For the past year or so I've been calling my mother every other Sunday.

I have decided to stop doing that.

I am not cutting ties completely. I am limiting contact.

And I want to share my thinking around this because I know this kind of decision weighs heavily on many adult daughters.

If you're new here, here's a quick history:

At the end of 2010 I cut ties with my mother in a "straw that broke the camel's back" moment. I was hurt and angry.

I thought it would be forever.

In 2014 we re-established contact. It was hard and awkward. I write about it in You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma and Shame.

(side note: last fall I recognized that one of the reasons I re-established contact with my mother in 2014 was to impress a mentor of mine. I didn't know I was doing that at the time, but it's the truth. I don't regret it but it's important to name it. )

Since 2014 there have a been a several visits (we live about 300 miles apart) and, up a little more than a year ago, we talked on the phone and emailed sporadically.

The reason we've been talking every two weeks since then is because in January of 2022 she indicated that she wanted to move closer to me...sooner rather than later. I put her in touch with a real estate agent and it seemed important to me at the time to communicate about it regularly.

Her plan fell by the wayside rather quickly, but our every-two-weeks calls did not.

After our most recent conversation, I acknowledged to myself how much stress I experience around these calls. It's not that this particular call was bad; it was basically the same as all the others, and I've been dreading them for a long while now.

Basically, I had fallen back into a "please and appease" pattern, but it looked different than had in the past.

Attachment and authenticity are equally important. Both are essential for safety and health. But in this relationship they are at odds with each other because my authenticity isn't easily accepted by the person to whom I was first attached: my mother. So of course, the pattern is to abandon myself and my authenticity in favor of connection to my mother.

And if I am really honest, it was having an observable impact on my wellbeing. I was eating more than I want to, I was drinking more than I want to, and I was picking at my skin to the point of needing antibiotics to quell what could have been a very serious secondary infection.

In other words, I was experiencing continual stress/survival responses.

This is not a tit-for-tat decision. It is not a "straw that broke the camel's back" moment. I am not angry. Or hurt.

I am taking care of myself by leaning into Dignity (one of the three pillars that upholds my Intentional Identity).

Sure, I have learned to manage my mind and emotions in the relationship I have with my mother. I have unshamed myself. I've learned how to tell a vastly different story about myself in relation to her.

It has been the most gratifying work of my life. The pride, self-respect, and confidence I've created blows my mind.

AND I was using the work against myself.

Coaching, personal development, self-help, therapy, etc. is NOT meant to be used against you. It's not meant to make you tolerate something you don't want to tolerate, persuade you to do something you don't want to do, turn you into a "good daughter," or force yourself to be in contact with your mother more than you want to (or at all).

It should never create shame and it should never be at your own expense.

It IS meant to help you:

...make clean decisions based on what you value (not what others say you should value);

...establish healthy boundaries;

...create safety in the relationship you have with yourself and her;

...and most importantly, like and respect yourself.

It's meant to help you be free and to have that be the guiding light in your relationship(s).

Much, much love,

Karen

"When we have liberated ourselves we will have to ask who we are." ~ Ona in the film, Women Talking