When Your Mom Feels like a Stranger

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]The hard thing about grieving a mother who is still alive is that on paper nothing is wrong.

[00:00:07]She calls you, maybe she remembers your birthday, she might even tell you that she loves you before she hangs up. But somewhere underneath all of that you've probably spent your entire life feeling like she's never actually been there for you. Like the woman who raised you and the mother that you needed are two very different people.

[00:00:27]When most people hear the word grief, they think of death. Someone is gone, we miss them, it's so sad, and we move through the stages in whatever order, and eventually we find a way to keep going.

[00:00:38]The grief I'm talking about today is very different. It doesn't have a funeral, right? There's no date attached to it. The person we're grieving isn't dead.

[00:00:48]In fact, she's probably at Thanksgiving.

[00:00:51]Maybe she's even in our group chat with our other siblings.

[00:00:54]And she possibly just sent us a picture of her dog.

[00:00:57]What we're grieving is the relationship that was never available to us.

[00:01:02]Without us having to having to I don't know why I'm having trouble with that.

[00:01:08]What we're grieving is the relationship that was never available to us.

[00:01:13]The mother who could have noticed when something was wrong without us having to scream or cry about it.

[00:01:20]The mother who could have sat with our sadness instead of getting uncomfortable and changing the subject.

[00:01:26]The mother who could have asked a real question and waited for us to give her a real answer.

[00:01:32]That mother was never there.

[00:01:35]And the woman who is there, the one who calls or sends pictures or shows up at the holidays is not the same person.

[00:01:42]She's someone else.

[00:01:44]Someone we have a relationship with technically.

[00:01:48]Someone we love often. I mean, she is our mom.

[00:01:51]And someone who has never been able to give us the thing that we needed most from her.

[00:01:56]This type of grief is what therapists sometimes call ambiguous loss. And I talked about this in my previous video about growing up with an emotionally absent mother. And if you missed that video, I would definitely go check it out. But the phrase ambiguous loss comes from the researcher Dr. Pauline Boss.

[00:02:11]And she used it to describe a particular kind of grief that doesn't get acknowledged because the loss itself isn't visible.

[00:02:19]The person is present in some ways, absent in others.

[00:02:23]There's no clear ending.

[00:02:26]There's no clear beginning. The loss is just kind of like ongoing.

[00:02:31]Every interaction is a small reminder of what's not there.

[00:02:35]And the reason this type of grief can in many ways feel harder is because with a death, the world helps us grieve, right? I remember when my dad passed away, like so many people stopped by, they sent cards, they brought food, so much food, you guys. And they'd ask us how we were doing. They checked in all the time.

[00:02:54]People around you expect you to be sad.

[00:02:57]And oftentimes they're actually sad right along with us.

[00:03:01]There is a shared understanding that something has happened, and we get to feel it. We even set aside time for it, right? People take time off of work and have bereavement leave.

[00:03:13]That's a certain kind of grief.

[00:03:16]With this kind of grief, there's none of that.

[00:03:20]No one knows.

[00:03:22]Often we don't even know. We just know that we feel something heavy or like something's missing every time we talk to her. And we've spent a lot of years assuming that the problem must be us.

[00:03:35]But we aren't the problem. The problem is that we've been grieving something for decades, and no one, including us, has been allowed to call it grief.

[00:03:46]Most grief has a direction to move in.

[00:03:49]The person who we loved is gone, and over time we find ways to carry their absence, right? The The shape of the loss is clear even when it's unbearable.

[00:03:59]We know what happened. We know what we lost. And eventually, slowly, we build a life around the space that they left.

[00:04:07]It's like that old Instagram meme that I've talked about where people um this person demonstrated grief and she wrote that like oh I always thought that it would get smaller and smaller and smaller and it shows it like getting smaller in this person's life.

[00:04:18]And she's like actually realized that it things just grow around it, right? It doesn't get smaller. We just learn to live with it.

[00:04:24]But this type type of grief >> [snorts] >> But this type of grief doesn't work that way because the person is still here.

[00:04:33]We keep hoping. And the hope is what keeps that wound open. It's like we keep tearing the sutures. Every phone call could be the one where she finally asks how we are really doing and listens.

[00:04:46]Every visit could be the one where she sees us for who we are.

[00:04:49]Every birthday could be the one where she finally writes us a card that feels like it was written by someone who truly knows and gets us.

[00:04:57]We don't consciously decide to hope for this, but the hope just keeps coming.

