Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

There’s a line that gets passed around a lot in coaching, self-help books, and wellness circles. You’ve probably heard it. Maybe you’ve said it to yourself. It goes something like this:

“The only thing you can control is your reaction.”

It sounds empowering. And in theory, it is. But for a lot of moms — especially moms who are doing the work, who care deeply, who want to show up differently — it quietly lands as something else entirely: shame.

Because you’ve tried. You’ve read the books, taken the courses, set the intentions. And still, in the moment when your kids are melting down or you’re exhausted or your partner says that one thing — the reaction that comes out isn’t the one you wanted. And now there’s a second layer: I should have been able to control that. Why can’t I control that?

Here’s what I want to say to you: that’s not a willpower problem. And it’s not a character flaw. It’s science.

Why You Don’t Actually Have Control in the Moment

90 to 95% of our experience — the lens through which we see the world, the automatic responses we have to the people and situations around us — is coming from our unconscious. And our unconscious lives in our body, reflected in the state of our nervous system.

When we’re triggered, it’s not our thoughtful, intentional prefrontal cortex calling the shots. It’s older, faster programming — the kind that was wired in long before we had the language or the capacity to choose. For those of us with a fiery relationship with a parent, a history of emotional overwhelm, or deep conditioning around what “good mothering” is supposed to look like, that programming runs particularly deep.

So telling yourself I just need to control my reaction is a little bit like standing at the bottom of a river and telling yourself to swim upstream — without addressing the current. It’s not that you’re not trying. It’s that the current is stronger than effort alone.

And the shame that piles on top when we can’t do it? That’s not helping either. It’s just adding more weight.

What You Actually Do Have Control Over

Here’s where I want to offer you something real.

You may not have significant control over your reaction in the moment. But you absolutely have control over what you do before the moment. And that is where the real power lives.

You have control over:

The support you decide to get. Whether that’s a community of other mothers doing this work, a somatic session, a therapeutic container, or a coach — the support you choose to surround yourself with is a genuine choice you can make. And it compounds.

The practices you commit to consistently. Not the ones you do once when you’re in crisis, but the ones you tend to regularly. The nervous system work. The body-based practices. The moments of turning inward before the storm arrives.

The reprogramming you invest in over time. This is the slower, deeper work — the kind that doesn’t necessarily show up in the next heated moment, but starts showing up in the one after that, and the one after that. Until one day you notice: I didn’t react the way I used to. Something has shifted.

That shift doesn’t happen because you tried harder in the moment. It happens because of what you did in the days, weeks, and months leading up to it.

The Body Knows More Than We Think

One of the most consistent things I see in my one-on-one sessions is this: women who are brand new to somatic, body-based work and women who have been doing it for years both walk away saying the same thing. I can’t believe what just came through. I didn’t think anything was going to happen.

That’s because the body holds wisdom that the mind can’t always access. Insight — the kind you get from talking about a problem, reading about it, journaling around it — is genuinely valuable. But it has a ceiling. When we turn toward the body, we access something different: real-time healing, intuition, the kind of unfolding that doesn’t happen in a conversation but in the stillness of actually being with yourself.

Most of us avoid it because it’s unfamiliar, or because we tried it once and felt nothing, or because it sounds a little woo and we’re not sure we’re doing it right. But when you’re held in the right container, with someone you trust, it is almost always surprising. And almost always worth it.

The Flourished Mother Isn’t Always Calm

I want to be clear about something: the goal of this work is not to become a mother who is perfectly regulated, always grounded, never reactive.

The Flourished Mother — the archetype and energy we work with here at The School of MOM — is not someone who has suppressed her humanness. She feels the full spectrum of her experience. She gets angry. She has hard days. She moves through seasons of depletion and seasons of aliveness.

What she has is capacity. The capacity to be with her feelings — including the big, inconvenient ones — with presence, with grace, and with self-compassion. That capacity isn’t something she was born with. It’s something she built, through practice and through choosing the right support.

Making the Choice Where It Actually Matters

If you want to react differently in the hard moments, the most powerful thing you can do is make a choice before the hard moments arrive.

Choose the support. Choose the practice. Choose the community. Choose to turn toward your body and learn its language, instead of continuing to talk around the thing you want to change.

That’s where your real control lives. And that’s exactly what it’s there for.

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If this resonated and you’re ready to take a closer look at your own patterns, a Flourished Mother Map is a beautiful place to start. It’s a personalized session that gives you a bird’s eye view of where you are, where you’re getting stuck, and what your path forward looks like. Find out more HERE.