1. Welcome to Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother

Are you navigating the wild ride that is motherhood without the support of your mother?  

Welcome to Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother! 

The mission of this new podcast is to help motherless mothers recognize harmful patterns, own their stories, open their hearts to forgiveness, transform limiting beliefs, and set new boundaries. By doing this, it is creating a safe space for moms to heal and grow together. 

In this episode, your host, Alyssa Carlene shares her deeply personal story about growing up without maternal support and how it shaped her journey as a mother. She opens up about the challenges of navigating motherhood without her mom’s guidance, the pain of unresolved wounds, and her path toward healing and breaking generational trauma. 

Listen to this episode to answer the following questions: 

• Where can I turn for support navigating motherhood without my mother? 
• How does growing up without maternal support impact the way I navigate motherhood? 
• What steps can I take to begin my healing journey and create a healthier future for myself and my children? 
• Why is it important to address childhood wounds? 
• What will help help me break generational trauma? 

1. Want to join a supportive, heartfelt community with other moms who are also navigating motherhood without their mothers? Join our Facebook Group today!

2. Are you ready to build confidence and emotional resilience as a mom, even without the support of your mother? Access the free video training now: Five Steps to Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother!

3. Want to chat more about what it's like to mother without your mom and get personalized support? Send Alyssa Carlene a DM on Instagram!

