[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. This is Lisa Lewis, your host. Thank you so much for tuning in, and if you are in the United States, we are in the month of May. What that means is that the second Sunday of May and of every year is when we celebrate Mother’s Day and today, I have a special guest who’s going to talk about how to thrive as a mom without a mom. Me, myself, I cannot imagine not having my mom. I have a very special relationship with my mom. When I think about if I didn’t have her around, what would I do without her and how she’s been a special person in my life, in the life of my children. It actually brings tears to my eyes. I don’t want to break down, but today I have on Melissa Reilley, she is a mom of two boys, a clinical psychologist and a coach for moms without a mom who is passionate about helping moms who don’t have the support and guidance of a loving mother by their side move from feeling overwhelmed and alone to feeling confident and supported while they thrive as the amazing mom they’re meant to be. As a mom without a mom herself she understands the unique experiences and challenges motherless mom’s face, and is on a mission to build awareness so all women know they are not alone. Welcome to the show, Melissa. [LISA] Yes. Thank you so much. I wasn’t expecting to get that emotional, but I guess I am and I just wanted to be there. [MELISSA REILLY] Yes, absolutely. Well, it’s a very powerful topic and one that gets many people very deeply. The reason I’m so passionate about it is because when we aren’t aware of its impact, we have a tendency to go inward and see ourselves as less than, or something wrong with us because we can’t identify why our experience looks and feels different than other people’s experience. [LISA] Oh, wow. I had never thought of it like that. I love that way you just framed that. I just want to back up a little bit. As my podcast is geared towards people that are highly sensitive and there’s lots of highly sensitive moms out there, including myself, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person or not, and if you do, you can share a story about that. [MELISSA] Yes, I do consider myself highly sensitive. I have always been that person beginning in childhood who could sense how others were feeling around them, even if we weren’t in close proximity. Part of that was, it was a survival mechanism for me. I had multiple losses early on and I needed to be okay and part of how I would be okay was if I could navigate the emotions of others around me who weren’t okay. So it isn’t surprising that as an adult I am very in tuned with those around me. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my son also is as well, and he is very in tuned with me and will be going along and all of a sudden he will say, “Mom, are you all right?” I’ll look at him and be caught off guard because I may not notice that, oh yeah, I am feeling some tension and he reflected that back to me. But I do the same also. So, and I just, my mind went right to my son because we’ve been talking, I’ve been talking a lot about him lately. I know you asked about the story about me being highly sensitive, but he’s on my mind and that’s just where I had gone. So we’ll go with that. [LISA] Well, thank you for sharing that story. That’s, from many people I’ve talked to, that’s very common that they have a child who is like them or is highly sensitive and also a parent, whether the parent knew it or not. But as more people are becoming educated about highly sensitivity that they’re like, oh yeah, I see how that runs in my family. It’s not necessarily a negative thing even though people can feel it’s negative. It’s just a personality trait that we’re born with and we’re just more sensitive to many different things. [MELISSA] Absolutely. And yes, I don’t see it negatively at all. I couldn’t do what I do if I wasn’t skilled in perceiving the experiences and emotions of those around me. That’s part of what makes me such a good psychologist. However, to do that, I also need to have very healthy emotional boundaries as well, because being highly sensitive or being highly empathic without healthy boundaries can be very wounding because I’m exposed to a lot of intense emotion, hardship, trauma and so forth. So I need to be able to protect myself as well as connect with others. That’s something I’ve learned through my training, but also through experience over time. [LISA] What does it mean to be a mom without a mom? [MELISSA] I define being a mom without a mom as any mother who does not have the support and guidance of a loving mom in her day-to-day life. This includes women who are separated from their mother by death or by an unhealthy emotional relationship or by physical distance, so if they live on the different side of the world than each other. At first glance, they seem like very different groups of people, but there are very significant commonalities amongst those three groups, which is why I see them and define a mom without a mom as including all three. Those three common factors include not having a go-to person that most mothers function as, experiencing grief unexpectedly for either the mom you had or the mom you wish you had, and then third, some difficulties in developing one’s own sense of mom identity. So who are we as a mom when we don’t have a mother to learn from, or the mother we had wasn’t helpful or wasn’t healthy? [LISA] Then how do you work with that? Do you have to identify out of those threes which one you have, maybe you have, I don’t know, maybe you could have all three of them. Then how do you work with moms from there? [MELISSA] Well, you can absolutely have all three. In fact, when I started developing my program, I was really adamant. I got a lot of advice from other coaches and people in the business world that said, oh, you’ve got a niche down. You need to choose one. I was really adamant about not doing that and then I realized after