[00:05:01]It's apparent, right? We want them to get us. We want to feel seen.

[00:05:07]And so it just keeps coming the way that it always has because she's right there and the possibility is theoretically right there with her.

[00:05:15]And every time the call ends and the visit ends and the birthday passes, we lose her again or we're reminded of how she can't show up for us.

[00:05:24]Not all at once, right? It's not just slam you in your face. It happens in small pieces, small interactions over and over and over for years.

[00:05:34]And this is why so many of us end up worn out by our parents without being able to explain why.

[00:05:40]It's not like it's one big betrayal.

[00:05:42]It's the accumulation of thousands of small disappointments.

[00:05:47]None of which is dramatic enough to name on its own, but all of which add up to a particular kind of exhaustion.

[00:05:53]It's almost like that death by a thousand cuts. You know, it's not the one strike that really gets us. It's the fact that it just keeps happening, happening, happening, happening, happening until we just can't take it anymore.

[00:06:04]Another important piece to mention is that we often feel guilty for grieving her.

[00:06:09]She is alive.

[00:06:11]She does love us in the way that she's capable of loving us. I'm going to say that again because I feel like it's it's tough for us to hear, but she does love us in the way that she is capable.

[00:06:21]That's the important word of loving us.

[00:06:24]She's not abusing us. Pos- I'm hopefully some for some of us they they maybe are, but there are people in the world with parents who are much worse.

[00:06:33]And we know it. And we've probably been told it by someone in our life, possibly by her. Like other kids have it so much worse. We might have heard that a lot.

[00:06:40]So, when we feel sad after a conversation with her, we often respond internally by telling ourselves, "You shouldn't feel this way. Why are you feeling so sad?

[00:06:51]You don't have it as bad as other people." Right? We can compare our situation to people who have it worse.

[00:06:55]Like imagine if our mom was doing this.

[00:06:57]And so, we remind ourselves of the ways that she did show up. You know, "We did have a roof over our head, Katie. Get it together. She did feed you and she showed up for your band practice." or whatever.

[00:07:07]And then we feel ungrateful for even noticing what's missing.

[00:07:11]And that's kind of the trap we get stuck in. Right? The guilt about feeling the grief prevents us from actually grieving. So, it's like the grief stays underground and the heaviness just like keeps coming or compounding.

[00:07:25]And we keep not understanding why we feel this way.

[00:07:29]You are allowed to grieve a mother who is alive.

[00:07:34]You're allowed to grieve a mother who loves you.

[00:07:38]You're allowed to grieve a mother who did her best, even if her best wasn't good enough for us, right? And none of those things cancel out the fact that what you needed from her was not available.

[00:07:53]And that absence is a real loss. You know, the difference between what we needed and what we got could be a huge gap.

[00:08:00]And real losses deserve to be grieved.

[00:08:05]I had a patient years ago in her late 30s and she came to therapy because she was exhausted and she thought that she might be depressed. She'd come from her doctor and she'd gotten all these tests and like all her blood work was fine.

[00:08:15]And she and they recommended she see a therapist. So, she found her way to me.

[00:08:20]And she just couldn't figure out why she felt this way. And she even said on her intake form, I remember, and it was just kind of funny. It said, you know, quote, might be depressed but doesn't have a reason to be or something like that.

[00:08:30]>> [snorts] >> Because she had a good job, okay? She was married to someone that she loved.

[00:08:35]She had two children she adored and by every external measure her life was working, right? Look good on paper.

[00:08:43]But she felt down a lot.

[00:08:46]Exhausted in a way that no amount of sleep was fixing.

[00:08:50]And when we started talking about her relationship with her mom, because when you have people come into your office this way as a therapist, you usually just try to figure out maybe what else could be causing it. So, you look into other relationships or other environments, right? Like she loved her job, but if she didn't that might have been something we'd go down, right? So, I asked her about her relationship with her sister and then we moved on to her mom. And when I mentioned her mom, she immediately defended her, which I have to be honest is usually a sign that something's there, you know? I'm just saying.

[00:09:17]But she said, oh, my mom was a great mom.

[00:09:21]That her mom had been there, she had cooked dinner every night and remembered every school event and never missed a birthday. And she said all of this like in one breath, like, boo, she did this, she made all the food, and she showed up for everything. And it's kind of like the way people say things that they've probably rehearsed or said a thousand times, maybe to themselves or to others.

[00:09:40]And so I okay, I hear you. But then I asked her what her mother knew about her life right now. Okay, so your mom was great growing up. Awesome, she showed up for you, she was there.

