What Breaking the Cycle Actually Looks Like in Motherhood
Episode 124
By Sarah Herstich, LCSW | Somatic EMDR Therapist + Host of The Complex Trauma Podcast
Libby Ward is a creator, speaker, and advocate for mothers whose honesty online has resonated with millions of women. Her book, Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself, is the memoir version of what she has been building for years: a space where mothers feel seen in the full complexity of what they are actually experiencing, not the curated version.
I brought her onto the podcast because she speaks to something I think deserves much more direct attention in the trauma space: what complex trauma actually does to you in motherhood. Not in a theoretical way. In the way of a Tuesday morning, a car full of kids who won't stop crying, a granola bar, and a moment of rage that breaks you open into someone you did not think you still were.
This post is not a recap of that conversation. It is an attempt to go deeper into what I think matters most for the mothers carrying this.
Why Motherhood Surfaces What You Thought You Had Left Behind
Many trauma survivors enter motherhood with a version of the same plan: I am going to be different. I am going to parent the way I was not parented. I am not going to become my mother.
What most of them do not anticipate is that the very act of loving your children so fiercely, of wanting so desperately to give them what you did not have, is what digs up everything you thought you had moved past.
Libby describes spending years before motherhood perfecting the performance. Hypervigilant, people pleasing, perfectionist. She had learned those skills young, and they worked. She could hold it together. And then her second child arrived, sleep became impossible, her capacity shrank, and the invisible load grew past what the performance could contain. She broke. Not in some dramatic, identifiable way. In a car, over a granola bar, screaming at two small children who were simply trying to communicate a need.
What she saw when she turned around and looked at their faces was the thing she had organized her entire childhood around preventing. She was the source of their fear. The person who was supposed to be safest was the one making them afraid.
That moment sent her back to therapy, into books on trauma, and eventually toward understanding something that changed everything: she did not just have a hard life. She had complex trauma. And complex trauma does not stay in the past. It follows you into every relationship, every high-stakes moment, every morning when you are running on no sleep and someone needs something from you that you do not have.
The Thing About Overstimulation That Nobody Warns You About
Motherhood is inherently overstimulating. The constant contact, the noise, the unpredictability, the relentlessness of small children's needs. For a nervous system that developed under chronic threat, that overstimulation does not land the same way it does for someone without that history.
A dysregulated nervous system does not have reliable brakes. It has been running on high alert for so long that the gap between manageable stress and complete overwhelm is much narrower than it looks from the outside. So you can be doing everything right and still hit a wall that makes no sense proportionally. The seat being kicked. The phone call and the screaming simultaneously. The granola bar that no one opened.
It is never really about the granola bar. It is about every unmet need, every unreasonable expectation you have absorbed, every piece of shame you are carrying about whether you are doing this right, whether you are enough, whether anyone would help you if you asked. The granola bar just happens to be the thing that is happening when the cup finally overflows.
Libby put it clearly: when she really dissects the moments she is least proud of, it is almost never the actual trigger that she is reacting to. It is the text messages unanswered, the resentment toward a partner who got to sleep, the fear of what someone will think if she is late, the old wound running underneath all of it. The trigger is just what happened to be in the room.
The Shame That Comes From Knowing Better
There is a particular kind of shame that shows up for trauma survivors who have done enough work to understand what they are doing and still find themselves doing it anyway. It is the shame of knowing. Of being able to name the pattern, understand the origin, articulate exactly what is happening developmentally, and then still lose it in the car.
Libby names this directly in her book. The shame she felt from knowing better and doing worse was sometimes heavier than the shame she carried before she understood any of it. Because at least before, there was ignorance. Now there is awareness. And awareness without the capacity to change in the moment can feel like evidence that something is still fundamentally broken about you.
It is not evidence of that. It is evidence that insight and nervous system capacity are two completely different things that develop on two completely different timelines. You can know everything about your triggers and your attachment patterns and your window of tolerance, and your body can still activate the old response before your prefrontal cortex has a chance to intervene. That is not a failure of understanding. That is how nervous systems work.
The work is not to never be activated. The work is to shorten the time between activation and return. To repair faster. To be less afraid of the ruptures because you know what repair looks like now.
What Cycle Breaking Actually Is
The version of cycle breaking that gets talked about online tends to be aspirational and abstract. A list of things you do differently. A decision you make. A conscious choice to be the parent you never had.
What Libby describes is something much more unglamorous and much more real. Cycle breaking is waking up every day and being radically honest about your capacity. Not what you think you should be able to handle. Not what you handled yesterday. What you actually have to work with today, given how you slept, what your nervous system is carrying, what the next twelve hours look like, and what your children are going to need from you.
It is stopping in the middle of a moment that is escalating and asking yourself: is there actually a fire? Is there actually a lion? Because your body is telling you there is, your nervous system is running the threat response, and the answer is almost always no. There is no fire. There is a child who is trying to eat breakfast and a mother whose body is responding as though her survival is at stake, because at some point it was, and the nervous system has not fully updated that information yet.
Cycle breaking is also accepting that you will make mistakes for the rest of your life and that is not the failure. The failure would be making them without awareness, without repair, without being willing to look your child in the eye afterward and say that was not okay, you did not deserve that, I am sorry.
Repair Is the Cycle Breaking
Some people who grew up with complex trauma never received a sincere apology in their entire childhoods. The ruptures just stayed ruptured. The damage accumulated without ever being acknowledged or addressed.
When you repair with your child, you are not just fixing what happened in that moment. You are teaching them something about relationships that many trauma survivors were never taught: that disconnection is survivable, that people who hurt you can come back and acknowledge it, that your feelings about what happened are real and valid and worth naming out loud.
