How Do I Remother Myself?

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • May 02, 2021

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

SUMMARY

Remothering isn’t about replacing your mother. It’s about building, from the inside out, the capacity for self-nurturance that your early environment didn’t provide. For driven women who learned to survive on competence instead of comfort, this is some of the most important and most tender work in therapy. This post explains what remothering actually looks like — and why it matters.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Ache of Wanting to Be Mothered
2. What Is Remothering?
3. The Science: Reparenting, Inner Child Work, and Neuroplasticity
4. Camille’s Story: Learning to Soften Toward Yourself
5. The Cost of Going Unmothered
6. Practical Remothering: What It Actually Looks Like
7. Sarah’s Story: When the Inner Child Finally Gets to Speak
8. Both/And: You Needed More Than You Got AND You Can Give It to Yourself Now
9. The Systemic Lens: Collective Mothering and the Village We Were Promised
10. A Final Word
11. Frequently Asked Questions
12. Related Reading

The Ache of Wanting to Be Mothered

You’re sick. Nothing serious — a bad cold, a fever that crested overnight and left you wrung out, lying in sheets that need changing. The light coming through the curtains is thin and grey. Your throat aches. Your head is heavy. And there’s this other thing happening underneath the physical symptoms, this quieter thing: you want someone to take care of you.

You want someone to bring you soup without being asked. To sit on the edge of the bed and put a cool hand on your forehead. To say I’ve got you. Rest. I’m here.

Maybe you have a partner who does this. Maybe you don’t. But the particular ache you’re feeling isn’t really about the soup or the cool hand. It’s older than this bedroom. It’s older than this body. It’s the ache of a child who learned very early that comfort wasn’t reliably coming — that the person who was supposed to be there, wasn’t. Or was there in body but not in presence. Or was there in presence but in the wrong direction entirely, facing their own needs, their own grief, their own dysfunction. And so you got good at not needing. You got very good at that.

And then one ordinary Tuesday you’re lying in bed with a cold and the ache comes up again, just like it always does. The ache of wanting to be mothered. And then the recognition, the one that might take your breath away a little if you let it: If I’m going to be mothered, I’m going to have to do it myself.

That moment — the grief and the turning toward at once — is the beginning of remothering.

This post is about what that process actually looks like. Not as a concept. Not as a metaphor. As a daily practice that changes, slowly and irreversibly, how you relate to yourself.

What Is Remothering?

Remothering is the deliberate, sustained practice of providing yourself with the nurturing, attunement, and unconditional positive regard you didn’t receive from your mother during childhood. It’s both a psychological framework and a lived daily practice. And it matters most for women who grew up with mothers who were, in some significant way, unable to give them what they needed — mothers who were depressed, addicted, narcissistic, emotionally absent, physically absent, or simply overwhelmed beyond their capacity to show up.

DEFINITION REMOTHERING

A therapeutic and developmental concept describing the deliberate process of providing oneself with the nurturing, attunement, and unconditional positive regard that was absent or insufficient in early childhood. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, frames it, remothering involves consciously activating the archetypal mothering capacity that lives within every woman — cultivating warmth, safety, and internal care at both the psychological and somatic levels.

In plain terms: Remothering is learning to give yourself the care you deserved — and didn’t get — when you were small. It’s not about blaming your mother or pretending she didn’t exist. It’s about filling in what was missing, slowly and deliberately, so your nervous system finally knows what it feels like to be looked after.

Remothering isn’t about hating your mother. It isn’t about deciding she was a monster or rewriting the entire story of your childhood as one of pure deprivation. Mothers are complicated. Many of them were doing the very best they could, inside their own wounds, their own histories, their own unmothered selves. The point of remothering isn’t to assign blame. The point is to acknowledge what was missing and to begin, actively, to fill it in.

