Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich

Have you ever caught yourself reacting to your kids in exactly the way your mother reacted to you—the way you swore you’d never repeat?

You’re not alone. And here’s what I want you to know: those reactive patterns aren’t your fault. But once you see them clearly, they become your opportunity.

The Programming You Didn’t Choose

The truth is, you’re running on programming that was never really yours to begin with. These are stress responses that were modeled, mirrored, and passed down through generations—through your family lineage, through societal systems, through cultural conditioning that’s been shaping humans for hundreds and thousands of years.

Your current programming isn’t your fault. But it is your responsibility to transform it.

This is where the real work begins—not in trying harder to be perfect, but in understanding how to work with your nervous system to create lasting change from the inside out.

Your Kids Don’t Need a Perfect Mom

Let me say this clearly: your kids don’t need a perfect mom. That should never be the goal because it’s an impossible goal. And when we try to portray this perfect persona, we model for our kids that perfection is what matters.

What your kids actually need is a regulated mom. They need a mother who is comfortable in her own skin, who owns her human experience, who tends to herself unapologetically, and who sees her reactivity as opportunity rather than failure.

That’s a massive shift from “Oh my God, I’m doing that thing my mom did and I hate myself for it” to “I’m aware of this pattern, and that awareness is the doorway to transformation.”

Why Mindset Work Isn’t Enough

Here’s what most personal development misses: only 5-10% of our experience is conscious. That’s the realm where mindset work happens—where we can consciously choose our thoughts and try to think more positively.

But 90-95% of our experience is unconscious and subconscious, driven by our body and our nervous system. This is where our programming lives.

Think of it this way: your nervous system is like the source of water that fuels a hose, and the water coming out of that hose is your thoughts. You’re having 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day, spraying out at rapid speed. Trying to control or rewrite those thoughts as they’re coming out of the fire hose is exhausting and unrealistic.

Why not change the source of the water instead?

That’s what nervous system work does. When we heal at the level of our body and nervous system, our thoughts, feelings, and reactions naturally shift—without having to work so hard in every moment.

When Your Nervous System Drives the Bus

When your nervous system is stuck in survival mode—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—it’s nearly impossible to show up as the mom you want to be. We react unconsciously in milliseconds, before we can pause, assess, and consciously choose a different response.

This means that when you react and repeat patterns you swore you wouldn’t repeat, it’s not a personal weakness or character flaw. It’s just your biology doing what it was wired to do to keep you safe.

The good news? Once we understand how these patterns are imprinted in our nervous system, we can learn to work with them. We can rewire what our nervous system knows about safety, love, and connection.

This is how lineage healing begins.

The Five Nervous System Practices

After years of teaching and guiding women through mothering ourselves mindfully, I’ve distilled the most essential practices into what I call the Flourished Mother Starter Kit. Here are the five nervous system practices that will help you stop passing down stress to your kids:

1. The Radical Mom Pause

This is where everything begins: interrupting the mindless, unconscious loops by bringing your body out of autopilot and into the present moment. We cannot change what we’re not aware of. The pause brings your prefrontal cortex online so you can consciously choose how to respond—to soften your shoulders, feel your feet on the ground, and breathe more deeply.

2. Two Words: “Of Course”

When you notice yourself in an unwanted pattern, simply say: “Of course this is where I’m at—this is my biology.” These two words interrupt the spiral of self-blame and invite in compassion and understanding. Place a gentle palm on your body and offer yourself the same kindness you’d give your child.

3. Self-Compassion and Repair

After a triggered moment, the first step is self-compassion. Acknowledge the context: you haven’t slept in three nights, you’re stressed about a work deadline, you had a difficult conversation with your mother. Then, once you’ve offered yourself compassion, you can repair with your child. This models emotional resiliency and teaches that mistakes are part of being human.

4. Be the Compassionate Presence Your Inner Child Needs

In moments of struggle, become the resource for your younger parts—the parts that may have never had that grounding, nurturing presence. We self-regulate through co-regulation. Healing happens in relationship because trauma happens in relationship. When you’re regulated, you can be a grounded, compassionate source for both your inner child and your actual child.

5. Awaken the Flourished Mother in You

This practice is about connecting to your nervous system’s safety state—where compassion, playfulness, joy, curiosity, and contentment live. When we tune into the grounded, connected, resourced state, the stress naturally falls away. This is the piece most nervous system healing misses: we focus so much on the stress that we forget to activate the states we actually want to embody.

The Path Forward

I learned something profound from an ancestor session years ago. I was fixating on an old injury, asking anxiously if I’d be okay, when the ancestor interrupted me: “When you tap into playfulness, the fixating dissipates on its own.”

That’s what this work is about. Not just managing stress, but awakening the flourished, grounded, connected version of yourself that already exists within you.

These five practices are not quick fixes or band-aids. They’re doorways into the deeper work of rewiring your nervous system so you don’t have to work so hard to override your programming in every moment. Instead, the moment itself becomes naturally different.

Your reactivity isn’t a flaw. It’s an invitation. And you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

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Ready to dive deeper? Download the complete Flourished Mother Starter Kit with detailed practices and a guided meditation at theschoolofmom.com/start.