You are also showing them that you are imperfect, which gives them permission to be imperfect. That mistakes do not define a person. That the relationship is sturdy enough to hold both of you when things go wrong.
As Libby says, it is never too late to apologize. What some people would give for one sincere acknowledgment and a genuine change in behavior. One is not magic. But it is real. And repeated over time, it builds something that chronic rupture without repair cannot.
The Grief Nobody Talks About
There is a grief that comes with being a cycle breaker that does not get nearly enough acknowledgment. It is the grief of realizing that the hardest parts were not actually over when you became an adult. That breaking free from poverty or chaos or a dangerous household was not the finish line. That the nervous system you built inside that environment came with you, and it is going to take sustained, intentional work for the rest of your life to live differently inside it.
For a lot of trauma survivors, becoming a mother is the first time they fully understand the depth of what they did not have. Because now they are giving their children something, some version of consistent presence and attunement and repair, and in doing that they are confronted with the absence of it in their own histories. You love your baby with everything you have, and that love illuminates exactly what was missing for you. The grief of that is real and significant and largely unscripted.
Libby adds something to this that I think is worth sitting with. She realized, in doing her trauma work, that she had not lost herself in motherhood the way people often describe it. She had never actually known herself. Because trauma survivors often prioritize attachment to others over attachment to their own authentic self. You learn to chameleon. To read every room and become what that room needs from you. To make people like you quickly so you feel safe. And you do it so automatically and for so long that it stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like who you are.
For Libby, motherhood was not where she lost herself. It was where the load became heavy enough that she was forced to stop and ask who she actually was underneath all of it. And that question, which many trauma survivors have never had the safety or the space to genuinely ask, is one of the most significant ones in this kind of healing.
What Loving Your Kids Is and Is Not
One of the most honest things Libby says in her book, and one of the things she acknowledges might be taken out of context, is that loving your children is not enough.
It is worth sitting with that because it is true and it is not cruel. Love is essential. But love does not automatically equip you with the skills to give your children what they need to grow up into whole people. Love does not teach you how to co-regulate. It does not prevent the overstimulation from landing the way it does in a dysregulated nervous system. It does not dissolve the patterns that were built over decades before these children arrived.
What love can do, in Libby's experience, is give you enough of a reason to do the hard work. To go back to therapy after the car incident. To read the books. To stay in the discomfort of examining yourself honestly. To keep trying the next day after the day you failed.
That is not nothing. That is actually quite a lot. But it is the work love motivates, not the love itself, that changes things.
FAQ: Complex Trauma and Motherhood
Why does motherhood trigger childhood trauma?
Because motherhood creates conditions that are uniquely designed to surface unresolved material. The physical overwhelm, the relentlessness, the demand to regulate someone else before you have regulated yourself, all of it activates the same threat responses your nervous system learned in childhood. Additionally, loving your children deeply and wanting to give them what you did not have brings you face to face with the specific absences of your own history in a way that is hard to avoid. Motherhood does not cause trauma, but it tends to surface what was already there.
Why do I still lose it even though I know better?
Because insight and nervous system capacity are two completely different things. Your prefrontal cortex can hold all the knowledge in the world about triggers and attachment and co-regulation, and your body can still activate the threat response before that knowledge has a chance to intervene. The response lives in a part of the nervous system that is older and faster than conscious thought. Knowing does not bypass that. Repeated new experiences of safety, sustained body-based work, and time are what gradually update the pattern. This is not a failure of understanding. It is how nervous systems work.
What does cycle breaking actually mean in practice?
It means waking up every day and being radically honest about your actual capacity, not what you think you should have but what you genuinely have today. It means catching yourself in a moment of escalation and asking whether there is actually a threat or whether your nervous system is running an old response. It means making mistakes, because you will, and then repairing them. It means tolerating the discomfort of changing patterns that were built across decades, in real time, in the middle of ordinary life. It is not a destination or a decision made once. It is a daily practice that is always going to require more from you than it would from someone without this history. That is the honest truth of it.
Is repair really that powerful?
Research on attachment consistently shows that children do not need perfectly attuned parents. They need parents who repair. Rupture and repair, repeated over time, actually builds more secure attachment than an absence of rupture, because the child learns that relationship is durable, that disconnection is survivable, and that the adults in their life can acknowledge harm and come back. When you apologize sincerely to your child and change the behavior, you are giving them something many trauma survivors never received: the experience of being seen after being hurt, and the evidence that their feelings about what happened are real and valid.
Did I really lose myself in motherhood or did I never know myself to begin with?
For many trauma survivors, it is the second one. When you spend years learning to read every room and become what that room needs from you, when attachment to others consistently takes precedence over attachment to your own authentic self, you can arrive at adulthood with no clear sense of who you actually are under the performance. Motherhood, for some people, is the first thing that becomes heavy enough to force that question. The identity disruption of motherhood can actually be the opening to the deeper question: who am I when I am not being what everyone else needs?
What if my children are already older? Is it too late?
No. It is never too late to apologize. Never too late to begin repairing. Never too late to start showing up differently. Children, even adult children, carry the impact of their relationships with their parents for their entire lives, which means the relationship continues to be a place where something can change. A sincere acknowledgment of harm plus a genuine change in behavior can shift something significant regardless of when it happens. The earlier the better, but later is infinitely better than never.
Libby Ward is the author of Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself. Find her work and pre-order her book at libbyward.com.
Sarah Herstich is a licensed clinical social worker and somatic EMDR therapist specializing in complex trauma. She is the host of The Complex Trauma Podcast. Learn more at sarahherstichlcsw.com.