Transcript

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Imagine this scenario. You're an overwhelmed, overstimulated mom on the brink of utter exhaustion. And the one person you wish could help you can't. Your mother. For whatever reason, she's not available or capable. You long for your mom to guide and care for you in a helpful, loving way as you care for everyone else. It's a gaping void, deeply devastating and painful. Because at the end of the day, when your kids are begging for you to hold them, you wish you could be the one held, properly mothered and loved. Are you a version of this mom? You're listening to Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother. Here, we help moms with young children who lack maternal support to heal childhood wounds and break harmful generational patterns through the five-step Roots Framework. My name is Alyssa Carlene. I am a generational healing and motherhood empowerment coach. My mission is to help you heal the root cause of your struggles so you can learn to regulate your emotions and create a healthy, loving home environment for your family. Before we begin this episode, I want to issue a trigger warning. Today's discussion covers sensitive topics, including child neglect, drug and Thank you so much for joining us. One of the heaviest pain points of my entire existence has been the lack of emotional and physical support from my mother. And this wound only grew bigger when I became a mother myself. Does this resonate with you? By the end of today's episode, I promise you'll understand my why for starting this new podcast and know what the five steps to my roots framework represent and how they can help you heal. First I'd like to share some of my story with you. In sharing my story I want you to know that it is never my intention to bash on my mother or other mothers who are incapable or unavailable. My intention is to help you heal and I want you to know and understand through my story that I can truly empathize with you. I'm the oldest of three children and It's a version of my mother that I hold fondly in my heart because I believe that that is who she is underneath. And I just, I try to remember her like that and remember that she wasn't always the way she is now. Unfortunately, when I was around five or six years old, she endured a neck injury that sparked the beginning of a lifetime battle with addiction. You see, this neck injury was only a true symptom of something much bigger. Years and years of unresolved childhood trauma and abuse. Her family of origin was highly dysfunctional. She didn't have a strong support system, and she just always suffered from mental health struggles that I truly believe manifested physically in her body. My mom was not properly taught how to manage her emotions or deal with her problems, and I understand that now. I believe that she was taught to suppress them, and shove them down to smile and let things go for the sake of her parents and everyone else around her. She's the youngest of eight children, and I think she just learned that she needed to sit tight and do as she's told. So with this being the basis of her coping, essentially the accident really unleashed nightmarish consequences. Around the time I was eight, she tried alcohol for the first time with a friend. Alcohol was the great escape because she felt like a failing mother and wife, and this life for her was unbearable. And that's when she couldn't take it anymore. She attempted suicide by combining alcohol with benzodiazepines, but not just once. I... Can't even count how many times she tried to take her life over and over throughout the years and then in and out of hospitals and rehabs over and over. Mind you, my siblings and I were so young and we felt so scared and confused. I remember questioning why mommy didn't want to be here, why my mom kept doing this. And just not understanding and feeling really scared. It was very, very devastating. And the trauma of these suicide attempts coupled with her absence while attending the rehabs grew into this chilling uncertainty. Worst of all, this fear developed of the one person who was supposed to protect us all along. Mom. As you can imagine, she was very incapable and unfortunately neglectful of us children. She just deteriorated over the years. And I remember her often in bed most days, uninvolved in pretty much every facet of our lives. In hindsight, I realized that she was over-medicating, which made her extremely drowsy and incapable. And it was just this vicious, vicious cycle of It felt like things were so up and down. I have so many memories of her screaming and crying in her upstairs closet. There was a lot of verbal and emotional abuse, so much fighting. And then there were seasons when she did seem a little bit healthier and she was more active in our family. But from my memory, she was just constantly sick, anxious, and suicidal. Even despite all of this, I wouldn't say that my childhood was horrible. I have very fond childhood memories. I often miss the thrill of being a child and playing with my siblings, my childhood home, and all the pleasant times that I had. It's like the saying, two things can coexist, right? There was still much happiness amidst the chaos. Yet unfortunately for my mother, her health continued to plummet. After I graduated from high school, being physically removed from the toxic environment, I watched from afar things worsen like I could have never imagined. And I could go a lot more in detail about my mom and about my life and the trauma and everything that I went through. But regardless, the point that I want to make here is that I've lacked hope. maternal support my entire life, and it's been a painful uphill battle. Truly though, it wasn't until I became a mother that the sting of what I lack hurt the most. Just like my mom's neck injury triggered her past traumas, becoming a mother triggered mine. So what did I do with all this pain? Because one minute I'm married and then the next I miscarry my first child. And then eventually I have a beautiful baby daughter who I love more than anything. And I'm staring at this baby thinking, how do I mother her? No one taught me how to do this. What am I doing? There was a breaking point when my first daughter was two and a half. And I decided that enough was enough. My chronic pain was at an all-time high. Nothing was working. No medicine. I realized, you know, I've got a lot of unresolved stuff that I need to work out. So I relived a traumatic childhood memory. And the floodgates opened. And the rest is history. No, I'm just kidding. But long story short, that was truly the first official day of my healing journey. After a few years of dedicated work on myself and embodying the mother I deserve, I created this show as a loving guide for moms like me who feel broken and shattered and they just need help to rebuild the pieces. So here's the fun part, the transformation, my roots, formula, and framework. My previous podcast was called Uproot and Uplift. And I've always loved the metaphor of roots and the concept that we can dig deep enough to heal. So let me quickly summarize what roots stands for. R is for recognizing harmful patterns. O is own your story. The next O is open your heart to forgiveness. T, transform limiting beliefs. And S, set new boundaries. This is just a simple introduction to the framework. In my next episode, I'll be going into much more detail about the importance of each of these steps and my personal experience and how I can help you. Because the ultimate goal here above all else is to learn how to navigate motherhood without your mother. I know what it's like to... look around at my mom friends and see them having the best relationships with their mom or having so much help and the pain that comes from witnessing that and not having that and not knowing what to do. And then feeling the horrible guilt that comes from feeling like you have to be the perfect mom, that you can't end up like your mother, and the pressure that you put on yourself because you don't want to end up like her. And if you're mothering with unresolved childhood trauma, you are going to suffer and struggle. And a lot of us don't even realize that we have it. So another part that is so important is recognizing we have this trauma, we've got to recover, and then we can do the work to prevent the trauma from passing forward. I know that this is such a big deal and it is such an incredible work that you can do, not just for your family and for your children, but for you because we lose ourselves in motherhood Every time we have a baby, we birth a child, we are reborn. And when we do that without the support of our mother, it is like a gaping hole inside that needs to be filled. It will never and may never be filled by your mother. That is a reality. That is my reality. But you can fill it with other things and you can thrive. You can be the mother that you deserved. You can embody her And you can heal. I am so thrilled that you are here listening to this new show and on the journey with me in navigating motherhood without your mother. Because at the end of the day, you have the power to heal your childhood wounds and break generational trauma. Please, if you haven't already, follow me on Instagram at alissa.carleen.rogers. Thank you so much. empower one another. Thank you so much for listening, and I cannot wait for you to heal.