00:00

Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

00:37

Hello and welcome back to make more money without selling your souls. The podcast for women who want to build wildly successful businesses without abandoning themselves in the process. And today’s conversation is a powerful one, because we’re exploring something that sits quietly beneath so many entrepreneurial journeys yet rarely gets talked about in the business world. We’re talking about the mother wound and how our earliest relationships can shape the way we show up in business, our drive to achieve, our fear of failure, our relationship with boundaries, visibility, perfectionism, and even the clients we attract. My guest today is Shelly Sharon, a trauma informed, certified hakomi therapist who helps women unpack the impact of a complex relationship with their mother so they can thrive in their relationships, careers and lives. This is a conversation that affects me so deeply, and I’m so excited for you to wrap your ears around this. So without further ado, let’s get into it.

01:36

Hello Shelly, and welcome to the show. I am so excited for this conversation, because this is a conversation unlike any other conversation we have yet had on this podcast. But for anyone who is new to you, please, can you introduce yourself to my lovely listeners? Yeah, and thanks for having me here. I am really excited towards having a conversation about healing the mother wound and how it’s related to business. So I help women who’ve had a complex relationship with their mother unpack the way it holds them back today, so they can move the debris aside and thrive in their personal life or in their businesses. Yeah. Oh, I’m so excited to dive into this. I mean, one thing that comes to mind listening to you is recognizing that a lot of women, and I’m curious to hear your view on this, but my perspective is, my assumption is a lot of women who are high achievers do that as a reflex to perhaps growing up with a mother who they didn’t feel loved by, and so they’ve done it, partly to have that independence, and I say all this perhaps slightly looking at my own experience and journey, but also from that place of craving admiration and craving love and craving that sense of if I do enough and I do well enough in the world, perhaps I’ll be loved. Perhaps I’ll be accepted by my mother. So I’m assuming you’re inundated

03:09

with people who need to work on this, because, I mean, high achievers are basically the majority of entrepreneurs, right? Yes, yeah, and this is such a brilliant question to start a conversation, because, yeah, I can’t say a stronger yes to that, and I’d like to break it apart a little bit that achieving can have so many faces and can show up in so many Ways. So I’m raising my hand as well, because I’m definitely my husband calls me a hyper achiever, and

03:49

it’s originated in a form of effort. I call it efforting, and I speak about that in my private podcast, birthright with R, i, t, e, which means that not having the attuned relationship with our mother, not having the emotional response guidance, presence from our mother, unconsciously, we get the sense that we need to work harder in order to fulfill these very human needs, and that becomes an ingrained habit of ours. It also becomes a gift, because being a high achiever means that you plow through difficulties and you stick to your self belief, or you stick to your goals no matter what, there are a lot of gifts in that, but there are a lot of downsides to that, to when, when you become really, really exhausted, or when you’re haunted by perfectionism and you’re never able to start your business or to start your group program, or.

