When we release unmet childhood needs, we unlock authentic leadership rooted in transformation
Repeating the Blame Pattern
As soon as my sisters and I were out of our mother’s earshot, we would slip into our familiar routine of complaining about her. We blamed her for this and for that. We judged and questioned (mostly rhetorically) and criticized her. The details didn’t matter. The point was to find fault with her. To listen to us, you wouldn’t know we were now all professional and accomplished women, successfully adulting for years.
Since we all lived in different parts of the country, opportunities for just the three of us to be in person together had become rare. Yet, most of our conversations seemed stuck in these well-worn ruts. The dynamic was so familiar. The more we could blame her, the “better” we could make ourselves in comparison to her. To be honest, the pattern was so accessible and well-practiced as to be easy yet it was increasingly uncomfortable.
I had done enough of my own healing and had enough self-awareness to know I was rehearsing victimization narratives. I was playing small in relationship to my “all powerful” mother. As a grown-up, this story was keeping me small, not her. I wanted to step out of this powerlessness and disrupt the blaming pattern. Yet I was afraid I’d jeopardize what felt like closeness with my sisters. This bond was forged, in part, in opposition to our mother. I was afraid to lose what we had, even if it wasn’t as genuine as I imagined it could (and wanted it to) be.
Breaking the Cycle: One Awkward Question
Then, one afternoon, I took a risk.
We had just climbed in the car on the way to a hotel we’d reserved for the night, officially commencing Sister’s Day. This 24 hours away from our parents, children, and partners happened once a year. We were excited to be together and almost as soon as the car door closed behind us, the complaining began.
This was my chance to try something different. I wasn’t elegant. (The first time any of us try to break out of a pattern it rarely is.) I hazarded a poorly-phrased question that came out more as a plea than curiosity: “What would we talk about if we didn’t bash mom?”
Silence.
The excited chatter that had been there just seconds ago evaporated. After a long pause I eventually spoke up. “I get so little time with you two. I feel bad that we spend this precious time complaining about Mom. I feel bad talking bad about her and I don’t feel any closer to you.” And then I said, “I don’t think she deserves it. And I think we deserve better for us, too.”
There. It was out there. I had said it.
To my sisters’ credit, they also wanted out of this dynamic. They were thoughtful and transparent in their responses. Each shared how this focus on blaming our mother made them feel (also not great) and that day we agreed: we wouldn’t complain about Mom again.
As you can probably guess, it wasn’t easy to keep this promise and we slipped back into the pattern on more than one occasion. When this happened, one of us would remind the other two of our agreement or we’d stop ourselves when we’d fall back into this familiar dynamic. Over time, with our shared commitment, and a willingness to keep each accountable, we stopped blaming our mom, and the connection between us sisters deepened.
Even as I was pleased by the changes we had made, an unanswered question lingered for me: Why do I feel achingly disappointed in my mom? And why do I feel so entitled to judge her?
The Unmet Needs We Carry Into Adulthood
Earlier this month, I delivered a session entitled Centering Relationships for Systems Change at the Zero to Three (ZTT) LEARN conference. As engaged Early Childhood Education professionals, we discussed how children depend on their primary caregivers—often parents—to meet their needs. Our very survival relies on our parents, not only for food and shelter, but also for attention, care, and connection. We needed our caregivers to give us correct information, be trustworthy, tell us the truth. When parents can’t meet these needs, often because of real societal barriers and their own unhealed hurts, children carry this pain into their adult relationships.
Often unconsciously, we blame our parents for leaving us with these unmet needs—without seeing the full picture of the societal barriers they faced and unhealed traumas they carried into their parenting. Then, as adults, we project the childhood expectations we had for our parents to meet these needs onto our friends, partners, bosses, colleagues—everyone, really. (Side note: I shared how others are doing this to you in my blog “Do they treat you like you’re their mother?“)
It’s a waste of time, of course. A fruitless endeavor.
That need was real in the past—in our childhood. We can’t go back to get it met. The past is in the past. It’s over. Unfortunately, our feelings about the past aren’t. We didn’t fully feel what it was like to not have those childhood needs met. It might have been scary to go without food or have unstable housing. It might have been painful to be hit or scolded in ways that humiliated us. It may have been confusing and isolating when our caregivers couldn’t connect with us—because they were emotionally unavailable, working two or three jobs to cover the bills, checking out with screen time, or numbing out with addictions. It felt like betrayal to discover we weren’t told the truth or that our parents passed on incorrect information. It was heartbreaking. And worth grieving.
The Emotions We Buried Alive
Most of us didn’t get to grieve what we didn’t receive, let alone acknowledge the feelings.
We tell ourselves we survived. We assure others (as much as ourselves) that our parents did the best they could (and they did). We point out how it made us stronger (which it didn’t, not necessarily). We affirm that we overcame it all.
While this may be accurate, it’s also not the full picture. To quote Sigmund Freud here: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
My buried unexpressed emotions from my unmet childhood needs showed up as blame, disappointment, and criticism.
