Episode 258: Breaking the Cycle of Generational Trauma: Healing the Mother-Daughter Wound with Erica Thomas
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What if the struggles that you face today as a woman didn’t start with you, but with your mother and her mother before her? In this powerful conversation, therapist and certified mother-daughter coach, Erica Thomas, shares how our earliest identity as daughter shapes our personality, our relationships, and even how we show up at work. We’re diving into the cultural and family scripts that keep women small.
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We silence our voices and worry more about how things look than how they feel. And we lose ourselves in people pleasing servitude. You’re going to hear Erica’s personal story and why she believes that the patriarchy often lives inside us gals. Erica will explain how healing the mother daughter wound creates generational change that ripples both forward and backward in time. This episode is part truth telling.
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part blueprint, and a call to every woman who wants to stop carrying the emotional weight that she inherited and start living with authenticity and personal power.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again.
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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol. uh
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Erica, I’m so excited to welcome you to the show and I’m looking forward to this conversation on mothers and daughters. But before we kick off, would you do the honors, introduce yourself, let the audience know who you are, what you do, and why you do it? Yeah. Colleen, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I was really looking forward to this day, so I’m excited this day’s here and just to speak to your listeners.
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So yes, I’m Erica Thomas. I’m a licensed therapist and I’m a certified mother-daughter coach. So I’ve been a therapist for 20 years um and it has been in over the past five years, I’ve really centered my practice around women. So I mostly serve women, teen girls and their parents and mothers and daughters. So.
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Beginning in September, I am going to be completely focused on my mother-daughter work and go into that realm. So I’m really excited about that pivot. So, but really my ultimate drive for working with women is I am very, very passionate about generational change and just what generational change, if we work on ourselves enough, we can create that generational change for women.
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You know, so doing that shift now really has a ripple effect on the women that come after you. Not only that, but also it also heals the women before you. So I strongly believe that. I really, I really do believe in the power of a woman, but I believe that in order for us to build ourselves up and really empower ourselves and future generations, it starts with us. So tell me what draws you.
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personally into this work. Is it just working with mothers and daughters and you found that to be your specialty? I mean, I’m assuming you’re a daughter, possibly a mother. Yes, both. it’s uh really my mother daughter work is not just my work. It’s a personal thing. it
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derives from my own story with my mother. And we had a very complicated relationship for a long time. And it wasn’t until recently that, you know, we came together and really talked things through and through my work that I really found healing. I, um you know, I guess we can go about this in a couple of ways, but really and truly, it wasn’t until I found out I was going to have a daughter.
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that it really hit me on what I can bring to the table as a woman. And if I didn’t work on myself, what was I going to be passing on? I do think about my mom too, when she came into motherhood, she wanted to break a lot of cycles. She came from a very difficult mother-daughter relationship. And there were a lot of things, like a lot of women who are mothers out there who say, I don’t want to be my mother.
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My mother went into motherhood thinking, I don’t want to be my mother. And she approached it with a lot of intentionality. However, because there were certain things that she did not know, they were then passed on to me and those hurts perpetuated in different ways. So it wasn’t until me that I said, I’ve always questioned things along the way anyway. I’ve always, you know,
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not been afraid to ask why, why things are like they are, but for this I was thinking, just feeling the hurt in that mother daughter relationship and the effect that that caused on me and how I navigated the world as a woman, how I saw the world as a woman, how I entered relationships as a woman, friendships, my professional world, all of that really derived from
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It’s the foundational elements of a mother-daughter relationship. I wanted my daughter to really come from a healthier blueprint. Okay, so can we break some of this open? What is it that we’re passing on? What did she not know? What did you have to learn? Gosh, that’s a great question. How were you showing up as a woman prior to doing the work?
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So the way I was showing up as a woman was a lot of silencing, a lot of good girl things, a lot of, you know, don’t say anything because if you do that, then you’re going to cause trouble. You know, uh if, you know, don’t just being discouraged to use my voice. Some of that is cultural too. uh
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But a lot of it was, number one, just kind of seeing that through my mom, you know, just kind of the narrative that she carried sometimes and how I was expected to be and not encouraged to use my voice whenever I wanted to use my voice. It was turned around on me and it ended up being really, it just caused a lot of hurt down the road. So it taught me that if I use my voice, it’s going to lead to trouble.
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And it’s going to stir things and not in a good way. And I’m going to be an inconvenience to people. that really played also with my other part where I wanted to speak up. I was screaming. I wanted to say something, but this part of me that was nurtured would just squash it. So it was this really, just really difficult internal battle that I had with myself. Caused a lot of depression, caused a lot of anxiety. Yeah.
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You know, it led difficulties, you know, just in communication in my marriage with my husband, who is a communicator and he wants me to tell him, you know, what’s going on. And because I didn’t want to hurt him and hurt his feelings, I wouldn’t say anything. So, so that’s the way I really led into this world. love what you’re saying here because one of the phrases that I
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polyenisms, if you will, that I say when I coach is your feelings about other people’s feelings are still your feelings. And I think that that mother daughter relationship is where we learn to fear our own feelings about other people’s feelings. We are taught to care more about how things look than how we feel. We’re taught to care more about other people’s feelings.
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than our own feelings. And like you said, don’t be inconvenient. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t be a bother. Give more than you can take. And for the most part, you know, I often think that we talk about the patriarchy as though men are perpetuating the patriarchy. But really most of the men in my life, you know, they’ll get on the bus. them a minute if you’re changing the rules, but they adjust. But really it’s the women who keep these.
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rules of silencing yourself and playing to authority or playing into an unequal power dynamic or just all of the things being pretty and small and good. And that’s how people will love you. And if you make trouble or you make them uncomfortable, that’s not gonna go well. And I think when I realized that the patriarchy was living in me,
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and it was being enforced by the other women in my life. That was a very powerful, eye-opening, empowering moment. Absolutely. Oh my gosh, you bring up so good. This is so good. Because you do. You bring up such really valid points. Sometimes the patriarchy is not perpetuated by men. It’s perpetuated by women and the expectations we have of other women. And we’re judging other women for
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you know, not being skinny enough or because they’re leaving the house without makeup and, or we, um, you know, we’re, we’re holding these expectations of other women that we were taught, you know, if, know, and there’s certain, um, there’s certain patterns that I teach in my mother, daughter coaching services and in my, in my sessions about, you know, just these particular patterns, but one of them is like the culture of female service.
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And being a mom myself, you see this a lot around motherhood. If you don’t show up in a certain way as a woman, being of service to others. And of course, don’t get me wrong, there’s a caregiving component to being a mother. Yes. But on the other hand, there is a component too of that where if you’re caregiving, if you’re so entrenched in your caregiving,
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you’re going to forget about yourself and you’re going to give to others and you’re going to fall into people pleasing and you’re going to just neglect yourself to the point where you’re walking around with an empty cup. And how many women nowadays walk around with empty cups. Yeah. A lot of them do. Because we’ve somehow got the message that our value is in our productivity and in our performance.
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and in what we have to offer to other people. I think that is one of the biggest disconnects I see with my clients. That’s, know, at the source, they forgot they were a person. And by forgot, I mean, never really knew. Again, it’s more important how things look than how things feel, which is how you end up with a drinking problem 20 years later thinking you’re getting away with it. Cause nobody knows. And you’re like, well, are you getting away with it? Like what you know, how’s that going? Right.
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Right. Absolutely. it’s, it is, it is interesting how, you know, as women, when we do get entrenched like that, we do fall into those pitfalls, as drinking and, you know, just certain vices, even, even, even scrolling, right? Just, just scrolling on social media at the end of the night, you’re just mindlessly scrolling because it’s, you need something to do and you, you’re trying to distract yourself, but this is, it turns into, it can turn into an addiction, right? So it’s,
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Well, we felt, go ahead. Or being in other people’s businesses, you know, talking about the mother daughter, you know, as a middle-aged woman who raised daughters, I can see how one would lose yourself in making sure your daughters are doing it right. Absolutely. And being very busy managing, micromanaging, instructing, correcting, guiding. And, you know, then I don’t know if we are.
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are injecting ourselves or what do they say, living vicariously. I never felt like that at all, but I saw a lot of moms who didn’t have time for themselves because their daughters were so overwhelming. And it’s like, I think the call’s coming from inside the house on that one. No, you’re right. And you know, I think about my own experience with my mother. know, my mom really just took a lot of pride in being a mother and she was a good mother. oh
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I never had to worry about a meal. I never had to worry about my needs, you know, not being met. But I also did not know my mother outside of being a mother. And I don’t know if a lot of mothers know this, if you have a, you know, mother listening here is it is an important thing for you to feed the other parts of you as a woman. It’s important for your daughters, no matter what age.
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for them to see you as a woman, age appropriately, of course. And the reason why that’s important is because, for instance, for me, when I went into my own adulthood, went on into just my own thing, I didn’t know how to exist as a woman. I did not have the blueprint. I know how to be a good mom, right? But to be a woman, didn’t necessarily have those conversations with my mom. As a matter of fact,
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I had some of those conversations with my dad, which is interesting, but I wish I would have had those conversations with my mom. I wish I would have seen the woman part of my mom, the person first part of my mom. I didn’t even know her favorite color. Like I didn’t even know her favorite food. There’s just certain things, certain basics that, you know, it’s, if we don’t know those basics about our mothers, then what do we really know about them as people first, as women first?
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I know though, as I hear you say that, when there was a time my daughters may not have known my favorite color, my favorite food, that’s because I didn’t have one. I had so lost myself. I still remember at one point I had quit drinking and I was talking to my now ex-husband about problems and needs that I had. And he shows up with a pad of paper and his eyeglasses on and he’s like ready to take notes. He’s like, well, what do you need?
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Like, what do you want that you’re not getting? uh I couldn’t even answer the damn question. You know, so like the role I was showing my daughters is I had just given up my opinions long ago because I didn’t have to fight with myself. You know, being a mom and having a husband and kids and all of the things, was like, was the very last, like, where do you want to go to dinner? Wherever you want to go so that there’s no problems. That’s where I want to go. You’re right.
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You’re right about that. You know, when I work with, especially adult women, you know, when I ask them, what do you want? And even in my mother, daughter work, right, with mothers and daughters, I ask them about their needs. It is very common for them to say, I don’t know. It’s very common for them to take a moment and really kind of look bewildered because that’s probably maybe one of the few times, intentional times that anybody has ever asked them, but they don’t know.
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I do validate that for them because it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to forget what we want and what need because you’re right, we’re so busy giving outwardly that we forget to give inwardly. yeah. Yeah, it’s a habit and it’s truly a blind spot. If you understand how the brain works, the different neural pathways, if you’re never visiting the neural pathway of who you are and what you want and
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and your expression as a woman, like those aren’t thoughts, those aren’t ideas, those aren’t themes, those aren’t intentions, then it doesn’t exist. Which is why I remember when he said, what do you want? There was nothing there. Like I want you to, like I wanna not hate you. I want to not feel like this. I knew what I didn’t want.
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But in terms of what actually would make me happy, I was so disconnected that there was no experience that was making me happy. It was just all these thoughts that were making me crazy. So talk to me then about how you work with mothers and daughters. Do you do it together? So I do it together and I do it individually. So if mothers and daughters are willing to come together,
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just together to do the work, then we do that work together. We do a combination of joint sessions, and then we also do a few individual sessions here and there to check in, also provide that space if they’re getting stuck. Just sometimes having that one-on-one conversation with them helps them process so that they...
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can continue moving forward, you know, get unstuck. So that really helps. do also work with women individually who are either mother or daughter and their mother or daughter don’t want to come to the table or mother or daughter has passed away and they’ve been left with these hurts to work through on their own. So I provide that space for healing so they can continue to move forward even though mom or daughter are not here.
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Can you talk to me about what has to change in order to heal that is not the other person has to change? You know, what does the woman have to change in order to heal her relationship with her mother? um Yeah. So, well, number one, what they have to change is the idea of, well, there’s a few things they have to change. They have to work through any kind of unresolved past hurts.
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Because what I find is when those unresolved past hurts are not going addressed, they do leak into the mother-daughter relationship, sometimes without them even knowing. So it’s important when I’m doing mother-daughter coaching is I do have certain things that I want them to come in, especially joint work. I want them to come in having done some inner work around their unresolved hurts.
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They gotta also be willing not to, to get away from fighting to be right, from trying to make a point, from being able to respect the other person’s, what I call emotional reality, even though they don’t agree with it. So emotional reality as opposed to factual reality is, know, factual reality is based on facts, know, undisputable facts, the weather today, you know.
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The color of shirt I’m wearing. Emotional reality is that subjective experience that we get the reality based on that, which is defined by past hurts. It’s defined by our values, our beliefs, you know, just a whole bunch of things. So it’s the lens in which we see things. So that said, mothers and daughters have to come in to do the work in a way where even though they don’t necessarily agree, they’re willing to still make them, still make each other feel seen and heard.
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Okay. So, and what I tell them is, you know, the purpose of that is, especially adult daughters and moms, the purpose of that is because this is the way not only are they going to be able to heal some of those wounds around their connection, but it’s also going to allow them to connect woman to woman. It’s going to allow them to be able to bring their own individualities.
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into the relationship and be able to exist even though they’re different. I don’t see how you see things and I don’t understand it, but I respect it because, you know, that’s what you believe in, that’s okay. But that’s not going to change how I believe. And daughter would say or mother would say, hey, that’s okay, right? We’re two individual women, we’re going to have two individual perspectives, but we still love each other and we’re going to find a way to connect.
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So oftentimes, fighting to be right prevents that. Yeah. And I imagine that that’s big stuff you’re talking about there, especially if somebody’s emotional reality includes that you are bad or mean or broken or abusive. You I mean, you get a lot of language being thrown back and forth. One of the things me and my kids often giggle about, and I do mean giggle lightheartedly, is
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There’s no sentence or story that doesn’t start with, well, mom was yelling. And I’m like, stop the bus. And then I start yelling about the fact that I don’t yell. What are you talking about? But it’s so hard to, and I feel very emotionally free. So I let them have those stories. And that’s why I say I just giggle because I’m like, you
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I wasn’t yelling or I didn’t, but that was their emotional experience. That’s how they remember it because they felt small, they felt scared, like whatever it is. But it’s very hard. And I would love for you to say more about how you help people bridge the gap of the emotional reality and the factual reality when someone’s emotional experience is just not lining up with your facts. Like, what do you do for that to
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to allow that gap to be bridged with respect to yourself and to them. Like, how do you do that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the elements that I think is really key to bringing moms and daughters together is to develop that trust. Really, and that trust is based on safety. The very, very foundational base, other than if you look at the Maslow hierarchy of needs, the base is your basic needs, but the next one is safety.
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If you don’t have safety, you don’t have anything else. You don’t have trust. It’s hard to build love. It’s hard to really be able to build ourselves individually as women and reach that self-actualization phase. It’s hard to nurture relationships correctly if we don’t have that sense of safety. we, one of the elements I use is teaching the scientific components. So we actually have a little section of a science class.
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as to how that works because I think that’s a really important piece that I think it takes the, it takes some of the personalization away from it when you’re able to see that some of what, that what is going on is also biology and what is going to be fixed and how it’s going to look like is also biology. So it’s not just me saying.
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You need to be open to your daughter. You need to be open to mom or daughter saying, you need to be more open to me or mom saying, you need to be more open to me. It’s literally the biology in the brain that creates that need. And if you don’t feed that, if you don’t meet that, then it’s not going to happen. So that is a way I do bridge that gap. um, which not only that, but I also really do, we do focus a lot on just
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parsing down the differences in opinions. You know, they see things differently. And I think that’s a really important piece because both of them need to feel seen and heard. you know, what I also find there’s another component of fighting to be right. It’s not, let me tell you why I’m right and you are wrong. It’s also,
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let me tell you why I didn’t mean to hurt you. And this is why I did what I did because I love you and I want to protect you. But it comes off as fighting to be right. being able to make room, you know, the space for them to really explain that to each other, why they are holding these perspectives is really important. yeah, it’s just, it’s really important because they find
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once we give them that space and they’re able to figure out, oh, okay, I see where this is coming from. You’re not just, you know, being mean to me. You’re not just wanting to prevent me from doing this because, because you’re jealous, right? It’s because you really want to protect me and you’ve been there and you love me and you don’t want me to through the same thing. And sometimes moms don’t share some of that history behind their own story.
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where sometimes it gets out of context with the daughter. That makes sense. makes sense. Well, you were saying before we started recording that you are moving into coaching and yet you’ve been a certified therapist for years. Can you speak to why and the difference between a therapeutic setting versus a coaching setting?
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So yeah, this is a really exciting shift for me. know, first and foremost, what’s exciting to me is that I can, and I have, you know, through the coaching part, coaching side of my business, my reach can be expanded worldwide. And, you know, I can work with women from all over the world and it’s not preventing me from, you know, just when you are a licensed therapist, you have to practice.
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therapy in the state in which you’re licensed in. you know, for me to be able to give myself that professional freedom, to be able to help any woman, any mom and daughter that is willing to come to the table and do the work is really, it’s really important to me that I, you know, provide that. Also too, the difference between coaching and therapy is with therapy, there is a diagnosis. There is a certain type of
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I guess, you know, when, you know, there’s a sentiment of pathology when it comes to therapy. What I like about coaching, it’s not, you’re not diagnosing, you’re not trying to necessarily come from a lens of you’re broken, let me fix you. It’s let’s take what’s working, let’s take what’s working right and what’s not, and let’s make it better. And it’s more conversational. It’s, yeah, it’s just.
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you know, it’s just more, uh how can I say it? It’s just more, I guess it allows me to really nurture the humanity in people without having to put a clinical lens into it. And that’s what I’m excited about, not having to pressure myself to put a clinical lens into it. So ah yeah, so I’m really excited about that. Yeah, I think it speaks to the difference between a partnership
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collaborative relationship where you believe that the women that you’re working with are perfectly capable of getting good results with good support versus like the expert or authoritarian model of here’s what’s wrong and here’s what you need to fix and here’s what you need to do and here’s how to do it and this is the best way to do it. Like assuming that they’re capable of creating a relationship that works for both of them and you’re just kind of guiding them.
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as opposed to leading them into a certain, you know, I don’t know, box or modality or framework of mind. It’s much more creative. is much more creative. I, you know, that said, I am leveraging my 20 years of clinical experience and I’m able to see things a little bit, you know, I’m able to see things from a clinical lens. think which really, really is important for this type of work.
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You know, with coaching, as you know, we focus more on, what’s not working right now? Right. And how can we fix that so that you can continue being well in the now and moving forward into the future? But we do create, we do look into some of the past where we look into their mother daughter histories and we do mapping and we figure out what generational patterns have been passed down from mother to daughter.
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which generational patterns have been broken. I also like to highlight the fact that, hey, know, some of these patterns are not, there is a generation here that broke this and we need to celebrate that because mom, now you don’t know, you didn’t know what that was like, right? Because your mom broke that or daughter, your mom decided to change that and you don’t know what that’s like and you don’t have to exist in that space of pain because she broke that. So.
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not only do I like to look at those, like those patterns that cause pain and hurt and dysfunction, but also celebrate the good ones, the good in that. Yeah. I love that. love that. Noticing what’s not there, noticing what’s not broken is a good place to start. Yeah. Celebrating the wins, celebrating the success, building on what’s right. So how do people find you?
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They can find me through my website. So it’s vidanovacounseling.com, V-I-T-A-N-O-V-A, counseling.com. So you can, you know, just look at, it has a good base as to what mother-daughter coaching is, who I am. You can also reach me through there. You can also email me also at erica, E-R-I-C-A, at vidanovacounseling.com. All right. Well,
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Is there anything else that you wanted to say that I didn’t ask you or anything you want to leave the listeners with? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one thing about mother-daughter coaching, and like I said before, I’m really passionate about driving generational change for women. And I feel that mother-daughter coaching is really a great way to level up as a woman, to be able to figure out how can I be most impactful in this world.
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while I’m here and build up women and just be the best version of myself in doing that too. So also too mother daughter coaching is not necessarily for mothers and daughters in conflict. It could be also for mothers and daughters to have a good relationship, have a great relationship, but they want to make sure that they keep it that way. And so there’s just certain elements that will need to, they need to understand so that they can keep it that way.
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So, yeah, I guess mental health is just like physical or financial health. Like you gotta work on it every day. It’s not like you just have a good relationship with your mom and good luck or you’re lucky. And now that’s going to be that way forever. Like you have to invest in what you value. Yeah, no, you have to, yeah, you have to keep it up. It’s not, you know, it goes for anything, right? Even, even my therapy clients, it’s, you know,
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Are you doing well enough to stop or are you doing well because of the therapy? So it’s a thing where it’s important for us to just keep it up. So even if it’s not as often, but we gotta, it’s just like the gym, gotta stay in shape. All right. That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. And if this conversation resonated with you, the best way that you can support the show is by sharing it.
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Text a link to your mom or daughter or sister or friend, or just share it on your socials so that other women who need to hear this know that they’re not alone. And if you’re listening and realize that you’re carrying your own mother daughter wound, then get in the show notes and go find more with Erica Thomas. Or if you recognize that this wound is manifesting as a drinking problem at this point and you want help with this,
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Well, this is exactly the type of work we do inside my year-long program. Because drinking too much, as you already know, isn’t about the alcohol. It’s just a symptom that you’re running on a deficit because you’ve been taught to silence yourself, to push down your own needs, and to care more about other people’s feelings than you do your own. You need to understand it is not your fault that you are where you are, but it is completely your responsibility.
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Inside my program, you’ll learn how to get emotionally sober. You’ll learn the tools for how to show up differently, not just for your drinking, but in your relationship with yourself so that you’re no longer needing or wanting to numb or escape or avoid the pain of emotional baggage and generational trauma. Instead of focusing on the problem and getting stuck in it, you can start using your focus and energy and creativity
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to design the solution. So if you’re ready to do that work, I’m inviting you to schedule a free discovery call. You’ll find the link in the show notes. And trust me when I say that these discovery calls are a two-way interview. They are designed to help you figure out where you’re at and where you want to be and the next steps that are right for you. We don’t pressure you to join. We don’t even invite everybody to join because our program is not a good fit for everybody.
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there’s only one way to find out if I’m your next coach and this is your next program. You gotta click the link and take the action. You can’t think and know whether it’s a good idea. You gotta book it, come to the call, and then actually feel from your experience whether or not this is a good next step for you. So either way, I want to thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of my community. I love you and I’m rooting for you. And I hope you go into this week knowing
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that you can show up for yourself in ways your mom never knew how. Like it’s 2025 and we got all new moves. All right, have a kick ass week.