger or our partner's criticism or our partner's harshness, and so then we can, we can placate or resist being firm, which actually creates more of the same thing.
Speaker 2:So, just to, this is why knowing our kind of origin story is what I talk about it as that we bring in helps us to see whether we're seeing this situation for what it is, because this is the thing with perception is that we filter out like 98% of the data that's coming at us, right, and this is why like to what activates you and your child and what the thing that triggers you the most will be completely different to the thing that triggers your partner, because they're not seeing them the same way that you see them, because they have a different set of narratives that they bring to the situation yeah, awfully.
Speaker 1:I have like an example of myself when my youngest was little and he was like a you know a child who got a lot of reflux, and so you'd put him in the car seat and he'd just scream instantly, poor cherub, like he must have been very painful. Yeah, and I would get very anxious about the screaming, like obviously something about my own wounds right because it was way over threshold.
Speaker 1:I was just like, oh my gosh, you know he's not going to cope and this is terrible. And also like, like that concern and love paired with, like a lot of anger towards him, like, oh, it's so loud, I'm so overwhelmed, this is too much. And I would like project that onto my teenager. I'd be like, oh, my teenager and I remember going to therapy at the time and I'd say to my therapist, like I'm so worried about Sebastian, who's my oldest, I'm so worried about Seb, like he must be so distressed and he and he goes. Well, have you asked him? And I was like, no, and he goes. Well, how do you know that he's distressed by it? And I said, well, I just assumed. And he goes.
Speaker 1:No, just because you're neurotic doesn't mean Sebastian is. He's much more level-headed than you. He's probably just thinking you know it's annoying. So I also think there is a lot in that right. Even with the other siblings we can have a reaction. Our nervous system is, like you know, showing up as some old you know whether that's, you know, some kind of little attachment, kind of trauma. And when I say attachment trauma for listeners, this is kind of just like normal parenting mishaps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like little T, little T and not kind of big T stuff yeah yeah, and just to normalise that, that there's no child that's going to come out of a family system with no like minor, minor problems. Right, we're all going to parent imperfectly and that's going to show up in lots of different ways. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In terms of, I guess, that dynamic where you see someone as more permissive and then the other partner compensating by perhaps being more authoritarian. Other than working through the origin story, have you noticed any other tools that women can kind of engage with that can help them move towards increased assert, know, increased assertiveness in the parenting dynamic with their child? Yeah, I'll start with that, rather than asking too much at once.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so definitely. So I think it's looking at, yes, their origin story and then also what they're trying to fulfill, because sometimes some parents will struggle with boundaries because they have a fear that if they are really firm with their child or say no, that their child may not want them in their life you know, got into the future, for example or their child might not want to be around them or have connection with them, because often the mothers who have bigger attachment wounds are often seeking to create something really different, which is often a closeness that they didn't have, and so there can be a fear, almost like a loss of love. If I'm really firm here and if I assert my boundaries and if I make it clear what is okay and what's not okay for you or for me or for us as a family, so that can be part of it is to kind of look at how is this origin story driving what I, what my future kind of fear is, and then to also look at how, how am I struggling to be in my body with what's going on? Because if we struggle to be in our body, then we're going to do whatever we can to move as quickly as possible out of how, out of what's happening and back to where what we perceive is safe. So this is why, you know, we might fawn right or we might, you know, get out of the room or we'll, you know, collapse into a puddle of tears because our capacity to hold, like our tolerance, our window of tolerance in that is less.
Speaker 2:And so I also work with women with somatic practices to look at okay, how can I be? Okay to be here in this discomfort a little bit longer I can, and a little bit like what we do with our children, with with their emotions, is that, rather than trying to stop that wave that really just wants to crash on the beach, how do we ride it with them? How do we be present in the intensity, trusting that the intensity will resolve itself? And I think it's the same same kind of theory with slightly different practice for us as mothers around how we be with you know this, this in us. And then also, too, how do we communicate with our partner in a way that they can hear that is considerate of what they value, so that you can get more on the same page, because it's really difficult to parent when you're not on the same page yeah, it's so complicated, right?
Speaker 1:I actually only just started doing more embodiment practices this year. I found a woman to work with who just does that and teaches you know, rest and and it's been, I think, one of the most transformational practices that I've integrated, other than, like you know, things like breath work, because I think what can happen is when we tend to be very intellectual beings, we'll try and like intellectualize ourselves out of it right, whereas and I think it was really beautiful how you described you you know that early somatic memory.