The concept of the “good mother within” has deep roots in Jungian depth psychology. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, writes extensively about the internal mother as an archetypal force — not just the personal mother we were given, but the mothering capacity that lives inside every woman as a natural inheritance. When that capacity is stunted by an inadequate early experience, she writes, a woman can consciously work to cultivate it. She can choose to activate the wild, instinctual mothering that was always within her — even if no one ever modeled it for her.

Marion Woodman, MA, Jungian analyst and author of Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride, approached this same territory through what she called the negative mother complex: the internalized critical, withholding, or absent mother-voice that many women carry as a punishing interior presence. Woodman, MA, observed that women shaped by inadequate or harmful early mothering often internalize not the warm, nurturing maternal archetype they needed, but its opposite — a harsh, demanding internal voice that replicates the original wound. The work of healing, in Woodman’s clinical framework, involves consciously recognizing this negative mother complex, grieving its origin, and deliberately, intentionally, building a different relationship with oneself. A relationship characterized by warmth, permission, and unconditional care.

Remothering is, in essence, that work. It’s the practical, embodied, daily practice of offering yourself what was missing — not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a lived experience that gradually rewrites the internal template.

RESEARCH EVIDENCE

Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:

• SMD = -0.65 (medium protective effect on posttraumatic stress symptoms) (PMID: 34584575)
• β = -0.59 (self-compassion predicts PTSD symptom severity after controlling for combat exposure) (PMID: 26480901)
• effect size g = 0.62 for depression reduction in psychological intervention (transdiagnostic, related to self-compassion) (PMID: 36939067)
• r = -0.28 (childhood maltreatment negatively correlated with self-compassion) (Zhang et al., Trauma Violence Abuse)
• r = -0.31 (emotional neglect and self-compassion) (Zhang et al., Trauma Violence Abuse)

The Science: Reparenting, Inner Child Work, and Neuroplasticity

If you’ve been in therapy of any kind, you’ve probably encountered the concept of reparenting. It’s the therapeutic process of providing, within the therapeutic relationship and through intentional practice, the kinds of corrective emotional experiences that were absent or inconsistent in early childhood. The goal isn’t to rewind the clock — we can’t do that. The goal is to give the nervous system new experiences of safety, attunement, and care so that it has something different to run on.

The science behind this is more robust than it might sound. Developmental psychology has documented for decades the way early attachment experiences shape the internal working models through which we interpret and navigate all subsequent relationships. John Bowlby, MD, psychiatrist and founder of Attachment Theory, demonstrated that children build an internal working model of the world — essentially a set of assumptions about whether relationships are safe, whether caregivers can be relied upon, whether they themselves are worthy of love — based on their early experiences with primary caregivers. When those early experiences are marked by inconsistency, absence, or harm, the internal working model reflects that. And the child carries that model into adulthood, where it quietly runs in the background of every relationship, every decision, every moment of crisis. (PMID: 13803480) (PMID: 13803480)

DEFINITION REPARENTING

A therapeutic process in which a person provides themselves — or receives within a therapeutic relationship — the corrective emotional experiences absent in early childhood. Rooted in Attachment Theory as developed by John Bowlby, MD, psychiatrist and founder of Attachment Theory, reparenting works to revise the internal working models of self and relationship that were formed through early caregiver experiences, offering the nervous system new templates of safety, attunement, and consistent care.

In plain terms: Reparenting is giving your nervous system experiences it never had. It’s not pretending your childhood was different — it’s adding something new alongside what happened, until the part of you that learned to brace for the worst starts to believe, slowly, that things can be different now.

But — and this is the crucial neuroscientific piece — that working model isn’t fixed. Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, has spent decades documenting what he calls neuroplasticity in the context of attachment and trauma healing. The brain, he writes in The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, maintains the capacity for change throughout the lifespan. New relational experiences — including experiences we provide ourselves through intentional practice — can, over time, literally change the neural pathways through which we process safety, care, and self-worth. (PMID: 11556645) (PMID: 11556645)

This is the scientific grounding for remothering: it works, not because we can pretend the past didn’t happen, but because the brain is plastic enough to add new experiences alongside the old ones. The old template doesn’t disappear. But it starts to be joined by something else. A different voice. A softer internal presence. One that says you’re okay, I’ve got you in the moments when the child inside you is sure that you’re not, and nobody does.