[00:09:49]Perfect. What does she know about your life? And not just like the surface details, but the actual interior of her life. Does like does she know that you're here seeing me? I ask that sometimes to see how close people are with their parents.

[00:10:02]Does she know what you're struggling with?

[00:10:04]Does she know what you're proud of or what's keeping you up at night, how your marriage is going? And she was quiet for a bit. I'd clearly hit on something.

[00:10:14]And then she admitted that her mom didn't know any of that.

[00:10:21]In fact, she hadn't really talked to her about anything deep ever.

[00:10:27]And it wasn't because she didn't want her mom to know, but because her mom never asked.

[00:10:33]And if she tried to share anything personal or emotional, her mom would just change the subject right back to the stuff that was going on with her.

[00:10:40]Maybe some narcissistic tendencies, we didn't go down that road at the time, but we spent the next several months in therapy unpacking what it meant for her, my patient, to have a mom that didn't really know anything about her.

[00:10:53]We talked about how this affected her, how it affected her relationships with her mom, and its connection to how she felt about her life now.

[00:11:01]She had a mother who showed up to every event and yet knew nothing about her.

[00:11:06]Who called every week and asked no real questions.

[00:11:11]Who said, "I love you." constantly and had never in her entire adult life been asked a single follow-up question to anything she said that hinted at her actual emotional experience. And as we continued to talk about this, my patient realized that she'd always kind of known this was going on, she just never had a word to put to it.

[00:11:30]Nor did she think she even had right to feel this way cuz her mom was there, right? So, she stuffed it down and pretended everything was okay.

[00:11:39]But what she discovered slowly was that every phone call with her mom was leaving this small almost like this small little deposit of disappointment. Like every visit confirmed again and again that her mom couldn't see her.

[00:11:54]Like really see her.

[00:11:56]And she'd been carrying that disappointment and that sadness for so long and pushing it down all the time that it had become kind of this background noise in her life.

[00:12:06]The exhaustion that she couldn't explain was really the cost of containing decades of grief that she'd never been allowed to feel.

[00:12:15]What changed for her was not her mom. I mean, her mom didn't change, right? We can't control other people. Her mom is still her mom. The phone calls are still the phone calls. But what changed was that she stopped pretending the relationship was something that it wasn't.

[00:12:28]She let herself notice in real time what was missing.

[00:12:33]She let herself feel sad about it instead of arguing with herself about whether or not she had the right to be sad.

[00:12:39]Imagine that, right? She finally grieved her mother in pieces, like week after week, conversation after conversation that we had while her mother went on living and calling and visiting and just doing what she'd always done.

[00:12:51]And over time, the exhaustion started to lift. Not because the situation changed.

[00:12:56]Right? Mom's still mom. But because she stopped using all of her energy to deny what the situation actually was.

[00:13:06]The hard thing about this topic is that we're not talking about a problem with a fix, right? Five steps is not going to give you a different mother. I wish it I wish it was like that, but it's just not like that. The mother you have is the mother you have, right? We can't just swap them out. Sometimes it'd be nice if we could, right?

[00:13:21]But the grief doesn't lift because you read an article or you did this like specific exercise.

[00:13:27]But what we can do is stop the cycle that's been making it worse or essentially making us feel worse.

[00:13:34]We can stop fighting the grief and start letting it happen. And I know as I say that that that sounds icky or bad and you're like, why would we do that? But trust me, it's the only way that we can finally start living our lives for us, feeling lighter and better than we probably have our entire lives.

[00:13:50]So here are five ways to help ourselves grieve and heal.

[00:13:55]Starting off strong with number one, name it accurately.

[00:13:59]The first thing that has to happen is that you stop calling this something else.

[00:14:04]It's not you being too sensitive.

[00:14:07]It's not you being ungrateful.

[00:14:09]It's not the holiday blues or the post-call slump.

[00:14:14]It is grief.

[00:14:15]Specifically, it's the grief of a relationship that was never what you needed with a person who is still alive.

[00:14:22]Naming it accurately is important because when we have a word, now let's get nerdy for a second, okay? So when we have a word for what we're feeling, it reduces the emotional intensity. There's research to back this up, I promise.

[00:14:33]It calms our nervous system and enhances decision-making by engaging our brain's rational frontal lobe.

[00:14:42]Amazing, right?

