Therapy and Mom Jokes

It feels like the oldest joke in therapy: “It’s probably because of your mom.”

And even though it might be overused, sometimes even oversimplifying things or ignoring the other significant layers that impact us…honestly, there’s a reason it might feel like your issues always come back to your mom.

Our parental figures and caregivers deeply impact our growth, our transformations throughout our lives, and the way we relate to everyone else in our lives.

Our brains form around the models we’re given, and that can feel like we’re sort of at the mercy of our caregivers as we’re being raised.

So we shift into adulthood and realize that so much of our identities and ways of seeing the world are wrapped up in how we were treated as young people…and sometimes that can feel supportive, while (many) other times it can feel harmful, frustrating, wounding.

Of course, as a therapist, my perspective might be slightly skewed—it’s a bit of a workplace hazard, the commonality with which I see “mom stuff” be at the core of so many people’s challenges.

A lot of times, that’s literally the thing people are coming to work through.

But while I might see this more often than other people, there’s no denying the reality: processing our childhood harms may mean we have to confront the hurt we experienced with our caregivers.

And for a lot of people, those wounds aren’t just in the past—they’re still actively happening, in some form, whether it’s because we have active relationships with those people, we’re trying to set firmer boundaries with them, or we’re reminded of a gap in our care that we grieve now as adults.

I offer all of this because while the whole “mom thing” in therapy can often be joked about, to you, it might feel like anything but humorous.

I work with so many people who’ve experienced (and often are still experiencing) wounding from their mothers.

You’re not alone if that’s also you. Knowing that might not make that feel easier, but healing is harder in isolation—maybe the first step is just knowing that your hurts, while certainly unique to you, are hurts that might be felt collectively in some way, too.

Our relationships with our mothers are some of our earliest, most complex, and most formative relationships…why wouldn’t they carry lots of different feelings?

To be clear, the recognition of how much this comes up in therapy is not to generalize mothers or place blame on the role—being in a parenting role is a lot and the way we parent is often informed by how we were parented…and there is so much pressure to be perfect as a mother, which of course just isn’t possible, or necessary.

(And if you’re a parent who also has parent-shaped wounds…it just adds to the challenge of processing the past and building the kind of future you want, for both you and your kids.)

This isn’t about blame—it’s about acknowledgement, it’s about naming the thing, it’s about shining a light on things that might feel really tough to look at but are informing so much of how you move through the world, regardless of if you look at it or not.

If you’ve been craving support to process past wounds, current hurts, or new and more effective boundaries with your mother or caregivers, therapy can be a really helpful place to do some of that work.

And while it might feel pretty challenging, it can also be incredibly transformative.

Click here to request a free consult! I’d love to help.