Tag Archives: Patriarchy

Patriarchy encourages women to become mothers, then abandons them; patriarchy sets up mothers to fail, then blames them for the suffering it causes

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In my email last week, I received brilliant words from Discovering the Inner Mother author Bethany Webster.

Bethany wrote:

“Patriarchy encourages women to become mothers, then abandons them.

Through isolation, overwork, lack of childcare, lack of parental leave, lack of healthcare, and through lack of real community support.”

I would add to this: lack of reproductive rights, the wage gap, and access to quality education. I could go on…

Bethany writes:


“Patriarchy sets mothers up to fail and then blames them for the suffering it created. All of this limits a mother’s capacity to show up in the ways she may have wanted to.”

So when I speak about the Mother Wound, many women get reactive and tell me:

“You’re just blaming mothers.”
“You’re putting even more on women.”

And I understand why it can feel that way.

But here is where I see it differently.

When we only position mothers as passive victims of the system, we unintentionally strip them of their power.

Mothers are not ONLY victims of patriarchy.
Mothers are ALSO participants within the system—and therefore have the capacity to interrupt it.

Mothers are extraordinarily powerful, precisely because they are formative.

And recognizing their formative role is not equivalent to blaming them.

It’s about responsibility in the truest sense: the ability to respond differently.

This critical nuance is the core of my work and is often misunderstood.

Not every woman is a mother. But every woman is a daughter.

And the work of healing begins there.

When a woman becomes more conscious of:

  • what she herself received and missed from her own mother
  • how she adapted to patriarchal norms in her own family
  • and what she now chooses to carry forward

She begins to break the cycle with her own children.

This is not about being hard on yourself or trying to be the perfect mother.

It’s about awareness, honesty, and a willingness to do what your own caregivers could not.

I’m not saying this is easy work.

The truth is, not everyone is ready for it.

But this is where change happens.”

I’ve had coaching from Bethany, and she’s been instrumental in helping me find my inner mother. I’ve also trained in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to learn the skills to emotionally regulate and show up with presence, curiosity, and compassion for myself, my partner and my kids. Basically, figuring out how can I be resourced enough to be as healthy a mom and person as possible while living in the patriarchy that degrades my values and doesn’t support my well-being.

Nonviolent Communication, created by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, teaches that all human behavior is motivated by an attempt to meet universal human needs. Feelings are clues pointing to those needs. NVC teaches how to to express these needs honestly while staying connected to the humanity of others, which basically means not creating “enemy images,” remembering that everyone has needs and everyone’s needs matter.

So, for example, say I go into my daughter’s room and it’s a mess. Maybe I’ve asked her to clean it, and instead I see her lying in her bed, looking at her phone.

How do I feel when I walk into this scene? Probably frustrated and irritated. My underlying needs could be: order, beauty, and maybe respect or consideration.

Before learning NVC, I might have yelled at my kid, something like: “What are you doing? Get up! Clean your room!” Maybe I would’ve added a threat: “If you don’t, you’re not going out.”

I might have gotten compliance from her. She may have rolled her eyes, gotten defensive, she may have yelled back. Most likely any motivation would come from fear about a consequence or from wanting to please me, a fear of disconnection, maybe a feeling of shame and a need for acceptance. It’s doubtful she would have met or recognized any intrinsic motivation, any desire to care for her space, what she wants and how to make that happen as far as the state of her room. And without being motivated in this deep way, the whole cycle is likely to repeat: my daughter dependent on me, yelling and threatening.

Now, if I find myself in this scenario, the first thing I do is offer myself compassion for the pain of my unmet needs. My needs matter, totally separate from hers.

When I see her messy room and my daughter in her bed, I might quietly say something like “Ouch,” and put my hand on my heart.

I do whatever I need to do to regulate—maybe I leave the room and come back minutes or hours later. Timing is everything. I love the phrase: “Strike when the iron is cold.” I rarely talk to my kids now if I’m activated. After I’ve soothed myself, I turn with curiosity in my imagination, to my daughter. Rather than thinking about what she’s saying no to, I wonder: What is she saying yes to? How might she be feeling—tired, overwhelmed? What needs might be alive in her—ease, comfort, rest?

When I’m in that “NVC consciousness,” if I still want to talk to her, I go ask her if she’s in a place to talk to me. I might go back in her room, sit next to her on her bed, and gently rub her head.

