Mother - Daughter Relationships
/This article was written by Shelley Holland, a therapist with the Palmeira Practice.
A bond that shapes everything else
Few relationships carry as much weight as the one between mother and daughter. It's often layered, tender, complicated, and sometimes painful, all at once. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we form other relationships, and what we come to expect from being loved.
Whatever brings you to think about this relationship, whether you're a daughter trying to untangle something that's never felt straightforward, or a mother sitting with the grief of a distance that's grown between you and your child, you're dealing with difficult territory. It's common to feel very alone in it, even though it isn't rare.
How might we work together
It’s important I understand your perspective on the events that have formed the relationship between you and your mother or daughter. It’s also important we understand what those events mean to you and how they continue to shape your life and relationships now. The earliest patterns, around closeness and distance, around whether you felt truly seen, around whether needing someone felt safe, tend to be the patterns that stay the longest, sometimes because they formed before you had any language to make sense of them.
Working psychodynamically means paying close attention to what sits beneath the obvious story. Together we might notice how old dynamics echo in present-day reactions, why certain feelings seem bigger than the situation warrants, or how hard it can be to find yourself separately from the relationship that first defined you. Attachment theory, which looks at how our earliest bonds shape our lifelong capacity for connection, can often add clarity to our understanding of your mother-daughter story.
The ‘fix’ is not necessarily to reconcile, repair, or arrive at a particular feeling about the relationship. Unless repair, and how you might work towards that, is something you’re looking for.
Some daughters are grieving a mother who was never quite fully present. Some are sitting with a rupture that feels beyond repair. Some mothers are living with the quiet ache of an estrangement they can't undo, or don’t understand. Whatever your version of this is, the aim is to give you room to explore it, help you understand it better, learn more about yourself, and to find a bit more freedom in how you carry it.
My approach
At its heart, this is early trauma work, so we start by building enough safety and stability in the therapy itself before exploring the deeper, historical attachment injuries that sit beneath a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Those injuries can give rise to feelings of shame, guilt, or resentment that's gone unspoken for years. This is perfectly normal, but your feelings and the narrative behind them needs a secure foundation before it can be approached without doing further emotional harm.
I work open-endedly with this kind of work. Attachment patterns that have developed over a lifetime, and a relationship that's taken decades to form isn't going to resolve in a short number of sessions. Instead, I'd rather the pace be set by what you need and how far you want to go with the work.
It's slow, careful and kind work. But for many people, even facing the painful parts, brings a kind of relief that's hard to reach any other way.
This article was written by Shelley Holland, a therapist with the Palmeira Practice.
If you are affected by any of these issues and would like to seek therapy with Shelley Holland, contact the Palmeira Practice to make an initial appointment.