Inner child work — the practice of consciously relating to the younger parts of yourself that still carry the original wounds — is one of the central modalities through which this happens. Pioneered in different forms by therapists including John Bradshaw, author of Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, inner child work invites adults to create a genuine relationship with the childhood self who learned, early, to disappear. To not need too much. To be small. Remothering that child — speaking to her, comforting her, letting her exist and be held — is not a metaphor. At the neurological level, it creates real new experiences of care that the nervous system can use.

Somatic approaches — body-centered therapies that recognize the way trauma is stored in the body as much as in the mind — have added another dimension to our understanding of how remothering works. Peter A. Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, emphasizes that healing from early relational trauma requires addressing the body directly. The tension held in the shoulders, the chronic vigilance in the chest, the way the jaw tightens when someone raises their voice — these are all somatic expressions of unmothered experience. Remothering practices that work through the body — through warmth, through touch, through breath, through physical self-care — reach the nervous system at a level that cognitive work alone cannot. (PMID: 25699005) (PMID: 25699005)

Camille’s Story: Learning to Soften Toward Yourself

Note: The following is a composite vignette. Identifying details have been changed and combined to protect client privacy. It does not represent any single individual.

Camille came to therapy at thirty-seven describing herself as someone who had “built her whole life on grit.” She’d grown up with a mother who struggled with depression — not the kind that was ever named or treated, but the kind that manifested as long silences, unexplained absences from school pickup, and a household that always felt like it was waiting for something to happen that never quite did. Camille had learned young to not add to the weight. To take care of herself. To handle things.

The Cost of Going Unmothered

I want to spend a moment on what it actually costs a woman to grow up without adequate maternal attunement — not to assign blame or generate grief for its own sake, but because naming the cost clearly is what makes the work of remothering feel urgent rather than optional.

In my work with clients, I see this cost in a few consistent forms. First, there’s the internalized critic — the voice that sounds like judgment but is actually a replay of what was absent. When no one reliably said you’re okay, you’re enough, I see you, the psyche fills that silence with its own verdict, and the verdict is rarely kind. Many driven women experience this as a persistent low-level dissatisfaction with themselves: the sense that no matter what they accomplish, it’s never quite enough. That voice isn’t wisdom. It’s a wound shaped like a standard.

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Second, there’s the difficulty with receiving. Women raised without consistent maternal care often have an underdeveloped capacity for receiving — for letting care land, for tolerating being cared for without immediately deflecting or minimizing it. They can give abundantly. They struggle, in quiet ways, to take in. When someone offers them something warm — a compliment, a gesture, an act of genuine care — the system doesn’t quite know what to do with it. The nervous system reads it as unfamiliar rather than safe.

Third, and perhaps most painfully, there’s the confusion about what one is entitled to need. Childhood emotional neglect specifically shapes a woman to distrust her own needs — to minimize them, apologize for them, or simply not register them until they become undeniable. In practice, this means she waits until she’s depleted past the point of function before asking for help. She treats basic needs for rest, comfort, and care as indulgences rather than requirements. She’s very good at identifying what everyone around her needs. She can’t quite locate what she herself needs — or she locates it and immediately decides it’s too much to ask.

Practical Remothering: What It Actually Looks Like

Remothering is not a metaphor that stays in the therapy room. It’s a daily practice, made up of small, consistent acts of self-attunement that, over time, build a genuinely different internal relationship. Here is what it actually looks like, in concrete terms.

Noticing before fixing. The first gesture of maternal care is attunement — simply noticing how someone is doing without immediately moving to fix, manage, or redirect. In the context of remothering, this means developing the practice of checking in with yourself throughout the day. Not what do I need to do? — but how am I, right now? This sounds simple. For women shaped by early environments where their inner state didn’t matter much to anyone, it can be genuinely disorienting. Start small. Three times a day, pause and ask: what am I feeling? What do I need? You don’t have to immediately provide it. Just notice.