some time why, and that was because I fit all three categories. So I was 25 when my mother had died suddenly, but prior to that I was in graduate school. We had lived in different states. I moved out of the house and went right to college at the age of 17 and I never moved back home, not because of any bad relationship with my mother. Up until that point she was somebody I worshiped. I loved my mother, I looked up to her, I wanted to be just like her. Then like many students, we learned that, oh my goodness, my parents are flawed, they make mistakes. I learned that my mom was a wounded individual and some of the things she did wasn’t healthy for me. In fact, some of the things she did hurt me and as I became a young adult, conflict just started to arise. We got to a point where we had a major falling out and we stopped speaking and unfortunately that went on for eight months and then she died suddenly. So we never had the opportunity to work it out despite the fact that I’m pretty sure we would have but either way, I was left with that experience of what it’s like to go through that disconnection. So I am an example of all three, living far apart, not having the emotional support of a relationship and then later experiencing the death of my mother. Now, like I said, I was 25 when that occurred, and I didn’t become a mother until much later in life, I was just a couple days shy of my 38th birthday. So I had gone through the grieving process, I’d gone through a marriage and a divorce remarriage, first jobs, moves, all of these typical adult milestones and knew what it was like to go through all of that without the support of my mom. So when my son was born, I was caught off guard. I didn’t realize what an impact that would have on me. So I felt very much alone. I didn’t have female relations to talk to about it at that time in my life and nobody else was talking about it. So despite being a psychologist, despite being confident in who I was as a woman, despite the fact that I had treated hundreds of new moms and their new mom anxieties I could not seem to figure out how to be a mom myself. So I just felt like a failure and it took a few years before I was able to recognize that there were other women out there who also didn’t have their moms and felt similar things. I started recognizing patterns among the women I saw who didn’t have a mom and that made me really curious. So I did some research and started interviewing women and looking into their experiences as well as my own. That’s when I discovered that there are very common but unique circumstances that moms without a mom face. [LISA] Wow. I just think that’s fascinating, what you like uncovered there, just from your own experience and now that you’re providing your expertise and just from your own experience what these women have gone through or are going through and you can help them get to the other side [MELISSA] Thank you. And one of the biggest concerns that women have is that they feel alone. Like I said earlier, moms tend to function as a go-to person for their daughters, not all mothers, but when there is a healthy connection between mother and daughter, they tend to fill multiple roles, including being an emotional support, being able to provide assistance in getting things done. They help during times of emergency and they can help during off hours. But if you aren’t somebody’s mother, then it’s unusual that you fit all of those roles. So a mom without a mom needs to actively build a community of people to build those supports so that they have that when it’s needed. [LISA] And how would someone go about building their community to get that support into and surround themselves with other females or moms or? [MELISSA] I encourage every mother, but especially moms without a mom to have four types of friends in their group. Actually, it doesn’t have to be just friends. These people can include friends, it can be other family members, it can be professionals such as coaches or therapists, counselors, members of a religious community. But those four individuals should include first somebody I like to call a wise woman. This is somebody that knows things. So she is the person that can give answers and is very generous with her knowledge. For example, when my son was about six months old, I was breastfeeding and one day I dropped him off at his early learning center because I needed to work. The teacher came up to me and she asked me what my opinion was about going up on a nipple size. I had no clue what she was talking about. I looked at her and said, “Excuse me.” So she repeated, “He seems to be struggling, what are your thoughts?” I said, I have no idea what this woman was talking about. Like I said, I was nursing and I would bring the bottles and the breast milk, but I didn’t understand. It’s that type of knowledge that typically gets passed down from mother to daughter or other close females in our lives. I did not have that. So she was so gracious and kind and explained to me that the holes in the bottles get larger as the infant ages to make feeding easier. Well, I didn’t know that, so she explained how I would go about buying those things and so I did that. So for the first year or so many of my wise women were the teachers at his early learning center. I also have an aunt who became a huge support of mine. So wise women, they know things and they’re very good at giving advice and suggestions. The second person I like to call an emotional supporter, and this is a person that’s really good at listening. They will not give advice. They won’t try and cheer you up. They just let you be where you’re emotionally and believe or not, not everybody is good at listening. Part of that reason is because we can be uncomfortable when others are uncomfortable. Especially as highly sensitive people, we are in tune to the discomfort of others and so we may be quick to try and cheer someone up, but that may not be what they need in the moment. So