Speaker 2:So for listeners.
Speaker 1:You know, like the soma is the physical body right, and that when we don't have language or clear verbal kind of capacity to encode memories, then we'll experience that more as how that felt energetically, physically in our bodies and and then that often looks like this wild nervous system reaction where we have no idea what the hell this is caused by, right yeah, and then also, too, if we have like good girl conditioning that comes in on top of that that shames our body for having, then we don't even want to spend time in our bodies.
Speaker 2:There's some interesting research that looks at just how much as a culture we don't really support children to be in their bodies, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, like if you think about how early it is that we struggle with a child's anger or aggression, for example, and want to stop it, and anger and aggression is feedback, but we bring a whole set of meaning and judgment to it which, which, if we haven't worked through or found a way to to understand, we will typically shut it down.
Speaker 2:And so what happens with children who were conditioned out of being in their bodies which is a lot of us, right, particularly if you grew up in the 80s yeah, what we learn is we find the place that's safest, which is often in our head, and so we become really analytical, and often we become analytical before we're developmentally ready. And so what happens is you lay that as a pattern right, body feels too much leave going to head, and if you imagine how, for decades and decades, you've wired that as a response, then being in your body in the way that parenting requires you to be in your body in a time that, in a way that your life up until now has not, it's been really easy to leave, in all myriad of ways. You can go and get all of the degrees, you can go and get all of the success and tick, tick, tick and really just feel the support of a society that reflects just how good you are. And then you have children who show you all of the ways and times and reasons why you left your body as a child, because of, you know, this perception of a lack of safety, because of criticism, because of your parents' inability to regulate their nervous system, which they didn't even know what that meant. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, A hundred percent.
Speaker 2:We have an enormous amount of compassion for our parents also, as we recognise just how much neuroscience is telling us that we didn't know then. Yes, a hundred percent. So we have this perfect storm of these children. We're these educated parents who know something, who know all of the things. But, of course, when you're in stress, you regress, and so you're not in the part of your brain that knows the stuff and can use the stuff. You're in the part of your brain that's 20, 25, 30, 35 years ago, trying to be in the intensity of, you know, a five year old trying to hit you or an eight yearyear-old trying to attack their sister, or a baby that won't seem to stop crying, and that every part of you that feels like you're worth something is all to do with the things you've gathered in your brain, and none of that works in this moment. The only thing that works in this moment is how can I be here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow that works in this moment. The only thing that works in this moment is how can I be here? Yeah, wow, yeah. That notion of everything I've gathered until this moment is in is in my head and then, yeah, I, I can't. Yeah, I have to be in my body. I have to be able to hold this child in my love and care and feel my anger so that, yeah, I can love them and also hold boundaries.
Speaker 2:It's a fucking wild ride parenting and also, I think, normalising the fact that sometimes I'm going to feel like my kid is an arsehole, oh 100%. And that's actually okay to feel like that.
Speaker 2:Yes, there's going to be times when you want to rip their heads off, and that's okay to feel like that, like your feelings about this are not something to be shamed, right, because you're having a normal physiological response to intensity yeah and it's about how do I first of all recognize a part of me that's just having this huge aversion to my child because of what they bring out for me not because of who they are, but what that brings up for me and how can I support, best, support myself to be able to get myself beyond this hole that I feel like I'm in and this really is often kind of tricky dynamic that we can feel like we're in with our child to have enough safety and resourcefulness within me to be able to move the needle, to be able to see them beyond the narrow lens that I'm seeing them at the moment, to see that, no, they're not always rough and actually they do speak respectfully to me and actually, you know, they are kind with their sister, right, like to help us see that part of why we have a tunnel vision with that with, you know, one or all of our children is because of everything that it stirs up with us and you know sometimes, often, our lack of capacity.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know, when we say lack of capacity too, it's easy then for people to think, oh, there's something wrong with me, like I'm damaged or faulty. And I also want to clarify that lack of capacity is just a human condition, right? We've all got capacity problems in different areas, and some of us will be really strong in one areas and less strong in other areas, and so it's not that women can't do this, it's just that they haven't had the right you know environment, um to be able to learn yeah, and also learn those capacities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also to be in spaces and places that say, like I see this work that you're doing, like there's worthiness here, because I think that even for women who may need to go straight back to work there's many that don't but that that's where their safety is and that's where their worth is and that's where you know every societal measure on their goodness as a person is held in, whereas I think when we really hold like the sacredness of that mother-baby diet and of that mother-child relationship, and we see like wow, like you're shaping a nervous system that is going to pattern out into the future, for generations beyond what you can even comprehend, right, so you're doing some of the most profound work for humanity.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. It's like I often get goosebumps, like I just think being a mother has been the most transformative journey I've ever been on, in that my children have invited me to level up in ways that I could never have imagined, and just have such deep gratitude to them both for yeah, for being, and for the patience with me and and my imperfections and and even for my eldest, you know he saw me when I still had a lot of facades and, um yeah, felt kind of quite inadequate, and even him watching me grow up yeah, it's beautiful, isn't it?