“Hey honey, how are you?”

“Tired.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve been busy.”

“Yes.”

“You just feel like resting.”

“I could sleep forever.”

“I get it. Is this an OK time to talk about your room?”

She sighs. “I guess.”

“When I see the clothes on the floor, I feel kind of annoyed and anxious. I got you those clothes, and I feel sad when I don’t see them not taken care of the way I wish they were. I’m also thinking about the washing machine—when the laundry piles up like this, it makes it hard for everyone else to get a turn to use it. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, I see that.”

“I’m wondering if you have any ideas about how to take care of your clothes in a way that works for everyone in the family?”

“Yeah, I could do a load later today.”

“That would be helpful, thank you. Any other ideas?”

“While I’m doing a load, I can clean my room.”

“That would be great. Thank you for thinking about this.”

“Sure, I like it when my room is clean. I get it.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

My priority is connection with my kids—and my long-term goal is helping them feel safe and supported so they can learn how to emotionally regulate. Whether or not my daughter cleans her room is secondary.

Before I learned NVC, I was a “power-over” parent. I thought my job was to teach my three kids to be “good” and “successful” by obeying my wise and smart rules.

When my oldest daughter struggled with behavioral health challenges, everything changed. I realized I didn’t actually know what was best for her all the time. I realized she was a different person that me with her own feelings and needs. I know this may seem obvious, but somehow, I really thought, just like my reflex reaction to my youngest kid’s room, that I know best how and when everything in their life should be done.

When I learned NVC, I realized I’m not the ultimate authority on all things, the teller of truth, God, as patriarchy would have me believe in that there is always a power over another person or thing. With NVC, I learned how to actually listen to my kids, to meet them where they were instead of where I thought they should be.

So many of the rules and expectations I had internalized—compliance, obedience, rewards, external validation—were rooted in patriarchal values, not in fulfillment, joy, or creativity.

And just to avoid turning this into a binary: all three of my kids are actually more “successful” (I think all human are) when they are intrinsically motivated—when they are living authentically, recognizing their deeper needs, and making choices from that place.

That’s the kind of success I care about now.

To learn more about my daughter’s mental health challenges and NVC, read this post and go to Listen2ConnectCoach.com To download free NVC Feelings and Needs lists, go to https://listen2connectcoach.com/resources

‘The mother-daughter bond has been one of patriarchy’s most effective means of reproducing itself through generations’

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—Bethany Webster, author of Discovering the Inner Mother

‘The mother-daughter bond has been one of patriarchy’s most effective means of reproducing itself through generations’ —Bethany Webster, author of Discovering the Inner Mother

What do you feel when you read that quote? What does it even mean?

I’m the mother of three daughters. I’ve also been coached by Bethany, and when I read her words, again and again, my needs to be seen, heard, understood, and to matter are met. Her analysis, in my experience, is so rarely articulated and so true.

The simplest way I can explain the significance of Bethany’s quote is through describing my eating disorder and recovery from it. When I was obsessed with counting calories (I grew up in the 80s) I had a lot of clarity on what was good and what was bad: cookies were bad, cottage cheese was good; Republicans were bad, Democrats were good; William Faulkner was a great writer, Jackie Collins was a bad writer. I was a teenager, the world was easily divided into binaries, I knew who I was and where I was going.

In my twenties, when I started to try to give up the bulimia, I tried so many modalities to stop the behavior. I went to private therapy, group therapy, nutritionists, 12-step programs, and nothing worked until I started to practice what today would be called intuitive eating. I got help from an organization called Beyond Hunger in Marin County that supported me to eat when I was hungry, eat whatever I wanted, and stop when I was full. To be clear, this was not an eat when-hungry-stop-when-full “diet.” Many times, as I was learning, I would finish a bag of chips when they stopped tasting good, just because I had the urge to keep crunching, but the difference was I became aware of when I was continuing on past my pleasure point. I was conscious of my choices and I learned to be self-compassionate.

But here’s the really weird thing that happened as I recovered from bulimia. Initially, I lost my orientation of right and wrong. I no longer connected with other women as easily as I had in the past. When I stopped criticizing my body, I got confused. When I stopped eating because it was lunch time or dinner time, and ate when I actually was hungry, I didn’t know how to schedule my day. When I was served a plate of food and I only wanted half of the portion or I wanted seconds, when I was in the mood for salad and not the steak that was served, when I ate because I actually wanted the food and not to protect someone’s feelings, a waiter I didn’t even know or a man who cooked for me, I felt a rush of guilt, shame, and fear.

