Mother-Daughter Relationship Therapy & Coaching

(I am a mother-daughter relationship connoisseur)

You can check the article published on GHP: https://ghp-news.com/issues/q2-2022/26/

I am a mental health counsellor and a mother-daughter relationship therapist and coach who cares deeply about women’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. In my London private practice, I provide therapeutic coaching sessions for women who struggle with their relationship with their mothers and want to establish healthy and effective boundaries. 

A woman’s mother is extremely important because she is the foundation of a daughter’s self-formation. In the archetypal analogy, the symbol of the mother is the “tree of life”. She is like a tree and grows to selflessly provide her children with fruit, nourishment, and shelter. A mother has many functions for her daughter, such as being her daughter’s home base, nurturer, protector, place of attachment, emotional modulator, and more, a mother sets a foundation for her daughter in many ways.

When a daughter has problems with her mother, the following problems may arise: 

• Low self-worth and self-esteem: when daughters do not feel unconditional love from their mothers, they blame themselves and think they are not good enough, worthy enough, or that there is something wrong with them. Such internalised thoughts can become the biggest obstacle in a daughter’s intimate relationships and her pursuit of a happy life.
• Co-dependent relationships and trauma bonding:  when a daughter has a mother who does not know how to love her she often enters unhealthy, even traumatic relationships with the partners who abuse or hurt her. These relationships are usually co-dependent in nature that based on the daughter’s earliest unmet needs. 
• Weak boundaries due to a habit of people-pleasing: traumatized by rejection and abandonment, daughters developed the habit of sacrificing their boundaries and pleasing others to avoid being abandoned in exchange for little, inconsistent moments of love crumbs. This, in turn, leads to attracting people who take advantage of or use them, resulting in further injury to her self-esteem and self-confidence. 
• Chronic guilt and hidden resentment: many daughters suffer from chronic and toxic guilt, feeling as if they are in debt to their mothers while also feeling like emotional orphans. Mothers often send out guilt-inducing messages because of their tendency to over-give. As a result, daughters often oscillate between chronic guilt and unexpressed anger. 

From conflict and lack of connection with my mother, to expressing anger, to forgiving her and myself, and to developing a higher and deeper level of compassion, my life has changed a lot. I understand what a mother-daughter relationship means to a woman. The transformation process was not comfortable, in fact most of it was extremely painful, but it meant more to me than anything else. 

I want to use my personal and professional therapeutic experiences to help daughters face and deal with the impact of their mother-daughter relationship problems. I want to help daughters develop compassion that transcends pain as they blossom into their authentic selves that they were afraid to show in the past so that they can alter their lives.

This therapeutic coaching program is divided into three phases as follows:

1. The first phase focuses on developing awareness. I used a special relational map to give daughters a new generational understanding of their mother-daughter relationship.
2. The second phase emphasises the daughter's expression of her own needs. I help daughters deal with chronic and dysregulated guilt and teach them learn how to express their needs based on their basic attitude towards these needs.
3. The final phase helps daughters learn how to establish more effective boundaries while letting go of the influence of the past hurt has had on them as they implement new rules.

I thoughtfully designed this program for daughters to deal with boundary problems in their mother-daughter relationship with the goal of helping them find true strength, freedom and respect with their mother. If this resonates with you and you would like to heal your mother-daughter relationship, please contact me via yingli@liveyourworth.co.