Speaker 2:oh man, it's just like yeah love yourself in your own fallibility and also trust your children to take from that what's meaningful to them. Because, also, this is this is the thing like we can't like. We could do everything that we think is perfect, but we can't determine how our child's going to perceive that like we just can't like. So all we can do in this moment and the next moment is love them as best we can. Own as much stuff as we can.
Speaker 2:You know, repair, because I think this is the big thing too. Like you're never not going to stuff up, you're never not going to have moments where you lose it. You You're never going to get rid of the part that sometimes is really resentful. But what we're doing in this generation of parents which I think we didn't have for many of us, you know, in the 80s was parents who could come and repair, right, who could come and go. Wow, like I got pretty angry then. Look, I'm not sure how that affected you, but I just wanted to let you know like I've thought about how I behaved and that was out of line, like we didn't really get that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had a moment like that on the weekend with my almost four-year-old and he was just doing like the whole defiance thing. So just like you know, testing autonomy and yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:He's just doing what he's meant to do, right? Yeah, and I had somewhere to be and I just like and I very rarely lose it, but I like lost it I slammed my keys on the kitchen bench and I was like, for goodness sakes, just come up. And I was quite loud, like I wasn't screaming, but I mean for him that would have been like oh, Like what is this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, my husband looks at me like, oh man, she's losing the plot and um, you know that, look that you get. And I was just like shit. And you know, straight away you're like the guilt comes in. You're like, okay, yeah, regulate. And I gave myself just a couple minutes just to do slightly longer exhales, you know, get my, my oxygen saturation, carbon dioxide, back at kind of a reasonable level rather than a threat response from my four-year-old, because he's certainly no threat to me right yeah, and and I just sat him down.
Speaker 1:I said I'm really sorry I didn't smile. I'm smiling now I'm probably a bit anxious about it. And I just said I just overreacted and he goes, he goes, you won't do it again, mummy. And I said I'll, I'll try really hard not to do it again. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be more conscious of it. And he just gave me a hug and I think you know I was talking to another therapist a couple of weeks ago on the podcast and we talked about just the power of guilt, like and how guilt can heal intergenerational wounds too.
Speaker 1:Like when we can apologize to our own children, how that can then lay the foundation for imperfection, how that can then lay the foundation for imperfection, yes, and also for repair, right, because guilt's that A little like anger, it's a feeling that moves us towards connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it really can. And it's an interesting one when we consider it in the lens of Mother Hoj, the sociologist, dr Sophie Brock. She created this, a kind of model called the anger guilt trap, to help us, as mothers, understand how much you know, our anger then leads us to guilt and how yes, that's a normal human response, but also how much guilt is socially created for mothers in a way, potentially, that it wasn't experienced for mothers 50 years ago before, before there was such a a propping up of this perfect mother you know, who can't lose her temper right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, awfully like, well, I'm pretty okay with losing my temper.
Speaker 1:I just yeah, I just think it's. I remember myself being little and like I don't remember mum saying sorry to me, and I often talk, talk to clients and they talk about, you know, and way more serious traumas and they'll have relationships with their parents in the current and I'll say have you ever talked to your parent about how that hurt you and the impact on you emotionally and how that, you know, damaged the relationship? And they're like no, and I said well, you know, is that something that you might consider doing in terms of repairing those wounds? Because I think also in that kind of 80s culture of our probably generation, there was a bit of a sense of sweeping things under the carpet yes, yeah, absolutely and so then I think, wounds weren't repaired because, because that was just the culture of the time, it was very much of a you know, get on with it.