These “uglier ways” weren’t limited to my mother. They messily leaked out in every close relationship that looked the least bit hopeful. (As I was recently reminded: There are relationships where we don’t experience disappointment. They are called acquaintances.) And while I could sometimes tell these feelings were misplaced in these other relationships, I felt justified in targeting my mom with them because wasn’t it her who failed to meet these needs in the first place?
You Don’t Need Your Mom as Your Mom Anymore
At one of my recent sessions, one of the participants began expressing her justified disappointment about her own mother’s inability to do her emotional work. “I can’t get her to look at what she did to me. To do her own work, like I’m doing,” she complained. I could hear echoes of my own pain in her plea.
“This may be hard to hear,” I gently said to her, “but the truth is you don’t need your Mom as your Mom anymore.” I let those words sink in. “Trying to get your mom to do her emotional work with you is you trying to get the Mom you didn’t get in the past. She may or may not ever do that work. It’s not about her. Not anymore. This emotional work is yours. It’s work that only you can do for yourself.”
I continued, “If you can do this, if you can grieve the mother you didn’t have, you have a chance of getting to know the incredible woman your mother is.”
We may not have had the mother we needed then, and, because the past is over, we never will. But when we grieve that loss, something beautiful can happen: we can fall in love with the amazing person our mother is now, and she with us—because that old frozen need and its companion disappointment and blame is no longer a barrier between us.
You could only hear the sniffles as the nearly 100 participants in the room let in this possibility.
The woman sitting next to her described this takeaway as a “soul-changing experience.” She summed it up quite beautifully on TikTok: “You need to grieve the mother you didn’t get.”💯🎯
Exactly.
As my father, Miguel Angel Jiménez, would wisely remind me and my sisters, “Love her for who she is, not for who she’s not.”
Healing Is Personal—But Hurt Is Systemic
My disappointments weren’t about my mother’s personal failing. Not at all. She passed on the hurts she didn’t ask for and wasn’t given a chance to heal. That’s systemic. It happened to your mother too. And it happened to all of us females.
When we do our own healing and grieve what we didn’t get, we create space to know our mothers as the complex, layered, and contradictory women they are. We begin to understand how they were hurt and impacted by sexism and other systemic oppressions. With this new understanding, we can often find a level of empathy and compassion for our mothers—and even ourselves—we couldn’t access before.
Our mothers stood up to sexism as much as they could figure out and often more fiercely on our behalf than for themselves (an effect of sexism to be sure). The implicit and explicit expectations they had for us about how to be a “good” ___________ (fill in the blank: mother, daughter, sister, worker, leader) were filtered through their own experiences with sexism. And, yes, our mothers were put in the role of enforcing patriarchal norms in an attempt to protect us. Ouch.
What Does This Have to Do With Your Leadership?
Everything.
Well, “everything” if you don’t want to unconsciously replicate your unhealed hurts, reinforce inequitable systems, or continue to lead in isolation, with resentment, and on top of discouragement. “Everything” if you are ready to embrace Healing-Engaged Leadership. This transformational approach to leading has four core pillars: 1) committing to an on-going emotional healing practice for greater self-awareness and reclaim our best thinking; 2) understanding the role of oppression and taking steps undo these systems based in healing and transformation; 3) co-creating a community who ascribe to a shared, structured container for support; and 4) cultivating and claiming your significance as a leader.
For most of us, our mothers were our first female leaders. Without a Healing-Engaged Leadership approach, we will inadvertently reproduce or reject—or both—what we learned from and how we were hurt by our mothers in our leadership. When we openly examine our relationships with our mothers using these four core pillars, we not only transform this relationship but also how we lead and the impact we can have through our leadership. This work demands courage and community as we hold space for both celebration and healing.
From Transaction to Transformation
When we release our grip on these outcomes in our relationships, we become infinitely more effective at influencing change—not from a place of transaction, but transformation. This ripples throughout every aspect of your life, from your leadership at work to your connections at home.
The path forward isn’t about judgment or shame. It’s about understanding that our mothers’ experiences, their struggles, and their triumphs are woven into the fabric of our own leadership. By acknowledging and healing these patterns, we can create new possibilities for leadership that honor both our maternal legacy and our full power.
Through my own healing journey over three decades, I realized I didn’t need my mother to be my mother anymore. I could accept and love her for the woman she was. This profound shift allowed me to deliver a eulogy honoring all she overcame and the legacy she left when she passed away two years ago.
This healing freed me to show up as a leader who no longer needed to prove her worth. I stopped seeking validation from authority figures or running my disappointment at leaders. Instead, I could lead from a place of wholeness, making decisions rooted in my values rather than unconscious patterns inherited from unhealed wounds. The energy I once spent managing disappointment and resentment became available for creative vision and genuine connection with the people I lead and care about.
Your Leadership, Unburdened
This transformation is possible for you too. When you release the grip of unmet childhood needs and heal your relationship with your mother, you step into a leadership that’s both powerful and sustainable. You stop exhausting yourself trying to be everything to everyone. You start making choices that honor your authentic self while creating meaningful change in the world around you.
The journey requires courage, yes. It asks you to look honestly at patterns you may have carried for decades. But on the other side of this work is a freedom that ripples through every relationship, every decision, every moment of your leadership. You become the leader you were always meant to be, unburdened by expectations that were never truly yours to carry.