Does Mother’s Day bring you mixed emotions?

Do you have feelings of grief and loss which are triggered every Mother’s Day?

Mother’s Day is a day to honour our mothers by thanking them for their love and support. And for many who still have loving mothers in their lives, it can be. However, it can also be highly emotive for those who have lost their mothers, who did not have a mother to bring them up or for those whose mothers were not well equipped to care for them.

Whether she was a positive influence in your life or not, the intense emotional response to the pain of the loss or absence of your mother can be very deeply felt for many years, which can be debilitating. As our mothers are often our main carers throughout our formative years, to lose that relationship takes us right back to our early childhood selves. We feel the fear of abandonment and the terror of not being able to survive without her. Even as adults, this feeling can easily overwhelm us when we are triggered. After all, we all carry our inner child within us.

Taking time to grieve

Just getting on with life after the death of your mother is unlikely to allow space to integrate the intense feelings you may be experiencing. Neither does the passing of time mean that you should be over your grief. It can take years and without giving yourself permission to process your emotions, it can take a lifetime.

However, taking time to grieve with the support of a relational psychotherapeutic counsellor gives you the opportunity to process your feelings for your mother, whatever they may be, and come through this experience with a better understanding and a better felt sense of your relationship with her. You can explore your feelings around the loss of your mother and how you can survive and even thrive in the world without her.

Although there is no typical response to death, the five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as taught by the late Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are states throughout the grieving process which affect many people but which are not time-bound or linear. These states can be overwhelming. They can keep resurfacing in waves unless they are addressed and eventually integrated into our deepest selves, so that we are able to better cope with our loss.

The experience of grieving your mother’s death is often incredibly painful. Instead of burying your feelings and hoping they will go away, getting support to process your emotions to grieve fully will enable you to heal and come through one of the most painful of life’s experiences with a felt sense of acceptance.