[00:14:43]When we don't have a word for it, the feeling almost has nowhere to go and we can get queued up, we can go into our stress response, which takes that prefrontal cortex and frontal lobe off offline. So it just sits there indefinitely, all of that anxious or upset energy, and it drains us. Have you ever been in like a social situation that you find really stressful or overwhelming or a big performance or uh maybe a big presentation? Like all of that energy that whole day until you do the thing and then you're wiped out?

[00:15:12]That's kind of what's going on, but it's just going on in the background indefinitely, possibly since we were a kid.

[00:15:19]So naming it boop pulls us out of that and allows our nervous system to calm down, which you'll you'll probably feel so much relief and maybe want to take a nap.

[00:15:29]But I want you to try this, okay?

[00:15:31]The next time that you notice the heaviness after an interaction with your mom, let's say you hang up the phone or you leave from seeing her, instead of asking yourself, "What's wrong with me?"

[00:15:39]or like, "Why can't I enjoy the fact that she's here?"

[00:15:43]try saying this to yourself.

[00:15:45]I am grieving.

[00:15:48]This is grief.

[00:15:50]Something I needed was not available yet again. And I'm sad about it. And that makes sense.

[00:15:58]You can put your own words to this, but you get what I'm saying. Something along those lines, what I'm feeling is grief.

[00:16:03]I needed something that's not there and I'm reminded again that it's not.

[00:16:07]I'm grieving.

[00:16:09]You don't have to do anything else with the feeling. You just have to call it by its real name and stop shaming yourself or feeling guilty for feeling it at all.

[00:16:19]Moving on to number two.

[00:16:21]Stop arguing with yourself about whether you have the right to feel it. I know, this one's a big one.

[00:16:27]A lot of the energy that we spend on this grief goes into the argument about whether we're allowed to even have it.

[00:16:34]We compare ourselves to people with worse parents. We list all the ways that she did show up, the things that she did do.

[00:16:40]We talk ourselves out of the feeling we're experiencing.

[00:16:45]That argument is what keeps the grief stuck.

[00:16:48]The grief isn't asking your permission to exist.

[00:16:52]It's already there.

[00:16:54]The argument just keeps you from being able to actually move through it.

[00:16:58]And two things can be true. I kind of want to say that a few times, that two things can be true. You can love her and grieve her at the same time.

[00:17:06]You can be grateful for what she did give you and sad about what she couldn't.

[00:17:12]You can know that other people have worse mothers and still need to feel what you feel about yours. These things are not in competition with one another.

[00:17:21]They can coexist. I honestly feel like, and I've mentioned this before in a recent video, that a lot of therapy is just learning that things can coexist, that two things can be true at once. Because we often feel like, well, if I if my dad or my mom, if they did something that hurt me, that means that I can't love them. Mhm.

[00:17:40]You can love them and still be disappointed. I can, you know, feel like somebody should have treated me better, but still miss them.

[00:17:47]I, you know, things that feel like they can't coexist can, and a lot of our healing happens around us just realizing and being able to hold these two experiences or two feelings or two reactions without trying to minimize or get rid of one of them.

[00:18:05]Let's move on to number three. I could talk about that forever, but let's move on. Number three, lower your expectations of the relationship on purpose.

[00:18:13]This is the one that catches people off guard because it sounds like we're being cynical. We're not. Just hear me out, okay?

[00:18:19]A lot of the continual grief that you feel after every interaction is happening because you're still walking into those interactions hoping for something that she has never been able to give.

[00:18:31]I know, that's a heavy statement.

[00:18:34]The hope is not unreasonable. She is your mother.

[00:18:37]You should be able to hope for those things, right? But she has shown you consistently, probably for your whole life, that she cannot give them to you.

[00:18:47]When you stop walking in hoping that she'll be different, two things happen.

[00:18:53]The disappointment lessens. Yay! Because you're no longer setting up an expectation that, honestly, she can't meet.

[00:18:59]And the grief becomes something that you can hold and manage steadily, rather than something that like ambushes you every time because you're trying to pretend it doesn't exist, right? We keep hoping for something different. We think that this is what it's going to be.

[00:19:12]She's never been able to do that for you.

[00:19:14]I don't want you to think that this is like you giving up on her. It's not.

[00:19:18]We're not giving up. But it's giving up on a version of her that does not exist.

[00:19:24]So that you can have a more honest relationship with the version that does.

[00:19:28]I want to say that again because I feel like that's a really important piece here.

[00:19:32]This is giving up on a version of her that doesn't exist. So that you can have a more honest relationship with the version that does.

