Photo by Alicia Zinn

What It Actually Means to Be a Flourished Mother

There’s a version of you that knows exactly what she needs. She’s not white-knuckling it through the day, performing patience she doesn’t have, or collapsing into her phone the moment the kids are in bed. She’s not “regulated” — a word that, let’s be honest, sounds more like a thermostat than a human being. She’s flourished. Fully expressed. Moving through the hard stuff and coming back to herself.

That’s what this conversation is really about.

In Episode 92, Sarah sits down — or rather, walks through the woods — with life coach, business coach, and podcast host Katie Grimes. What unfolds is one of those rare conversations that covers everything: where our patterns come from, what’s actually happening in our nervous systems, why play matters more than we think, and why “just regulate your nervous system” is advice that sounds simple but lands nowhere.

You Learned This

One of the most quietly powerful things Katie said in this conversation is this: you learned this. The way you carry everyone else’s emotions before your own, the tendency to take care of everything and everyone before yourself, the difficulty receiving help — none of it appeared out of nowhere. It came from your caregivers, your early environment, the relationships that shaped you long before you became a mother yourself.

And the link between your relationship with your own mother — or whoever raised you — and your relationships now? It shows up everywhere. In your partnership. In your parenting. In your business. In your body. Which means the work isn’t about doing more or trying harder. It’s about bringing what was unconscious into the light.

As Carl Jung put it: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

The Four Rungs Nobody Taught You

Katie uses a ladder analogy to explain the nervous system, and it’s one of the clearest explanations you’ll hear. There are four rungs:

The top rung is joy, happiness, and contentment — where most of us want to live, but where none of us can stay permanently (Inside Out got this right). Drop down and you hit fight or flight: 57 tabs open, walking into rooms and forgetting why, feeling like you have to push through. Drop further and you’re in freeze or fawn: scrolling on the couch for hours, people-pleasing, shutting down. And at the bottom, trauma response: the panic attacks, the migraines, the getting sick the moment you finally go on vacation.

The goal isn’t to stay at the top. It’s to recognize which rung you’re on — and know how to move back up.

And here’s what makes that possible: movement. Not the gym-five-days-a-week kind (not yet, anyway). Katie’s talking about dancing in the kitchen, singing in the car, shaking your body, screaming into a pillow. These aren’t tricks. They’re biology. When we move, we signal to our nervous systems that we are not under threat. We unkink the hose. Energy starts flowing again.

Why “Regulated” Misses the Mark

Sarah has officially retired the word “regulated” — and she’s got good reason. Look it up and the first definition involves government control. It’s clinical, flat, and it implies a kind of controlled calm that most mothers find more shaming than helpful. Because the flourished mother isn’t controlled. She screams when she needs to scream. She dances when she needs to dance. She owns the full spectrum of her human experience — and that’s exactly what makes her capable of meeting her kids in theirs.

The flourished mother isn’t performing equanimity. She’s living it — messily, honestly, and with a lot more grace than she gives herself credit for.

The Pleasure Problem

Here’s the thing about play and pleasure that trips most mothers up: they can’t be accessed from empty. And they can’t be learned while playing Legos.

You have to go find pleasure and play in your own life first — the girls’ trip, the dance class, the drive home with old school hip hop on full volume — and then bring it back to your kids. The reason you feel so alive and present after a weekend away isn’t a coincidence. It’s because you were in a state of play for days, and now that state is accessible again.

The resistance to this is real. “I don’t have time for that.” “That’s not realistic.” “My kids need me.” And Katie’s response is direct: if you feel tension or resentment just hearing this, get curious about that. Because the trigger is the gift.

Conscious Parenting Happens Outside the Moment

Perhaps the most important reframe in this entire conversation: 95% of conscious parenting happens when you’re not in the room with your child.

The scripts don’t work when your nervous system is offline. The gentle response isn’t available when you’re at rung three. The work — the reflection, the understanding, the deciding in advance — happens in the quiet moments. In the walks. In the therapy room. In the community where you’re not alone in any of this.

Which is why your wellbeing isn’t separate from your parenting. It is your parenting.

You Are Not Alone

If you listened to this episode and felt something shift — even slightly — share it with another mom. Not secretly, not with a “don’t tell anyone, but…” Just send it. Because more women need to hear that what they’re experiencing makes complete sense, that their nervous systems are doing exactly what nervous systems do, and that there is another way to live inside all of this.

You’re not broken. You learned this. And you can learn something different.