Speaker 2:There's no time for feelings, and my mother was the youngest of 12 children oh my goodness wow yeah, and so there was no time for anyone's feelings.
Speaker 2:It was like survival, it was like get on with it. It was stoicism and and I I really can see how you know, many of those attributes that were cultivated in that family have been amazing. But there's also this you know other part of yeah, like their own innate sense of connection to themselves. Or you know feelings and and the validity of, like, your nervous system's expression when you're feeling threatened. That is really just something that was never in the realm of their consciousness. And so you know, circling back to all of the ways that we leave our bodies is because of so much of that right, this sense that well, if I fully share how I feel, then I'm going to lose love. I'm not going to be lovable in this state, so I need to be who you see me as good, to be accepted. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then and then, yeah, just the immense pressure of all of that Right and the forgoing of self, and I guess overwhelmingly like that's going to negatively impact the child right. If they don't have clear boundaries, or if a parent chooses permissiveness over honesty or truthfulness, then that's also going to set a child up for more entitlement rather than a real relationship which has more of these peaks and troughs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it has conflict, which has more of these peaks and troughs, yeah, and it has conflict. I often think that we can not see the value of conflict, even like with our children or between our children, and want to kind of rush through it and and, yeah, like my children, with the ages that they are, you know, the older ones are having to learn like it's. It's not like developmentally reasonable, for example, but we can expect your five-year-old sister to delay her gratification, right, like we've been, they've been, you know, sharing, because I make them share an advent calendar because it's near, it's near christmas kind of time here. And there's been this big showdown because pearl just helped herself to some of the other days of the month, right, and so the older people like that's not fair, she has to, she has to, not like she can't have her days then, and I'm like we would be punishing her for what she's incapable of doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, that's actually not fair and not understanding her. And so I think, too, what trips us up a lot as parents is is is our expectations of our children developmentally aligned and reasonable? Because if they're not and I think there's a lot of social mores around children being kind and children saying sorry and children making eye contact or you know whatever we have, as these things that make a good child are completely unreasonable underneath the age of five or six. I know I have this friend I'm sharing for two-year-olds. I'm like, just stop wasting your time, they're not going to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had a client describe her teenager like almost grunting at a doctor and how angry she got at her. And I said, well, also, like wouldn't that also be normal?
Speaker 1:like that she's a teenager and she probably doesn't want to even be there yes so then, grunting would just be quite a natural response yeah but I think you know, when we haven't had good experiences of, perhaps, how it's okay to just let our children be themselves, and that if they don't conform to this you know perfect child model, then that doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on us, that's just them.
Speaker 2:That's just them. Yeah, and we're quite entangled as mothers, which it's natural to be, especially when you invest so much of yourself in your child. If we're entangled, if our identity is deeply entangled with how good our child is, then we will create a narrower realm of permission for our child to be who they are yeah right, like, yeah, even at the moment, like my oldest child is, um, has been applying for like the school captain and he's just been confirmed to have one of the leadership positions.
Speaker 2:And I can feel the part of me that like feels proud, right, he was a parent. Like, oh, it's so amazing, but I really have to work, feels proud, right, I don't feel as a parent like, oh, it's so amazing, but I really have to work on that, because I don't want to lose myself and have my legitimacy in my child, because for him to feel loved, he needs to know that if he loses that opportunity, if he screws it up, if he doesn't perform the way he's held up to being, to performing, that my love is unwavering and that my sense of self-worth is not wrapped up in how well he performs. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:And something I only recently honestly worked through with my eldest. I remember something happened at his school. Only recently honestly worked through with my eldest. I remember something happened at his school and, for his own privacy, I won't tell the full story and I remember my reaction was like oh my gosh, like how could he have done that?
Speaker 1:yeah and it was really like shaming and I had to just check in with myself and I was like what are you doing, mel? Like what? This isn't about. What's happened to you? Like you're not thinking of his needs right now. You're going into some kind of shaming dynamic where you want to shame him and and when I think about the behavior, like it was actually just such a healthy reaction to what was happening, you know, and almost like if he hadn't ever had that reaction, what would he have been repressing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a good, that's a great question.