we need to find an individual or individuals who can sit with our emotion and just let us be where we are. Examples, like I said, can be friends or family, but this is where counselors or coaches can be very helpful. The third person I like to call a go-getter, and these are the people that are just amazing at getting things done. Unfortunately, that’s not me. We all know a friend that is always moving and despite how busy they are, man, they are really good at getting everything done by 9 o’clock. So this is the woman who will help you carry your diaper bag along with her three children while you struggle with one? That was me, by the way, I’m not pointing fingers. But I’m not good at, I’m not task oriented. That’s okay because I have a different skillset, but I have friends who are. These are the people that when you are feeling overwhelmed by the things you need to get done, that they can just help in a way that’s easy for them, but more difficult for you. Then the fourth person, I think all moms need to include in their mom community is a late-night talker. This is somebody who is available during unusual times. So particularly when we have young children, our sleep schedule may be off. Nowadays you may not have somebody that you know in your real life who’s up late at night, but perhaps online in a Facebook group or through social media or texting, you may be able to connect with another mom or a support system who’s there to answer a quick question or just tell you girlfriend, “I’ve got your back. It’s okay.” So again, those four people are a wise woman, emotional supporter, a go-getter and a late-night talker. If you have different people filling those different roles, then you’ll have a high likelihood of getting the type of support that you need when you need it because the other thing to remember is, like I said earlier, it is unusual for any one person to fill all of those roles unless for their own child in a healthy relationship. So moms without a mom have to actively create that and doing that through friends, family, church, community, early learning centers, playground communities, libraries, you can be creative and start building a repertoire of people that you can ask to give assistance when you need. [LISA] I just love your message and that is worth gold right there, what you just offered to everybody how to, I hear is receive help and get that guidance and support. As you’re talking, I’m just having flashbacks. When I was a new mom, I have three children and my first one was born in 2000, so it’s like right at the start of the internet, didn’t have any of that online connection. I just remember those nights by your, by myself going, God, I wonder if there’s anyone else out, is anyone else here, like anyone else up at this hour? It can feel so lonely. [MELISSA] Yes, and I was fortunate, my son was born in 2010 and my one of my best friends, her children were in high school and college, and she tended to be more of a night owl by nature. With her kids being busy in late night activities, it worked out well because I could call her later and many times she was still up. So it worked out. Then more recently, I do have some colleagues in different parts of the world and we have a WhatsApp chat, and that’s been super helpful because when it’s nighttime here, it’s daytime in Australia, so the back and forth has been wonderful. [LISA] Oh, that’s a great idea. Yeah, I love that. I’m wondering as a mom myself and as a therapist if a woman has depression before she gets pregnant and then has a baby, will that, is there a higher increase of having postpartum depression or is that totally unrelated? [MELISSA] No, that is one of the risk factors. So moms without a mom are at a higher risk for postpartum depression because first, they don’t have the built-in support. They are at a higher risk of experiencing that sense of being alone and if they have the premorbid condition of depression, so they’ve had depression prior, that alone elevates the risk of postpartum. However, I believe that there are a large number of moms without a mom who were misdiagnosed with postpartum. It actually wasn’t postpartum; it was grief but not recognized as grief. Now it can be both, of course, and the grief process increases the likelihood of postpartum, but not necessarily. [LISA] Okay, and how would you, as a clinical psychologist, how would you differentiate between postpartum depression and grief? Like, how would you know what the woman was experiencing? [MELISSA] Grief can look many different ways. When I say the word grief, we usually think about the punch in the gut experience that happens right after we lose somebody. That’s an example of grief. But it can also be characterized by a longing or a tendency for our mind to drift to the thing that we’re wanting to have in our life and being a person or circumstance. So being aware of when it occurs and why it’s occurring can help tease out is this a grief response? Postpartum depression is a cluster of symptoms that includes things like sadness, irritability, changes in energy. Again, all of that can be grief, but it becomes intense and prolonged. It can also get in the way of our bonding experience with our child. So postpartum depression will result in feelings of detachment, a lack of interest in enjoyment or pleasure and those symptoms can escalate. If a woman is experiencing those or more than a few days for two weeks, up to two weeks, then I strongly encourage them talk with a primary care clinician or a counselor because postpartum is underdiagnosed in general and when in doubt, get an assessment, it never hurts to get it looked into. Even amongst our postpartum professionals many times they aren’t asking about it, but even more so, almost nobody asks during the postpartum period, are you mothering alone? Is your mother in your life? What is the impact of being a mom without that type of support in your life? Nobody asks that. So it’s not even being