Speaking to yourself differently. The voice you use when you talk to yourself — in moments of failure, difficulty, or fatigue — is not neutral. It’s either replicating the wound or beginning to repair it. In remothering work, I often ask clients: what would a genuinely warm, caring mother say to you right now, in this situation? Then I ask them to actually say that to themselves — out loud, if they can tolerate it. This is not about affirmations or bypassing what’s hard. It’s about inserting a genuinely different voice into the moments when the old one is loudest. Over time, that voice becomes more automatic. It starts to feel less foreign and more like you.

Physical self-care as maternal act. Somatic work has helped me understand that the body carries the unmothered experience at a level that cognition alone can’t fully reach. This means that physical care — warmth, softness, nourishment, comfort — is not peripheral to remothering; it’s central to it. Warm baths, nourishing food, soft blankets, holding your own hand, putting a warm hand on your own chest when you’re distressed — these are not silly. They are direct communications to the nervous system that you are safe, cared for, not alone. They bypass the cognitive channel entirely and speak directly to the body that learned too early to do without.

Receiving care from safe others. Remothering is not only a solo practice. It also involves — gradually, carefully — allowing safe others to provide what was missing. A therapist who offers genuine attunement. A friend who can hold you without needing you to perform recovery. A partner who asks how you are and waits for the real answer. The attachment system heals primarily in relationship — not only in internal practice. The goal isn’t to become self-sufficient in a way that no longer needs anyone. The goal is to become able to receive what safe people offer, and to let it land.

Working with the inner child directly. This is the part of the practice that some women find the most awkward and the most powerful. It involves consciously relating to the younger version of yourself — particularly the child who learned to do without, to be small, to handle it alone. You can do this through journaling (writing a letter to your younger self, or letting her write to you), through imagery in therapy, or simply through moments where you consciously say to that part of yourself: I know it was hard. I’m here now. You don’t have to manage it alone anymore. The neuroplastic change this creates is real, even when it feels like just a thought.

Sarah’s Story: When the Inner Child Finally Gets to Speak

Note: The following is a composite vignette. Identifying details have been changed and combined to protect client privacy. It does not represent any single individual.

Sarah was forty-one when she came to therapy. She’d built a successful life — a leadership role she was genuinely proud of, a long-term partnership, a community of real friends. By every external measure, she was doing well. And she was. But there was a part of her that she described, in our second session, as “the part that doesn’t believe any of it.”

Sarah’s mother had been loving — genuinely loving — but chronically overwhelmed. She’d struggled with health issues throughout Sarah’s childhood, and the household had operated in a kind of quiet emergency management mode for most of Sarah’s early years. Sarah had learned, almost imperceptibly, that her mother’s capacity was limited and that adding her own needs to the pile felt selfish. She’d become extraordinarily capable and extraordinarily self-contained. These traits served her well professionally. They cost her something at the level of her own relationship with herself.

In therapy, Sarah began doing some targeted inner child work. It was uncomfortable at first — she kept wanting to intellectualize it, to understand it from a distance rather than feel it up close. But slowly, she began to make contact with a younger version of herself: a child who was tired of being self-sufficient, who had wanted, very simply, to be held and told everything was going to be okay.

What shifted for Sarah wasn’t dramatic. It happened in small increments — moments where she caught herself bracing for criticism after a success, and instead put a hand on her own chest and said, quietly, you did well. Moments where she felt the pull to immediately fix a bad mood and instead sat with it for a few minutes, just letting it be there. She described it, months into the work, as “like I’m learning a language I should have learned when I was five.” That’s exactly what it is. Relational trauma gaps can be filled — not all at once, but one small, consistent act of care at a time.