05:00

Or to move on to your next start your podcast, because there is that sense that it has to be perfect. Another limiting belief that is ingrained in that higher achieving is the fear of making a mistake. So yes, you’re afraid that whatever you have to offer is not going to be accepted, and then you might have your own business. You might have beautiful I’m sure, you have beautiful passions and creativity and ideas and a lot of beautiful experience and knowledge to share, but the fear of making a mistake is holding you back, and the compensation mechanism becomes high achieving. And the way that I help women, I should say, probably reduce that tension of high achieving, because personally, I don’t have anything against being a high achiever, but as you say, when it becomes a default, when it becomes a reflex, and we don’t have any other options, we don’t have any other choices. We don’t see what are the possibilities? Then we get trapped in a monotonous effort that really drains us. And what I help women see is what is the landscape of high achieving so they can see more possibilities and more opportunities to go after what they want and achieve the achievements that they want, but not always, necessarily through high achieving. Yeah, yeah, because there’s such a risk with it isn’t there, because, from my personal experience, I feel like it certainly contributed to burnout, because there’s that sense of never being or doing quite enough, and there’s that pressure to make it perfect, and like you say, there’s also that fear of failure, which I have to say, in my case, has haunted me in so many different ways, in that if I go to a party and they bring out a board game, I’ll be that person who says, Let me watch this first round so I can get a sense of how you play it before I join it in. And it honestly makes me feel so uncomfortable. If someone’s like, no, just jump in. Figure out as you go. I hate it feels. I feel like, you know, like I’m outside. I’m a caveman exposed outside the cave, like, you know, they’re genuinely going to a state of fight or flight, where I’m just like, This is so unpleasant, I do not enjoy the vulnerability of asking for help or not knowing what to do, even in a very basic scenario, like playing a game. And of course, that has a ripple effect into business as well. But yeah, between that sense of not wanting to fail, wanting to get it right, wanting to be the best, wanting to achieve, never feeling like that achievement is quite enough, and wanting to achieve more, and that sense of essentially not really feeling like there’s a clear barometer of satisfaction within myself. You know, previously it was very externalized. I would look at, you know, is my mother impressed? Is my father? Impressed is my boyfriend? Impressed are people around me on social media impressed? And I’d kind of forgotten what satisfaction in fact, I don’t know if I’d even forgotten, I don’t think I’d ever learned what satisfaction was for me, because I’d grown up in an environment where survival was pleasing others, and that definitely trickled over into business. So for that person who’s maybe hearing my story and resonating with that, how do you help people connect to what is enough for them?

08:41

Well, you said something very striking. And you brought up this image, which, in my world, images that come up are information from our psyche, information from our emotional world, and I always give attention to that. And you spoke about like the caveman, like and as if I’m taking that image on myself, what comes up for me is that if I am in a cave, I feel very protected. I feel like I’ve got the boundaries of the space that I need to feel protected. And being thrown out of the cave is like coming out from a very black room straight into a beaming sun in daylight and midday, and that’s quite cruel. I don’t want you or anyone else to do that. So how I help my my clients is first of all, understand what are the requirements of safety that you need in order to feel that you have that choice and that opportunity that we spoke about earlier, that you don’t have to be pushed into anything. And there is a very thin line between stepping out of your comfort zone, the you know, the the very popular set.

10:00

Saying two, are you actually feeling safe enough to be visible, to try out something new? It’s not so difficult actually, to learn. What do we need in order to feel safe? And when we’re actually crossing our own boundaries, which I’ll get back to that with the burnout and impressing your mother or other people. It doesn’t take much to learn the cues of safety, and when you learn the cues of your safety, because in that respect, we’re very, very different individually, what makes me feel safe in visibility is not going to be what makes you feel safe in visibility. And I believe that without extra friction, without extra imbalanced efforts, we can really bloom and very fast. And that’s the formula that I’m using, not pressuring my clients into, Oh, you just have to try it. But you know, if something is frozen inside of ourselves because it is in a very subtle and unconscious way, connected to some events that happened with your mother, then you don’t want to re traumatize that place over and over again. And so when I say, when you cross your own boundaries, this is where you know the whole conversation about trust and self trust, for me, takes a very particular flavor. So when we we we know that we want to achieve something, or we want to do something. We want to break some ceiling limits of ourselves. We want to feel enough. Yeah, we want to break through that limiting belief, or that Hidden Self belief that I’m not allowed to make mistakes.

12:03

We need to know what is our own boundary with feeling enough. Because when we talk about feeling enough often, it’s such a general, generalized conversation, isn’t it? Yeah, don’t really stop and have a taste of, like, what is really enough? So I’m a I’m a foodie. Yeah, I really love eating. And when I eat something that I really love, I just want to eat more and more of it, even though I am full, you know, I’m kind of like, I just want to have more of that. And sometimes I do, and I suffer for that so much, and that’s such a great example, which anybody can try and test what it feels like when we cross our own boundaries, and when we cross our own boundaries, we can get into burnout. We keep on doing things ourselves and not asking for help, getting into all kinds of tight corners within ourselves and in our business, because what if I’m going to fail? So there is learning. What is it that you need, personally to feel safe, what are your own boundaries and when you’re respecting them more easily and when you’re actually tending to cross them? So one of my clients, she wanted to set up her own Tarot reading business. For a long time she grew up with a narcissistic mother who’s always criticized her, criticized her looks. She’s a beautiful, gorgeous woman, criticized her body and demanded her attention.

13:53

Do you know this mother that calls you like 10 times a day and 20 if you don’t answer or text not to not living with that but yes, yes, not that one. Yeah. So she was so busy with her mum that she was just drained and had absolutely no energy to attend to her own ideas and creativity and her own business. And it was very interesting that she, as soon as she started noticing that she actually has a mother woman, and this is a woman that’s done a lot of therapy before, like the majority of my clients, and the theme of the mother wound never came up a conversations or, you know, relations to her mother from a therapist never came up. So I helped her see and realize what does she need in order to respect her bound.

15:00

Boundaries, and she noticed that she keeps on, you know, toppling over it and completely dismantling her own boundaries, because her mother never respected her boundaries. And so she started not answering her phone, getting through the guilt, which is also something I help my clients do. And she regained more and more confidence and more and more energy, and now she’s blooming. And she told me she went to visit her mom, which happens very rarely now. And she was really surprised to notice, after everything that she went through, after everything that she’s built, she was still planning scenarios in her mind. What is she going to tell her mother? So she’s impressed by her so these are the stick parts of the mother wound like you know, how do we impress others? Are also there, because we really need the validation from other people. So there is also a balance that we want to keep, just not to say, Oh, we don’t need anybody’s permission. I don’t need anybody’s validation, because that’s BS. We do need some people’s validation, but we want to be discerning who those are. Yeah, you know what, and what you’ve just said there, it reminded me of something else that’s so important when it comes to Mother wound from my experience in that, of course, there’s the behaviors, the kind of the thought patterns, the kind of limiting beliefs and all the kind of conditioning that comes with it. But actually, what you just shared about phone calls reminded me of something that I have. I mean, I’m really happy to be having this conversation with you, because I feel like I’m not talking from a raw wound anymore. There’s always, of course, more healing to be done, but there’s, there’s been so much, and there’s two things I want to touch on with you here based on what you’ve just shared. One on the fact that you know, as you just mentioned, a lot of the time, when we think about therapy and healing, we think about our childhood, but actually the reality is, with a mother wound, a lot of us are in our midlife doing our most courageous things in business alongside still having that relationship with the mother. And so it’s one thing to try and heal something that impacted us as a child, but it’s another thing to then navigate what that also looks like as an adult, and how you continue to relate from a place of not blame or hatred, but one way you can still find peace in that relationship. But the piece I wanted to touch on before we get to that, so I’m glad you’re making notes over there, the bit I wanted to touch on was when you talked about the phone calls and being able to be with that discomfort by not answering the mother all the time. It reminded me as to how early on in my business, when I was an ads manager, quite naturally, a lot of people, when they’re running ads will have anxiety, particularly if there’s a day where the ads aren’t doing well, and because I’m a softie who really cares. People would often message me at 11 o’clock at night on the weekend. One time I was on a beautiful, sunny vacation, it was a bank holiday, and I got a message at like midnight on Sunday, going, can you turn the ads off? I’ve had a spiritual download. It’s not aligned. And I was like, that’s all lovely. But I and and I remember talking to another ads manager at the time saying, I am finding this unbearable. What do you do with all these people who speak to you this way, like, How do other people manage this? And she said something that would forever change my relationship to my work and my clients, which was Polly, this doesn’t happen to me. And in that moment, I started to recognize where I was, in many cases, working with narcissistic women, and that I was falling back into that dynamic that I had when I was younger with my mother, of if there was a wobble, if there was any sadness, if there was any discomfort, rather than being the beacon, rather than holding strong and allowing them to feel safe in what I knew was a safe scenario where I could say, leave the ads. They’re fine. You know, they’re going to wobble. Trust me on this one, let’s wait till tomorrow, or just not respond at all, which is the better thing, right? You know, on a on a weekend, where it’s not in my contract, but instead, if I didn’t respond, I would be spiraling thinking, oh god, they’re going to hate me. Are they going to sack me if I don’t respond? I would, you know, really, catastrophize, but I’d also almost absorb that anxiety they were feeling too, and I would go into hyper overdrive to want to fix it, which then obviously resulted in over delivery once I had a copywriter who was designing my website say, Polly, you sound more like a therapist than an ads manager. We can’t use this testimonial, because what you’re doing here is well beyond what an ads manager should be doing, and you don’t want to attract more clients like that. So I was really unaware at that stage. I was really over.

