As a woman who has walked a few thousand other women through Rites of Passage work, studied the nervous system (through both a medical lens during my Bachelor in Medical Science to become a radiation therapist, and again through the eyes of a somatic practitioner), and worked with the body as an inherent source of wisdom, I have come to realise this:
A lot of our maternal rage is curdled grief.
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No backed-up resentment.
Not just hormones.
Not simply sleep deprivation.
Though, yes — also those.
This reflection is not a how-to.
It’s not neat or resolved.
I wasn’t someone who fantasised about motherhood. I didn’t dream of bassinets and breastfeeding. But when I discovered I was pregnant, I felt something like peace.
And then came the slow-motion unravelling. (Which is a lovely, poetic way to say: everything started to fall apart.)
Not in a phoenix-rising, goddess-of-the-void way.
Sometimes these terms sound mystical, poetic and lovely. Can I assure you before you go on reading and watching, this was not that. I haven’t emerged triumphant. There’s no neat bow on this.
I am still navigating it all imperfectly. =
Sometimes, I’m a little ahead of the explosions and tend to them with more intention and perspective.
And sometimes, like yesterday, feeling exceptionally constrained in my heart, in need of space and a full day of Life staring back at me, I had more than one clipped “yep” when what I really felt was: leave me be.
Rage can be invisible. It doesn’t always look dramatic. It’s often quiet. Functional. Plausible. Until it’s not.
Holding anger in the heart without turning it into an emotion, a story, or a righteous boundary-rupture belief is masterful work.
Please remember how human we all are together here.
What my reflection walks through:
Why anger in mothers isn’t pathological — it’s biological, cultural, and ancestral.
How the modern nuclear family model is incompatible with the nervous system of a mother — and why isolation isn’t normal.
What happens when unprocessed intergenerational trauma, hormonal shifts, and unrelenting cultural pressure collide?
Why postpartum rage is rarely talked about — and how it often masks deep grief, thwarted instincts, and the loss of communal mothering.
The freeze response (dorsal vagal shutdown) in modern parenting — and how it mimics depression, numbness, and collapse.
How repressed energy becomes internalised violence — and how that turns into self-hatred, shame, or cruelty toward those we love.
The sacred role of somatic practices, ritual space, and community containers in allowing grief, rage, and ancestral pain to move.
“What you exile will grow hostile toward you (Martin Shaw).
And I exiled a lot of pain.”
Know someone you care about who would do well to hear this story?
Stuff I really say
“I became more self-critical and doubting and diminishing of myself than I ever have been in my whole life.”
“I rolled my eyes at mothers before I became one. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“This isn’t about whether you love your child. It’s about the demand on one body, one nervous system, one mother — in a system that doesn’t support her.”
“The pressure I’ve placed on myself as a trauma practitioner, as a woman who reverses relational fracture for a living… was unbearable. I knew too much. And still — I lost it.”
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