Speaker 1:And yeah, and so I had to apologize to him afterwards. I was like I'm really sorry, like what, what a total you know selfish dickhead I was being. And I didn't even check with you like how you were feeling and what you were experiencing or maybe I did, but it felt really superficial, like it didn't feel like it came from a caring place. It was more like a, you know, that kind of perfect mother, you know.
Speaker 2:Almost like I need you to be okay, for me to be okay.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, I went through that for years, bridget, like I'm actually and I've said, you know, I've really apologised to my elders for this, but I was just so caught up in and and this is also just to normalize it, like you know, we can be caught and I was working as a psychologist at the time, you know and still just so self, you know, self-absorbed, and I think this is kind of that delicate balance like the more we learn then the more we can also just unfurl and go oh, yeah, and also to recognize that this is human behavior we're going to.
Speaker 2:We're going to remember and recall and have these moments of integration and get it and oh my gosh, like you know, like the heavens open up and we get these massive realizations and then we go back into not knowing and back into stupidity and back into stuffing stuff up and like that is just our human nature yeah yes, the quicker we can have these conversations within ourselves, around you know what's this really about, right?
Speaker 2:is this really about this thing? Or is this actually about how it makes me feel? And this is also why, like nourishing the mother and essentially having a connection point within ourselves and tracking that throughout our day, our weeks, our months, our years as mothers, allows us to have more of our selfhood in ourselves and allow our child to have that selfhood too. That doesn't depend on whether we approve of them or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fully, because that yeah yeah, because it's really tricky.
Speaker 2:I mean, as children, developmentally we're kind of designed to see our parents as God and at some point developmentally for're kind of designed to see our parents as god and at some point developmentally for that child to individuate and for us as parents to go through the next chapter of our lives.
Speaker 2:There needs to be a shattering of that, which is how what happens in teenage children? If there's not healthy individuation, then you have codependency, which, you know, we as mothers run into if we're still certainly that's been my experience as parts of me that had to, that hadn't completely individuated from my mother, you know, and there were circumstances that have been created in in my, you know, 11 years of mothering that have required me to to really hold stronger, energetic kind of bubble around myself that wasn't so enmeshed, for example and I think that this is also what we're learning with our children is, you know, and when they make choices that are so at odds with our own, or when they are interested in things that are so at odds with what we're interested in, that's actually designed to liberate us. Because when we become infatuated with our children and like want to kind of consume them and like be next to them and just love on them all the time.
Speaker 1:There's a loss of self in that yeah yeah, yeah, I actually think it's so interesting, isn't it?
Speaker 2:because, yeah, I was a bit like that bit enamored with the youngest and then it's only in the last year that I've really come home yes and I'm myself yeah it's a dance, right, but there's this great kind of saying from one of my mentors which is um, like the toddler's, designed to break the society's infatuation with babies yeah that's so good because, like, don't you just like love, like the sweetness you look at that like four month old baby, like the age that they use all the babies for, like all the commercials?
Speaker 2:I'm like you know so many mothers like, oh my god, I just wanted those, especially the mothers of toddlers. But like and I remember actually myself when my son was a baby like looking at toddlers and just having like a recoiling going, I don't know if I want one of those yeah, fully, but 100, that's like a toddler, is also testing how lovable they are like.
Speaker 2:How much can I stretch beyond you and you know, be this and still be loved, and that is so necessary for human development. Can you be loved in all of your parts?
Speaker 1:And I guess this is kind of why people show up for therapy, right? Because they see these parts of themselves that it's like they have to individuate from like they can't love.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe the more narcissistic or selfish parts of themselves that we all have right like. This is all part of us, and I think you know, in the pod I've heard you guys talk about shadow work too for these listeners. So, yeah, if you want to check out Bridget's pod, yeah, there's some amazing content on this material and I think that's kind of the work that we do with our children, right? Is holding them in their shadow, and, and, and that takes us to be able to hold our own.
Speaker 2:It's like tell me what you're judging in your kid and I'll tell you what you're judging in yourself fully. If you hate your kid's aggression, if you hate the way that they speak to their sibling, there's the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean they're the ultimate mirror, right? Sorry?
Speaker 2:Yes, you can teach them like effective ways of communicating. Yes, you can help them with their regulation, but as long as your goal is for them to not be that. You've kind of missed the point, because they're a mirror reflection of what you're really resisting with within yourself.
Speaker 1:Such a good takeaway.
