How Your Mother Can Be a Powerful Resource for Healing—Even Without Contact
The Mother-Daughter Relationship: A Lifelong Mirror
The mother-daughter dynamic is one of the most complex relationships a woman will ever experience. It’s not just shaped by shared history, but also by generations of inherited beliefs, patterns, and unspoken expectations.
Our mothers are our first mirror. From our earliest days, we look to her—through words, tone, facial expressions, and even subtle cues—to understand ourselves. And this mirroring doesn’t stop with childhood. Even if you are no longer in communication, the way you see yourself, your relationships, and your place in the world is still influenced by that first bond.
The Mother-Daughter Split: Healing the Division Within
In The Heroine’s Journey, author Maureen Murdock describes the “mother-daughter split”—not just an external separation, but an inner division between the self that has been shaped to fit a patriarchal world and the self that holds your feminine wisdom, intuition, and worth. This split is often inherited across generations, carrying with it both the survival strategies and unprocessed pain of the women before us.
Facing this internal split means becoming curious about the patterns, beliefs, and coping strategies you’ve inherited—not to place blame, but to reclaim the parts of yourself that were silenced, diminished, or overlooked.
The Science of Mirroring: How Our Mothers Shape Us
This is more than a metaphor. Neuroscience shows that we have mirror neurons—specialized brain cells that fire both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else doing it. This means that from infancy, we’re wired to “mirror” the emotions, expressions, and even nervous system states of our caregivers.
Psychoneurobiology, a mind-body approach influenced by the work of Dr. Allan Schore and others, explores how this mirroring helps regulate our emotions, shapes our attachment patterns, and builds the blueprint for how we relate to ourselves.
When a parent is emotionally attuned, their calm presence helps a child develop self-regulation skills. But when a parent is disconnected from their own emotions—often due to systemic devaluing of feminine principles, unresolved trauma, or chronic stress—that emotional resonance can be disrupted, leaving gaps in the child’s emotional development.
Mother-Daughter Healing in the Treatment of Eating Disorders
When a daughter is learning about her body and the changes in her development, and her parents are not in tune with their own emotions—especially when there are other stressors or family dynamics at play—it can create a perfect storm where emotional needs are unmet and coping strategies like disordered eating take root. Without secure relational mirroring—what psychoneurobiology describes as the nervous system-to-nervous system attunement made possible through our brain’s mirror neurons—she may struggle to regulate emotions, trust her body, or develop a grounded sense of self.
The good news is that this same relational template can be used for healing. Even if a mother and daughter are not in communication, the mother-daughter relationship can be explored as a symbolic and emotional resource. By reflecting on the patterns, beliefs, and unspoken rules that were passed down—often shaped by how women were treated in their family of origin or within marriage partnerships where feminine principles were devalued—a daughter can begin to rewrite her own blueprint.
This process is not about blame. It’s about recognition—seeing how these dynamics arose, understanding how they shaped you, and consciously choosing new ways of relating to your body, your needs, and your worth. In eating disorder recovery, this reframing can be profound: it allows you to integrate both the science of how our brains are wired to connect and the compassion needed to break generational cycles.
For more on how I integrate mother-daughter coaching into eating disorder treatment, you can explore the California Pathways to Practice virtual program.
The Most Important Relationship of All
The relationship with your mother—whether close, distant, or nonexistent—is ultimately a mirror for your relationship with yourself. When you tend to the split within, confront internalized beliefs, and reclaim your worth, you create a foundation for deep, lasting healing.
Because when you heal that inner relationship, you don’t just change your own life—you change what gets passed on to the generations that follow.
If you’re ready to explore your own heroine’s journey, heal the split within, and reclaim your voice, I offer private mother-daughter coaching sessions worldwide. Learn more here.