Both/And: You Needed More Than You Got AND You Can Give It to Yourself Now

Here’s the both/and I want to sit with you in: you genuinely needed more than you got as a child. That’s not a dramatic claim or an indictment — it’s a factual statement about what children require in order to develop a secure, stable relationship with themselves. If that wasn’t fully provided, the deficit is real. You didn’t imagine it. You didn’t need too much. You needed what all children need, and some of it wasn’t there.

AND: you can give it to yourself now. Not because that resolves the original loss or makes it not have happened. But because the brain and nervous system are plastic enough, at any age, to incorporate new experiences of care — and because the version of you that needed more is still present. She didn’t leave when you grew up. She’s in there, still hoping someone is going to show up for her. You get to be that someone. You’re the only person in your life who is always present, always accessible, and who has the most complete picture of what you’ve been through. That makes you, actually, uniquely qualified for this work.

The both/and also applies to your mother. She may have genuinely loved you AND been unable to give you what you needed. Both things can be true. Remothering doesn’t require you to decide that your mother was bad or that your childhood was all deprivation. It only asks you to be honest about what was missing — not in a spirit of accusation, but in a spirit of clarity about what work remains to be done. The grief and the compassion can coexist. Often they need to.

The Systemic Lens: Collective Mothering and the Village We Were Promised

There’s a dimension to remothering that rarely gets talked about: the systemic one. The deficit that many women carry isn’t only about their individual mothers. It’s about a broader cultural failure to support the kind of sustained, attuned maternal care that child development research has shown children actually need.

Mothers in modern Western culture are asked to do something that is, frankly, impossible without adequate support: to provide continuous, high-quality emotional attunement to their children while also managing their own needs, careers, relationships, households, and frequently unresolved trauma — without a village, without adequate parental leave, without the kind of intergenerational support network that humans evolved requiring. Many of the mothers who couldn’t give their daughters what they needed weren’t failing personally. They were unsupported systematically. The inadequacy was real, and it cascaded downward — but the source was structural, not individual.

Understanding the systemic dimension doesn’t erase the personal wound. But it can soften the self-blame that many women carry — the sense that they needed too much, or that their need for remothering is evidence of some particular fragility. It’s not. It’s a common experience of a generation of women raised in conditions that made consistent maternal attunement very difficult to provide. You’re not unusual for having this gap. You’re human, raised in a particular historical and cultural moment that made adequate mothering harder than it should have been.

The good news — and I mean this genuinely — is that the village doesn’t have to be the one you grew up in. Remothering includes seeking out relational environments where maternal qualities are present: therapy, certain friendships, communities built on genuine care and attunement. The attachment system heals in relationship. Finding relationships with genuinely warm, present, attuned people — and letting those relationships teach your nervous system something new — is part of the work. Not instead of the internal practice, but alongside it.

A Final Word

If you’ve read this far, I suspect you recognize something of yourself in what’s here. Maybe the ache in the opening scene landed somewhere specific. Maybe the cost list resonated more than you wanted it to. Maybe you’re sitting with a kind of complicated grief — for what wasn’t there, for the child you were, for the years you spent managing without knowing there was another option.

That grief is appropriate. Let yourself feel it. It’s not weakness — it’s honesty. And honesty is always the beginning of something.

Remothering is slow work. It’s not a technique you master in a weekend or a shift that happens in a single session. It’s the long, quiet project of building, from the inside out, a different relationship with yourself — one characterized by attunement instead of criticism, by warmth instead of pressure, by the steady presence of someone who sees you clearly and stays. The someone, ultimately, is you. And you are capable of this. You’ve already been doing it, in partial ways, longer than you know — every time you were a little gentler with yourself than usual, every time you paused before the self-judgment kicked in, every time you did one thing that was just for you, without justification.

If you’d like support doing this work in a therapeutic container — with someone who understands relational trauma and the particular experience of driven women healing early wounds — I’d be honored to work with you. You can learn more about working with me here. Whatever path you take, I’m glad you’re asking the question. The asking is the beginning.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Related Reading

• Estés, C. P. (1992). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
• Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books.
• Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
• Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. Bantam Books.
• Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.
• Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer