The Mirror, My Daughter, and the Cycle I Didn’t Mean to Share
I looked into the full-length mirror, and my eyes—like a programmed, self-sabotaging GPS—automatically charted a course for the usual suspects. My gaze landed on the love handles: "too squishy," my chin: "doubled," my new target, a term I recently became acquainted with- hip dips. Who knew there could be more words invented to make women feel like there is something wrong with them and who are these people inventing them?
I scrunch my nose. I shift my waistband. I do a quick French tuck, that little civilian effort to make the fabric bubble strategically over the precise spot where my babies once lived and now simply offer a depiction of a body that has been more lived in.
And as my face scrunched in that very specific flavor of disgust, I saw them: two little eyes peering up at me. They are so sweet, so kind, and so dangerously in love with me. And in that moment, I was instantly, spectacularly mortified.
Those two eyes had just caught me in a moment of critical self-judgment. The very thing I have spent hours reading about and thousands of dollars in therapy trying to protect her from. It was like getting caught stealing the last cookie, except the cookie was my own self-worth. I grinned, too widely (fakely? Definitely fakely), and swooped her up, praying to the god of generational healing that she hadn't noticed the split-second of internal body shaming that felt longer than a CVS receipt.
The Echo in the Room: When Self-Judgment Becomes Shame (and a Comedy of Errors)
The disgust at my body was the first feeling. A primary, knee-jerk, inherited feeling, thank you very much, patriarchy. The shame of being seen doing it? That was the secondary feeling. Like getting a speeding ticket for something you weren’t even having fun doing. But the one that really settles in, the one that tells you you’re already a terrible mother? The fear that I’ve already passed it on. That’s the third wave, and that one has a truly vicious undertow.
This is the frankly exhausting complexity of our feelings, especially in parenting. There is the primary feeling: the flash of disgust, or anxiety, or the urge to eat an astoundingly unsatisfying sleeve of cookies in the pantry. Then comes the secondary feeling, which is what we feel about our feeling: the embarrassment that we were caught, the shame that we are not, in fact, the emotionally regulated, cycle-breaking parent we want to be. I call this one the pile on. And then, the third wave arrives. This is the story we tell ourselves, the fear that we have failed. It's the conviction that we are repeating a cycle we promised, perhaps in a truly over-the-top, tearful journal entry, that we would break.
And here’s the kicker: this moment of critical self-judgment isn't actually just mine. I am realizing it’s a story I learned. It's the curriculum taught to me by my own mother’s averted eyes in a changing room, or the diet talk that hummed in the kitchen like a low-grade appliance, amplified by the toxic chorus of magazines and television shows everywhere.
This is how generational patterns, or generational trauma (because why call it a pattern when you can call it a trauma?), work. They are the air we breathe. The invisible, highly contagious virus of self-loathing. We don't even notice we are passing them on until we are caught, breathless and a little sweaty, in front of a mirror, sucking in our gut like we're preparing for a full-body biopsy.
Healing the Inherited Story of Body Shame: The Anti-Toxic Positivity Edition
So many of us are trying to stop a cycle we are still very much trapped in. We want to give our children a sense of bodily peace we have never known ourselves. This is a common and profoundly painful part of the perinatal mental health experience, right up there with the exhaustion and the sudden, irrational urge to reorganize the spice cabinet at 3 AM.
Here’s the good news (and the realistic news): Healing this inherited story, this process of healing body image, isn't about suddenly loving every single part of yourself. Let’s be real—some days, you just tolerate your left ankle. It is absolutely not about forcing a new script of toxic positivity over a lifetime of learned pain. That’s just shame in a sparkly, self-help disguise.
It is about noticing. It is about catching the thought, whispering, "Oh, that’s the old script," and gently closing the file. And most of all, it is about repair.
That moment in the mirror, the one that felt like a spectacular, multi-generational failure? What if it is actually an opening? What if that moment of being seen is the very thing that stops the cycle from continuing in the dark, where shame thrives?
Permission to Repair: Breaking the Cycle of Generational Trauma with a Hug
Here is the revolutionary thought, so simple it's infuriating: Your child does not need you to be perfect. She needs to see you be real. And she needs to see you be kind to yourself after you are not. The moment of repair is often more powerful, more cycle-breaking, and frankly, a whole lot more memorable than the original moment of rupture.
Repair can be quiet. It can be internal. It can be shown, rather than exhaustingly over-explained.
Here are a few reflections on what repair can look like (because if we’re going to be traumatized, we might as well be organized):
Repair through modeling, not explaining. Your child doesn't need to hear your self-criticism named and itemized. They just need to witness a new, kinder story taking center stage. Repair, in this case, is catching yourself and shifting. It’s actively appreciating what your body does—"Thank you, legs, for getting us up these ridiculous stairs," or just giving a strong, full-bodied hug without hesitation.
Repair with yourself. This is the practice of getting curious, not critical. Instead of shaming the part of you that judges, you can ask it, "What are you afraid of?" Often, that self-critical part is just an overzealous security guard, trying to protect you based on an old, outdated story from a time when your only source of information was a Seventeen magazine.
Repair as a practice, not a performance. The goal is not to be a perfect parent who never has a negative thought. That’s a fictional character in a parenting memoir you should definitely not buy. The goal is to be a real parent who models what it looks like to return to compassion, for yourself and for them, over and over again. It’s the constant return, not the flawless take-off.
You did not create this cycle of shame. You inherited it. But you are seeing it. And in that seeing, you are already changing it.
You are allowed to be a mother healing her own wounds while tending to her child's. They are not mutually exclusive.
They are, perhaps, the same sacred, hilarious, and deeply frustrating work.
Find more reflections on healing generational and relational trauma on our website at overturetherapy.com. You can also explore these themes in depth on Maya's podcast, How Did You Get Here?, available on all major platforms.