20:00

Working over delivering and fueling a really unhealthy dynamic, which really helped me recognize it went well beyond healing my relationship with my mother or healing my relationship with myself, but recognizing, you know, I kept on firing awkward clients until I came to the point where I realized this is getting silly now I can’t walk away every time a relationship becomes challenging. I need to learn what you were referring to earlier, which is like having clearer boundaries, having clearer like, this is acceptable, this is not acceptable, and embodying that in every decision and action I take. Would you mind kind of expanding a bit more upon that in terms of how the mother wound can impact our relations to our like

20:46

whoever we’re working with, to our clients, to other businesses, and maybe even to, I mean, I don’t want to get too broad here, because we’re talking through the lens of business, but I imagine, obviously it can also impact our romantic relationships and the partners we choose, and basically become a really rotten, toxic nucleus to the rest of our reality, right? If we’re not careful, yeah. So I’ll start by sharing how I define the mother wound. The mother wound is a rupture in all of our relationships, in our relationship to ourselves, our relationship to others, and our relationship to life as a whole, which I do include in that the the public space that we’re taking or the broader vision that we have for ourselves in life. So you are right to touch upon the impact on our relationships to others, so we may be covered more our relationship to ourselves with the fear of making mistakes or the fear of being failure, fear of failing, fear of perceiving failures in ourselves. And I’ll circle back in a moment to the impact on our relationship with our clients, because I think it’s really important. But what you said just there, this is something that I really began to understand when I took my trauma healing trainings something that I heard one of my most admired trauma healers, Janina Fisher, saying, trust your clients, and that’s one of the principles of hakomi therapy, which is my main practice, when you trust your clients, when you’re able to trust your clients, and we’ll come back to that with the relationships. Then, you know, one of the things that I heard they’ve dealt with dissociation, if I’m talking about the extreme end of trauma responses,

22:50

if we think about people who lived with different parts and the ad dissociation, identity, disorder, they’ve lived with that quite successfully, I would say, in my perspective, means that they’ve had a lot of adaptations that they have cultivated within the years in order to cope with the inner chaos and the inner terror. Way before they came to me as a therapist, and I respect that one of the things that is really important for me is to see the resources in my clients and to acknowledge them vocally, out loud. Because sometimes like, what I’m what I’m noticing, for example, is that you only needed that woman to tell you you’re acting like a therapist, not like an ad manager, or you’re coming across as a therapist not like and it was enough to shift something for you. And I’ll make a guess that you’re a very quick learner, and you’re open to receive feedback from people that you appreciate, that’s a resource that I want you to hear it from me, in a trusted relationship with me, and to have the impression, because that’s my basic belief, that you are already whole.

24:18

When women come to me, they don’t come to me to be fixed well. Of course, some women do come with the impression that, you know something needs to be fixed. Something is not working well, and some things are not working well in our in our life. We don’t have to elaborate much on that, but that perspective is a game changer for your relationship with your clients. If you’re able to find your way, and that’s what I’m helping my clients to do, to find their way to trusting their clients, then the relationship becomes a creative, co collaborative relationship, and high achieving.

25:00

Women, creative women, the wild spirit and wild heart, women that are working with that’s what they want. I ever heard you quite a lot on your podcast and your presentations and workshops, so I know that these are the women that you’re looking to work with. And it comes from that basic belief that the other person really has what they need in order to achieve what they want. And as a therapist, what I am helping women to do is to find, in a very natural way, the connections between what is happening to them today to what has happened to them in their childhood. So when I made the shift to focus on healing the mother wound, which is not so long ago, it’s something like five years ago, and before that, I’ve been working with women on healing the mother wound, I just didn’t call it that way. And you know how it is when your clients actually guide you and tell you what is Yeah, yeah, that you’re good at, or what is it that they really want from you? That’s exactly what happened to me for years. All the women that came to work with me in my private practice came with stories about their mother, and because I have worked through a major mother wound of my own. I’ve had a lot to share not before I reached a place like you’ve mentioned that I felt I’ve processed enough I have come to reclaim lost and exiled parts of myself enough that I felt that I had the confidence to do the work that I’m doing. And so after a few years, I thought, wait a minute, that’s what all these women are asking me. That’s what I’m actually doing. This is, this is what I was born into. And that moment, I completely fell apart. And what came to the forefront is feeling that I’m not being chosen, that I’m not going to be chosen. You know, these expectations that I’ve developed because of what happened to me in my childhood, the way that I was abandoned and neglected.

27:26

It’s like I’m not worthy to be chosen as somebody with value to lead people to healing, to offer something for women came out and blew in my face, and so our relationship to ourselves will be always reflected and mirrored to us through our relationship with our clients, and the way that I’m helping women make all these connections and connect the dots are just like it happened to you right now, I’m not going to explain things to you or give you formulaic, theoretical, oh, this happened to you because of that and that, but we’re going to have heart to hearts exchange. I’m following what you bring up, I’m offering some somatic experiences until bang, you make that connection. And when you’re making that connection, your relationship to yourself changes. And when your relationship to yourself changes, then your relationship to your clients changes. And you’ll also see that your client makes so much sense to me. You know? What’s really funny is, today I had another guest on the show, and she was talking about personal branding, and she was saying how ultimately, you can’t design any kind of personal brand without having a real strong level of awareness of your identity. And if your identity, at the core of it is one where you don’t truly trust or love yourself or accept yourself, then anything you build in your business, and even where you have a shiny exterior, even where you use AI, even where you make everything look polished and perfect, if the core beneath it all is rotten. And I know that’s a bit of a harsh phrase to you, as I know that’s not what you’re saying, but I feel like that is where, you know, in many ways, my business, on the surface may have looked successful, and financially it was. And there are various elements of my business that did work well, but ultimately, I wasn’t sleeping well at night. I never felt successful enough. I always was worried that one thing would go wrong with any client, and that would that always had so much more resonance to me than any of the success they were having, and it was so tiring to carry and had I stayed in that world, in that space, in that emotion, in that conditioning, I couldn’t have the business I have today. So I’m so excited to be having this conversation with you, because it’s such a nuanced and complex.

30:01

X thing, and also not all at once and but at the same time, if it’s ignored, then everything will feel heavier in life. And for me, the kind of the catalyst was my divorce with my husband, where unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I had married my mother, and I was being very controlled. And interestingly, within the first therapy session, I had the conversation moved to my mother, and then the following weeks, every conversation was about my mother. And from then onwards, all the healing work was around my mum. But I do hear you in the context that you know it doesn’t make us broken. There is not such a destination as being healed, per se, but I think the important thing is to be aware and to be on that journey, and to find support like yourself, to help you on that journey, because it’s, I don’t believe it’s something we can navigate alone. I don’t think anyone was designed to do anything alone. You know, we live in a world that’s so individualistic, but when it comes to healing, it’s done with other humans who can help you carry what you’re carrying, and help you see the things that you’re too close to see. So I wanted to come back to the little question I shared earlier about one of the things I struggled with. And so what I mean very selfish is a very like, self oriented questions, but hopefully that also just brings a slightly different perspective to this conversation. But for me, going through that divorce, I almost actually cut off my mother for the rest of my life that went through my head, and it was articulated, and my family heard about it, and it was a whole big thing, because I was moving back to the UK, I was tempted to cut off my mother. Anyway, I didn’t, and I’m really glad I didn’t, and I now have a healthy I actually love my mom to bits. Now she’s one of my best friends. So I can really reconcile the version of me that was growing up, and the mother I had then, with the mother I have now, and the relationship I have with her. And is it, you know, do I occasionally look at women who have mothers who are very doting, who bring out brownies for them when they arrive in the door and kind of say, put your favorite pajamas on the sofa, and all these nice things that my mum, you know, she’s not a motherly mum

32:12

in that sense. But you know she’s, I’m able to appreciate her for all the phenomenal things that she is. You know, she was a main breadwinner, she had multiple sclerosis that she was dealing with. I can see, you know, where she didn’t bring certain things I would have wished for. She is so many other things that have shaped who I am today. But yeah, so I guess hearing what you shared about how you supported someone in their relationship with their mother today, because I think in so many other scenarios, if you’re going through divorce, you’re not really you know, you’re not living with your ex husband anymore, you can heal that more easily because you have distance from them. If you have you know, childhood wounds, you can heal that more easily because you’re not a child anymore. You can have some distance from it. But with a mother where you desire to still have your mother in your life, it can feel very confronting and very much like for me, it felt like very much being in the messy middle. Like, how can I have space? How can I have clarity when I’m also in it almost every day? And I think maybe for some people, they may hesitate from doing this work, because as that fear of what Pandora’s Box am I opening here when I start truly doing this work? Can I love my mom and heal at the same time? So I guess that’s my question to you, can they love their mother and heal at the same time? What does that look like? Yeah, I’d like to comment on what you said earlier first and say that the mother wound is a relational wound, and which is why I’m a great advocate of healing the mother wound within a relationship and and why it’s so important. And as for the goal or the intention of healing the mother wound, I do want to acknowledge the huge spectrum of the mother wound. Yeah, one relationship does not look like another, for sure, and of course, there are a lot of similarities. So some women that come to me, they they love, genuinely love their mother, and others don’t. I’ve, I’ve never felt love for my mother, and I still don’t, and I feel I I don’t have any anger or hatred. I used to hate her for what she did to me. I don’t have any of that, but I do remember from early on that I’ve never had any love feelings. So I’m starting with that as a point to say, yes, anything is possible. You can stay in contact with your mother. You can estrange with her. You can be in any degree of connection with her. Between these two spectrums, you can love your mother, and you can choose or acknowledge that you don’t love your mother.

Anything is possible. It really is depends on what is your true heart intention, and what I mean by true heart intention is there is a survival process that we call normalization, that we love our mother, but we don’t really love our mother. We perform loving. We think we love our mother because we had to love our mother, because she was our lifeline. And, you know, we came out of her womb. That connection is there. It will always be there, and it has nothing to do guaranteed with love, that umbilical core, that connection will always be there. It’s a it’s a huge it’s the biggest reference point that we have in life. But you know, when love comes into the picture, it’s really, really personal, and I’m really happy to to know and to hear that you’ve had such a brilliant therapist that recognized what was going on and took that on board with you. And I can see the healing that unfolded from that, and definitely I can resonate with the fact that it’s very difficult to, let’s say, achieve the level of healing that you’ve achieved whilst being in a similar relationship to our mother. And I think that’s one of the hesitations of women to to start healing the mother wound that they are afraid of what it could do to their relationships, and the sense of abandonment or loneliness feels so familiar that they definitely don’t want to choose that consciously. But what my clients see very naturally throughout the process that repair is more often possible than not, within their intimate relationships or within their business or with their mother. And what I often say is that your worst, your worst nightmares, probably will never happen. Sometimes they do. I don’t want to paint a pink picture, but our worst nightmares come from the wounded place, and it’s because the wounded place can’t talk to us about other possibilities that it hasn’t experienced. So I agree with you that awareness is really important, and what I offer is more than awareness. I offer experiences, yes, that you’ve never had before, in order to know firsthand what it feels like to not be controlled, even in a therapeutic setting, that gives you the sense like, Oh, I could probably bring that into my friendships. I could probably bring that into my relationships with my clients, or what does it feel like to truly be acknowledged and witnessed? 

Yeah, what you said about somatic as well really landed for me, because when you talk about the work, I mean, I talk about how my mother cost me a lot in therapy, and it took years and took a variety of modalities. And somatic work was probably the most profound, because I found when I was just talking, I was kind of going around in circles, kind of driving myself a little bit crazy, like I was driving myself in knots towards the end, because, because there’s only so many times you can say the same kind of thing, and the same pattern can play out. And if you’re staying the same person responding the same way, then nothing’s really changing. And it was only through somatic work where I think I genuinely like you, like you say, I learned to experience the world differently, and I think like you say, Every relationship is different. So I’m not by any means saying my my experience is this, and therefore that should be the same. But from my lived experience, I think one of the things that really supported me was feeling better resourced and kind of learning to mother myself. So instead of waiting for someone else to say, Hey, do you want this? Or do you want No, I now go for massages once a month. I, you know, would go for my manicures. I I do a lot of things where I love on myself and I nurture myself in the way that I wanted someone else to nurture me. And when I started taking it under my own control, it’s like the universe gifted me with angels. You know, people who came down who wanted to do nice things for me, which I also somatic work was what enabled me to receive because for a long time, people could want to be kind, could want to give me things, but I was in such a state of hyper independence and fear of being vulnerable, fear of somebody offering something and then taking it away, that or fear of giving me something and then saying, Oh, I.

40:00

Gave you that, you know, like manipulating you, making you feel bad for it, that I just found it easier to not say yes to things. So, yeah, so can you tell me just a little bit more about what that somatic works looks like, and you’ve talked a bit about how you support people with a mother wound, but can you expand upon that? Because, yeah, I’m really curious to understand the trauma lens that you bring to it, the somatic lens. How do you wrap all these things up together and the experience clients have when they work with you? Yeah, what I love about somatic work that really echoes what you what you said, and what you’ve experienced in your somatic therapy is that it’s very flexible and it’s very creative, very creative, because our body gestures, the movement that we do, are so spontaneous, and they come from an unconscious place. You know, when we, for example, suddenly put our hand on our heart. So one of my clients, and I’ll, I’ll share a response to your question through an example. She’s a high achiever woman who grew up in a very, very strict religious community, her mother was completely lost in admiring and serving the gurus and the model of that community. And my client, as a very creative person, wanted to kind of, you know, join the mission, and she took on herself job in that community when she was way too young to start working, and she suffered abuse and no one there to protect her. So she’s learned to do everything by herself. She’s learned to suffocate all the abuse and all the the loneliness that she’s experienced, and recently, we did some work around her boundaries and her being always available, yeah, always always ready to solve other people’s problems, and she’s really good at problem solving, like that’s one of her resources that plays often against herself. So she got really, really sick, and it was a moment where she hit rock bottom.

42:19

She felt like she’s never achieved anything in her life. She’s always chosen the easy path. She felt like a failure. None of that is evidently true in her life, but that was a despair that she was never able or allowed to feel in her life, because she had to constantly be so strong and keep it together in such a dismissive environment that she grew up in that it became a part of her. So, you know, being with her in that despair, first of all, brought a lot of calm and a lot of relaxation, and that is very much part of somatic work. We’re not trying to fix anybody or anything. It’s like, you know, you just want to be witnessed in those places, and just want somebody to be there and say it’s okay to fall apart.

43:20

And when you have somebody that you trust and that you have, you know, a relationship with, a therapeutic relationship with, there’s a big part in you that already knows that right now, at least it’s okay. And so I used one of the practices that I sometimes use, and I’ve got many, many practices of such kind that I invited her to imagine a loving and caring hand, and that could be somebody that you know in your life, or a divine hand, a spiritual hand, an imaginable, you know, imaginative hand doesn’t have to be some because not not everybody has that kind of person in their life, or that they see that person that is in their life, as you said earlier, like I didn’t see those people. I didn’t see those opportunities and and the help that the kindness that was offered to me.

44:12

And imagine where does it want to go and bring that care and bring that warmth and in that place, I offer that possibility to notice what happens in the body when I say it’s okay to fall apart, and what happened that was extremely surprising to her was putting out the hand like that as a stop sign for your listeners who don’t see that, and saying, I feel like I need to put a wall there. And I said, Well, why don’t you just, you know, this is, this is an impulse that comes from your body. This is the somatic work. Why don’t you just try putting the hand there without talking, see what happens her breast.

45:00

Calming, and she felt like she’s gaining her ground. She felt less like a failure. But what was extremely interesting, also to me, is that hand, that loving, caring hand that we start with, was the right hand, and the Wall came with a left hand, and when I invited her to follow that impulse, she turned that heart hand into that protection.

45:31

And these are spontaneously, spontaneous gestures that come in somatic work. It’s as if that there’s no difference between love for ourselves and the boundary. Now I can say that to you. We can start at the conversation with that. Say, Hey Polly, but there is absolutely no difference between the love that you give to yourself to the boundaries that you put and that you’re not crossing them. But that will be a mental fact that will land as an idea that you’re unable to implement. I wouldn’t have been able to imagine how the somatic session will unfold. It came directly from her, yeah, and that spontaneous movement. This is the gist of somatic work. It’s so individualized, and it’s so in the present moment, and it comes out from you that you can go back to that it’s already integrated. Yeah, I was gonna, you know, I think the thing that’s interesting about somatic work is it’s so subtle. I remember sometimes finishing sessions, I mean, like, I don’t really know what happened there, but at the same time, I carried on doing it for 18 months because, because I could feel myself changing. And I think if anyone is listening to this and thinking about whether it’s worth exploring my like tuppence worth is that I have been told by therapists in the past that I have a tendency to try and think my way out of discomfort. I have a tendency to want to find a logical thread in my discomfort. Or to be honest with you, I haven’t drunk now for a long time, but, you know, alcohol was at one point a kind of crutch. If I was feeling discomfort, I would, you know, either eat sugar or, you know, drink, drink some wine, never to a problematic stage. But essentially, I had never really learned to be with discomfort. And found, yeah, just found it scary, I guess. And I think the thing that has immensely helped me with somatic work is that it’s so gentle, so subtle. It’s not like some other therapy I’ve gone into where I’ve been like, Oh God, I’m about to revisit some horrible things, or I’m going to talk to a page, a place where I feel wide open, and I’m now going to have to go back into the streets of Brighton and walk home feeling open and exposed and unhealed. Somatic work is so subtle, so gentle, so present, so personalized and definitely like I’m not the same person who I was before I started somatic work. So I know you and I haven’t worked together directly, but I’m such a huge believer in the work that you do. So I wanted my listeners to hear that too, but if anyone is listening and resonating with what you’re sharing and feels curiosity around exploring how you could support them with the mother wound. Where can they find you, and how do you support your clients currently? So you know, we started our conversation. We’re talking about making a lot of effort as a default that could be could translate into a reflex of being a high achiever. I’ve under identified three types of effort under mothered women, make the effort to be, the confusion of being in, the courage to be and I speak about that in my private podcast, which I call birthrite with R, i, t, e, so it’s Shellysharon.com/birthrite and that’s free, and women can learn both from my story and anecdotes of women that I’ve worked with how to move beyond these efforts, and we’ve also spoken about how to make the connections between childhood wounds or childhood trauma to how we navigate our challenges today as adult women and especially as business owners, and that’s what I call finding your reset like not burning down everything that happened, just like in your personal story, you know You found your own relationship with your mother or your you found your new way with your own business, but finding the right shift, the meaningful shift that will actually help you to deepen and research starts as a women’s group as experience based, because it’s a Soma.

50:00

Work. It’s four weeks to have an experience in a in a community, in an intimate community, going through the four aspects of what we need to know we spoke about safety. That’s where we’re going to start in in week one, in reset, and women can find that in Shelly sharon.com/reset

50:24

Beautiful. I’ve so enjoyed today’s conversation. I think it’s probably one of the longest interviews I’ve ever held, but it’s because I didn’t want to stop listening to all your magic. So thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me today, and I’m really excited for everyone to have a listen to it. Thank you, Polly. It was a delight, beautiful and of course, all the links you just referenced there will also be in the show notes. So do dive into the show notes so that you can access that wonderful private podcast and learn more about how to work with Shelly. Take care.

50:58

Well. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Make more money without selling your soul. If today’s conversation resonated with you, I highly recommend exploring Shelly’s work. She shares more about the patterns that under mothered women often carry, and how to move beyond them in her private podcast birthright, which you can find in the link in the show notes. And if this episode sparks something for you, I’d love to hear from you. You can always reach out to me on Instagram at Polly laverello, or share the episode with a friend who you think might need to hear this conversation too, because the truth is, the more we heal our relationship with ourselves, the easier it becomes to build businesses, relationships and lives that actually feel good to live inside. And that ultimately is what making more money without selling your soul is all about. See you in the next episode.