Maternal Rage: How understanding your past can hold the key to your motherhood journey
Maternal Rage: How Understanding Your Past Can Hold the Key to Your Motherhood Journey
Looking after a baby is all-consuming and wanting a break, or the chance to actually finish a task without multiple interruptions is completely understandable. If you’ve been looking forward to that window of time when your baby naps and they won’t fall asleep, you won’t be the first or the last mother to feel intense frustration or even desperation. However, for some Mums, this can be experienced as overwhelming rage that feels unbearable and is then followed by feelings of guilt, shame and confusion as to where these feelings suddenly erupted from.
As a new mother, something that is very rarely acknowledged in your antenatal prep is that your emotional experience of having a baby and becoming a Mum can be deeply connected to your own past experiences. Understanding this connection can be the first step toward a more regulated nervous system and finding more peace in motherhood without constantly comparing yourself to others (and thinking they’re coping better). For many mothers, the sound of crying or fussing activates old neural pathways formed long before your baby arrived. Perhaps it echoes times in your own infancy when you weren't soothed, when your needs weren't met, or when emotions ran high in your childhood home and you felt scared. Although you are no longer the baby and have become the parent, your body has kept the score of your own childhood and this can become reactivated by motherhood, leaving you feeling emotionally out of control and overwhelmed. In these circumstances, women often blame themselves for not having enough self-control and then feeling guilty, try to make up for this by being the “perfect Mum” until inevitably they find themself in the same situation once more.
To make sense of these feelings, it can help to think about how your emotions were, or weren’t tended to as a child. This isn't about placing blame—it's about recognising patterns and understanding your own emotional blueprint, so that you can respond to your baby in the present without feeling hijacked by your past. When you find yourself reacting strongly to your baby's needs, particularly during stressful moments like failed nap attempts, night wakings or their noisy exuberance when you are out together in a quiet café, it can signal an intolerance to feelings that were not tolerated in you by your caregivers. An example of this is the little girl who grew up to be “good and tidy” in order to be loved and accepted, finds the mess and chaos of motherhood difficult to manage, which results in episodes of rage that on the surface seem to come out of the blue (and can trigger feelings of badness and shame).
These intense reactions often surprise and confuse new mothers but are more commonly experienced than you think: "I've never felt rage like this before," or "I don't understand why I can't handle normal baby behaviour like other mums" are phrases that often come up in postnatal therapy. However, motherhood uniquely activates our attachment history in ways other relationships might not and in this process, forces you to confront feelings you have long buried and now can’t escape from. Although self-control and striving to be the “perfect Mum” are often hoped to be the solution, understanding your emotional blueprint from childhood often holds the key to your current motherhood experience and the roots of your maternal rage.
Postnatal therapy can help you to understand the context of your emotional reactions, develop more compassion for yourself and learn to regulate your emotions through acknowledging them rather than disconnecting from them or denying them. This understanding doesn't make the challenges disappear, but it does help separate past from present and breaks the cycle of rage and shame. Motherhood doesn't have to be defined by your past. With support, you can reach a place where one where your child's cries don't send you into panic and where naptime struggles don't leave you feeling like you need to scream or run away.
Taking steps to understand your triggers and reactions isn't selfish—it's essential care that benefits both you and your baby and has the capacity to break intergenerational patterns. If you would like to stop feeling like you are always on high alert and explore how your past is influencing your motherhood journey, I'm here to help. Together, we can transform those triggering moments into opportunities for growth and connection and equip you with emotional resilience for the inevitable challenges of parenthood.