Speaker 1:Like to see that, to see those triggers as a mirror for then the mother to then go in, or the father you know, if their father's listening, you know to look inside and think what is it about this that stirs up so much in terms of these reactions inside of me? I mean, if you could go back in time and I know this is kind of the benefit of hindsight and tell that younger version of yourself you know some truths or some lessons that you've learnt. What would you have liked to have known, you know when you first had your children yourself. You know some truths or some lessons that you've learned. What, what would you have liked to have known you know when you first had your children, that that you know now, yeah, um, your rigidity and your kind of black and white thinking around things.
Speaker 2:It's just there to try for you to try to keep yourself safe, right, like we'll latch on to, like this is the right way to parent and like this is the way I must feed my child, and that kind of self-righteousness I mean beautiful. It can be so inspiring, but it also can block you from what's really beneath it, actually, and can also be isolating you from your other friends or your family, for example.
Speaker 2:And it's often, you know, driven by anxiety. I think probably was what I would say to that part of me, like, oh, you know, like that's really sweet, you want to kind of go all in on that, but can we just look at like maybe you're just really anxious.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because anxiety likes to hide, hide behind control. Oh, fully, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and also too like, just like to love her in the her kind of deep desire to raise these whole little humans, you know, like that, because that's what it all was right, and to just really appreciate that determination.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like there was just so much conscious intent in your early parenting and still, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It sounds like you've shifted.
Speaker 2:It's a bit more grounded now, I suppose, a bit more grounded in the acceptance that there's not a perfection. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's not this perfect, one-sided parent that I can strive to be and and maintain all of the time, and nor should there be yeah, yeah, yeah okay and and, in terms of I guess how you know, women you know can benefit in terms of working from you what what are the kind of the key tools that you provide women with in your program that they can kind of, perhaps, you know, reach out to you if they hear the pod, or you know what might there be, you know, created with you that they can benefit from in that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have kind of two predominant ways of working. Which is one-to-one with women, so it's often mothers in the kind of their first, often five years of parenting. It's often therapists. I tend to work with a number of different, a number of therapists who themselves are almost rehabilitating themselves from everything they've ever learned and like the actual embodied reality of parenting and and how to expand their capacity for safety within that.
Speaker 2:So the way that I work one-to-one is is to really explore these three sort of areas that I touched on which is that origin story, that version of fulfilled future that you're aiming for, and then how this sociological stuff kind of overlays upon that. That can create a lot of like that constriction or contraction or anxiety in our mothering. So we map that kind of thing one-to-one. And then there's also the reimagining motherhood society. So this is my membership group, which is where you know other mothers who are really wanting to be in a space that values both the conscious parenting and your whole experience as a woman like that's not valuing either, or and that can really hold you in that intersection of both of those things and it just becomes a beautiful place to be for mothers to kind of unpack their stories or their struggles and to really move forward with more anchoring to what they're wanting to create within their families.
Speaker 1:And if women want to kind of work one-on-one with you or gain entry into your membership program, how can people contact you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can find me online at bridgetwoodlife or you can reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook. Yeah, of course you can find the podcast. It's just Nourishing the Mother. Just type that into your podcast app. And yeah, I'd love to hear from you if you've listened to this podcast and it's resonated in some way. Okay, awesome.
Speaker 1:Just as a final thought, do you have any kind of thoughts or kind of messages that you want to share with the audience before we?
Speaker 2:finish up. Yeah, I would just love to share that I deeply see you and value your mothering work, and that it is work, and that it's often unseen and invisible work and yet it is shaping the future of society and the future of humanity and it's a lot right. I think we often just need to be seen in England and all and be loved for how we're striving to create the family life of our dreams.
Speaker 1:I like that you used the word love there, because I think when I listen to you, I just feel so much love in terms of how you communicate and the gentleness and thoughtfulness of your language choice. You know like you can just see that intention. Thank you, behind you and I think it's a really beautiful gift that you can then give to women who are kind of struggling in these kinds of ways but yeah, I just want to thank you for your time, because I do see time as our most precious commodity, particularly as mothers so I super appreciate you coming on and yeah.
Speaker 1:I love learning from you. I love your podcast. I think it's brilliant and I think you know both of you are just doing such important work for women and for relationships too.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on, and I've really appreciated chatting about such important things. Yeah, beautiful, thank you.