identified as a possibility. [LISA] Wow, I love those questions. I’m storing those away if I have a client that comes in pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant. A term that I haven’t heard till I saw some of your questions is postpartum anxiety. I’m wondering if that can also be in relation to your relationship with, if your mother is still alive, like just having, if you’re having a child and that anxiety of like, oh my gosh, my mother or my mother-in-law is going to be coming to help, and that creates so much anxiety within yourself, or is this totally different? [MELISSA] No postpartum anxiety, like postpartum depression is not unusual. Anxiety can be a nervousness, an anxiousness, a fear that one is going to do something wrong. What makes it disordered is when those thoughts and those feelings get in the way of your day-to-day functioning. Now, as a mom without a mom, what can become really common is this fear that you’ll do something wrong. There’s an increased sense of needing to be hypervigilant because you don’t have a safety net to help or to guide you. So one of the common features I see among moms without a mom is this sense that they can never quite relax. They need to be on their game all of the time because if they do something wrong, there’s nobody there to catch them. [LISA] Then the mom would be in survival mode full time. [MELISSA] Exactly. It’s very draining. That was one of my huge fears and I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t understand the energy that was draining from me and how frozen with fear I felt quite often was I was always thinking I would do something wrong. Again, this was coming from a clinical psychologist with over a decade of experience. I just didn’t understand why. Well, I understand why now, and I understand the impact, but now I know what to do about it. I know that children are resilient, I’m resilient and I know who I can lean on for what types of support. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. I make a mistake, I correct it. There are very few things. And raising children that creates irreparable harm, very few things. So we don’t need to be perfect parents. In fact, being perfect parents isn’t what our children need. In fact, it can be unhealthy. We need to be good enough parents. [LISA] Yeah, we sure do. The good enough parent. We talked about depression, anxiety, grief, and I want to put the next one out there is guilt. So why is guilt so common among moms and why do we experience it and what can we do about it? [MELISSA] Mom guilt is one of my favorite topics to talk about. So first and foremost, guilt is simply an emotion. It is not an indicator of right or wrong. I’m going to repeat that, guilt is not an indicator of right or wrong, it’s simply an emotion. And like all emotion, it is there to help us live together in communities. We as human beings would not survive on planet earth if we did not live in communities. And one of the things that helps us live in communities is our experience of emotions and all animals that live in communities experience some level of emotion. And we can think about that, many people think dogs have emotion. Well, yeah, because they have packs, their level of emotion is rudimentary compared to ours. Chimpanzees have finely tuned emotional experiences. Elephants, any animal that lives in groups have some type of emotion. Alligators don’t, they don’t live in groups. So we as humans have highly evolved emotion centers. And so guilt has a really important purpose. It is an, it functions as a pause button, so anytime we are doing something new or we are moving outside of our comfort zone, guilt can get triggered to make us pause and look, ooh, is what I’m doing consistent with my values? Is what I doing okay for our greater community? And most of the time the answer is yes. It’s just something that is outside of her comfort zone. So why is this so common amongst mothers? Well, in part because when we become mothers, our primary role is in taking care of our children. So at the time of conception, our bodies are required to protect and nurture and take care of the growing child. If we adopt, it’s at the moment in which we make that decision that then creates the beginning of taking care of, our children need us, we sustain them with food. So not only biologically, but emotionally, and then societally, we are responsible for the caregiving of others and they depend on us. So as they grow, their need for us diminishes it slowly goes away and so we learn to let them become more independent. But with each new stage, each time we say no, or each time we set a limit or we put a boundary in place, we create a healthy disconnection and that can feel uncomfortable because we are disconnecting in little ways from the people that we have been taking care of. Even when it’s healthy, it can create that feeling of guilt, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s outside of her comfort zone. So I encourage women to see guilt as something to feel good about. In fact, I call my guilt Gladys. I bring her everywhere she comes with me, but I make her sit in the back seat. She no longer decides what I do and what I don’t do. She doesn’t drag, I do. I don’t try and get rid of her. That would be ridiculous. I’m going to feel guilty. So when my son asks for a third cookie and I say no, and he’s crying and says, mom, you hurt my feelings, I might initially feel guilty, but I know I’m not going to give into it. He’s not getting what he wants and that’s okay. That’s a healthy thing. Now that’s a silly little example and I use it because most of us can relate. But it’s the bigger things. When my child says, mom, will you please make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when they’re 14 years old and I’m in the middle of doing something work related, or even just taking 10 minutes to do my own meditation, and I say, no, you can either do that yourself or you can wait until