[00:19:41]It's one of the more loving things that you can do for both of you.

[00:19:45]Now obviously, if your mom is abusive in any way, you don't have to have a relationship with her at all. That's completely up to you and you get to do what's best for you. But this is helpful if you still want to have some semblance of a relationship with her. This allows you to meet her where she's at.

[00:20:01]Moving on to number four, find somewhere else to put the need.

[00:20:07]The need for a mother who can really see you doesn't go away because your mom can't meet it. Right? We can have that hole I've talked about forever. And we feel it, right? It's still there.

[00:20:17]And those needs or that that void deserves to be filled. Those needs deserve to be met.

[00:20:23]Just not by her. She can't, right? And this is where therapy, where chosen family, and where deep friendships, or even good partners come in.

[00:20:34]The role of a witnessing attuned present in your life is a real need. And it can be filled by people other than the person who we originally needed it from.

[00:20:44]It takes time to find those people. I know it can be frustrating.

[00:20:48]And it also takes time to let yourself receive them once you have found them.

[00:20:53]But it is possible and it can fill us It can take time to find those people. I know it can be frustrating, but stick with it. And I know it also takes time to let yourself receive that from them once once you have them in your life.

[00:21:09]But it is possible. I've seen it. I've heard from tons of you about how you've been able to create your chosen family and how that is really healed you and healed that like mother wound or that void that we feel, right? And so those people, those healthy, helpful, supportive people can help us fill that void with something that's healthy and sustainable. Moving nicely into number five, which is get more support.

[00:21:33]This kind of grief is hard to move through alone.

[00:21:36]Not because you're not strong enough, that's not what I'm saying, because grief is by nature something that we do in relationship with others.

[00:21:45]We grieve in the presence of other people who can hold the feeling with us.

[00:21:50]That's how we move through it. It's like that uh that famous Swedish proverb, a shared joy is double joy, a shared sorrow is half a sorrow.

[00:22:01]Let people share that sorrow with you.

[00:22:04]A good therapist who understands a specific kind of grief can also be invaluable here. Not because therapy automatically fixes your life, it'd be awesome if it did, but what it does is it gives you a safe place to grieve in real time with someone who understands what you're grieving and doesn't need you to feel any particular way about it.

[00:22:24]A good therapist will challenge you when you need it, support you when you need it, and help you move toward the relationships and the life that you actually want. And that experience alone can do more than years of trying to work through it on your own.

[00:22:37]There is no funeral for this loss. No one's going to bring you food. I'm sorry, they're not. No one's going to send you a card. The world isn't going to step in and acknowledge what you've lost because from the outside you haven't lost anything. She's still here.

[00:22:52]But you have lost something. You've lost the mother that you needed.

[00:22:57]And you've been losing her slowly your entire life. And every interaction with the woman who is in her place is a small fresh confirmation of what's not there.

[00:23:07]That's real and it's heavy. And you're allowed to call it what it is. You're not being too sensitive. You're not being dramatic and you're not making this up. You're grieving someone who is still alive. And grief is a thing that gets to exist even when the person that we're grieving is on the other end of a phone call.

[00:23:26]Now, naming this grief is not the same as resolving it. A lot of people watch a video like this feel the relief of being understood and then go right back into the same patterns with their mom because the recogni- recognition can feel so satisfying that it feels like it's enough. It's not enough.

[00:23:42]The recognition is the beginning. This is just the first step, you guys.

[00:23:47]What you do with it is where the actual change happens.

[00:23:52]If the part about the relationship that you wished you had really hit home for you, my video on the signs that your mom was emotionally unavailable gets directly into that. And I dig into the patterns that produce this grief in the first place. And I'll link it in the description so that you can check it out. And if this is your first time here, this is what we do each and every week. We take the patterns and wounds that can quietly shape our lives and we trace them back to where they started, get to the root, and figure out how to slowly build something different. The goal isn't just insight. The goal is to build a life that actually feels safe, honest, and fully yours. If that's something you're working on, make sure you subscribe and turn on your notifications so that you don't miss out. And in the comments, I want you to tell me just one thing. What's the smallest, most ordinary moment with your mom that always leaves you feeling heavy in a way that you can't explain to anyone else? Not the big obvious stuff, but the little things. The moments nobody else would notice, but they stayed with you anyway. I'll be in those comments chatting with all of you just to remind you that you're not alone with this. Thank you so much for watching.

[00:24:49]Have a wonderful week and I will see you next time.