For so many women, having an eating disorder, being sick, is easier than being healthy. Eating what I wanted, when I wanted felt so rebellious and strange. I felt like how I imagine those tigers do, like the one Glennon Doyle wrote about in her book Untamed, who was free of her cage and still couldn’t run. She was paralyzed,

I was 28 years old when I got better from bulimia and I was 34 when I had my first child. I thought I was ready. Not only had I recovered from a vicious eating disorder, I was sober. I was deeply in love with my smart, sweet boyfriend. I had a career that excited and fulfilled me, I produced talk radio programs, co-founded a non-profit that taught young women ethical leadership skills, I published commentary on politics and culture, and I advocated for women’s issues on national television. Who could be more ready for motherhood than me?

I raised all three of my daughters to be intuitive eaters which for me meant I never gave them rules about what to eat and when to eat it. I never made them finish a plate of food or rewarded “good” behavior with something like ice cream or told them not to “snack” before dinner. I filled the refrigerator and low cupboards with food that they could reach on their own. If they wanted ice cream for breakfast, they was fine with me.

This post is not about how in spite of my efforts, my daughters still grew up with disordered eating. All of them are “healthy” eaters. They eat what they want when they want, they’re adventurous with trying new kinds of food, they’re all “normal” weight.

But when my kids were little, the other moms had a really hard time with how my kids ate. When friends came over, often parents joined, and they were shocked and disapproving that my kids could eat candy whenever they wanted. I honestly believe that part of the reason these parents accepted my family’s intuitive eating, is because neither my kids or I were “overweight.” Once again, I learned, not having an eating disorder separated me from community and incited disapproval, judgement, and confusion.

In my own family, being a “healthy” eater (how I define healthy which is not controlling food, I’m not talking about eating your veggies) caused more conflict, upset, confusion, and judgement. When my kids were allowed to eat whatever they wanted and my nieces and nephews weren’t following the same “rules,” new flexibility and openness had to be reached and that path is never smooth. That journey to a different way of being and relating isn’t so so different from the readjustment sobriety can create in a family that connects and bonds at cocktail hour.

Moms want so much to keep our kids safe, and the way I was raising my daughters seemed dangerous, scary, and chaotic to so many parents. I get that because when I went through a new way of eating, that process could feel dangerous, scary, and chaotic.

Mothers pass on eating disorders, generation after generation, out of concern, love, and a desire to protect. As a woman, when you stop monitoring what you eat, when you let your own body determine what you want and when you want it, you are making a radical choice to trust yourself.

It turns out, at 34, I was not “ready” to be a mom, because no one is ever ready and there’s no perfect time. My oldest daughter never had food issues, but she struggled with behavioral challenges that I’ve written about before and what I learned from supporting her through recovery is that my insights about food didn’t go nearly far enough. It wasn’t just at the dinner table that I needed to follow the wisdom of my body, my intuition, my own unique path instead of the systems that rewarded compliance. As a woman, as a mom, as a mom of daughters, time and time again you’re confronted with a choice: Do I do what the “expert” tells me, the psychiatrist, the teacher, the lacrosse coach, the college adviser, or do I deeply listen to the needs of my daughter?

For example, it never once occurred to me, and I now I realize this lack of awareness was partly because I was born white and to a privileged family, that my daughter wouldn’t go to college. I may have been a Democrat, but I believed in all the rules and status and hierarchy of academia. While I wasn’t dependent on how much money or how much I weighed to determine my status and worth, I was still looking for external validation in my daughter’s grades and test scores. Those numbers told me if I was a good mom, if my daughter would be “safe” and “successful” in the world.

What I know now is that helping my daughters thrive in the world means prioritizing connection with them, listening to them, meeting their needs to be seen, heard, and to matter, not just in what they eat but in every aspect of their lives.

Listen to Laurelee Roarke’s podcast It’s Not About Food where I spoke about recovery and raising daughters free of disordered eating

If you want to learn more about Nonviolent Communication or my parent coaching visit listen2connectcoach.com or follow me on Instagram @listen2connectcoach