I am ready in about an hour, I might feel guilty because I’m saying no to something they want and in my head I’m thinking, oh my goodness, I’m not feeding my child and I am a bad mother. The answer is no, I’m not a bad mother. I’m setting a limit and taking care of things that I need to take care of. They’re capable and able to take care of it themselves. They just are inconvenienced and that’s okay. Does that make sense how I put that? [LISA] It sure does. It makes a lot of sense. I hear having a different relationship with the guilt, and I also hear it, I’m just thinking about my own experience of saying no, is I feel guilty because I’m saying no to someone I love and that’s the emotional part. Then like, that’s my high sensitivity because I care about this person so much. It’s hard to say no. And then the logical part has to come in say, no, I’m doing this because I need to take care of myself, or I need to set a limit with this person, my child, because it could be age appropriate, whatever it is. So there’s that balance of the two. [MELISSA] There is a lot of love in the word no. Sometimes no is the most loving thing you can do because it is not our job to take away discomfort. It is our job to help our children learn that discomfort is something they can experience, regulate it, be okay with, but if we are always taking it away, they don’t learn that. There is a significant difference between distress versus discomfort. Discomfort’s a normal part of being a human. [LISA] It sure is. That could be a whole nother podcast going into the challenges of parenthood. [MELISSA] Yes. [LISA] So Melissa, what would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? [MELISSA] I want listeners to recognize that if they are a mother and they don’t have a supportive, loving mother next to them, that they feel different because they are different, they aren’t alone. And being a mother without a mom is hard. But there’s things that we can do about that that makes it easier. I will never have a mother in my life, that will never happen, but I recognize that there are things that I do that make my experience easier, more comfortable, and help me feel good about who I am. That is absolutely possible. So I am open to all of your listeners for them to reach out. I offer everybody a no questions asked 30-minute consult because it is truly important to me that women don’t feel alone. So that is available to all your listeners. You are not alone. It’s a real thing. And let’s start talking about it. [LISA] Yeah, let’s start talking about it. I can just hear it in your voice and your message, how much you care about other moms that don’t have moms and how you’d want the help, how you’d want to help them. [MELISSA] Thank you [LISA] That leads me to my next question, do you have a free gift for my listeners? [MELISSA] I do, I do. In addition to that call, I have what’s called Enjoy Being a Mom Again free guide, which is just a neat little tool to use if you find yourself getting distracted by feelings of longing. Sometimes moms don’t even know what they need, so I also have a little quiz that’s available on my website that can be really helpful too for moms. That’s free. Everybody loves these quizzes, so [LISA] Thank you for offering that. That sounds wonderful. Where can conditioners get in touch with you Melissa? [MELISSA] Listeners can get in touch with me either on my website, which is momswithoutamom.com. I’m on Instagram also at Moms Without a Mom. I have a Facebook group called Thriving as a Mom Without a Mom. It’s a small group, but it’s really engaged and active and I love that group. So those are probably the best places to reach me. If listeners are wanting to dig in more, I also have a book that’s available called Thriving as a Mom Without a Mom, and that’s available on Amazon or my website, both as a paperback and as a eBook. [LISA] Great. That sounds wonderful. Also, will you announce about the other thing you told me before our interview because I just, I think it’s amazing. [MELISSA] Yes, yes. I’m so excited. I’m also a TEDx speaker. That just happened recently, and so by the time Mother’s Day comes around, the TEDx should be live. It’s called Thriving as a Mom Without a Mom. You can see my message. I’m really putting that out there. So that should be available. It’s TEDx for Sinus College. Oh, and oh my goodness, since this is going to come out, around or right before Mother’s Day, I hadn’t mentioned this earlier, but I hope you don’t mind me throwing it in. I am doing a free day of Pampering for Moms, and it’s completely free. It’s going to be an online thing that moms will be able to experience self-hypnosis and self-massage. There’ll be a sound bath and all these wonderful experiential things, yoga. And it’s all prerecorded because we as moms struggle to pamper ourselves and so that is available for free and that will be up also on my website and available and it’s called A Mom’s Day of Pampering, and it will be on Mother’s Day. [LISA] That’s wonderful. Oh, that sounds so great. [MELISSA] Yes, and that’s available to all moms. You don’t have to be a mom without a mom. In fact, it’s available to all women. You don’t even have to be a mother for you to pamper yourself. And I’m just so excited about it. [LISA] Oh, wow. That’s so much giving. Wow, that’s wonderful. Oh, everybody take advantage of that. Ooh, that sounds so nice. Nice gift for yourself for Mother’s Day. [MELISSA] Thank you [LISA] Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Melissa. It’s been wonderful to have you here. [MELISSA] Thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure, Lisa. [LISA] And thank you, my listeners, for tuning in. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me an email to lisa@miokpodcast.com, and while you’re there, remember to subscribe, rate in review, wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please visit my website at amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.