You can run a meeting, a team, a household, a whole company. You can charm a room full of strangers and be told you’re a natural. And then a name lights up your phone on a Sunday morning, and in five minutes flat you’re someone you don’t recognise. Smaller. Younger. Bracing.

Do you know that feeling? The bracing?

I did it for thirty years and called it being a good daughter.

For the longest time, I couldn’t find harmony with my parents. I told myself I’d figure it out when I got older as though I were still a mardy arse in my twenties, emotionally inept, a work in progress.

It was when I married and moved away that I saw the contrast. How well I related to other adults. How warm I was, how easy complimented for it, even. And then I’d be abrupt with my parent. Go silent. Once or twice, hang up.

Why do I brace before every phone call?

When my children came along, it stopped being only about me. I wanted them to have their grandparents. So, I decided to be consistent: a weekly phone call. Reps. The 10,000 hours. It’s drilled into you from the self-help books! Just do the work and the skill will come.

Every Sunday, I woke with dread. Not only because the kids were up (that didn’t help) but because Sunday meant checking in with my parents.

Five minutes into the call, I was dancing to my mum’s rhythm, forgetting my own entirely.

There’s a name for what I was doing. The physician Gabor Maté describes two needs were each born with “a need for attachment and a need for authenticity.” When a child can’t have both, attachment wins every time; we put away the real self to keep the bond. I’d been doing it automatically without realising.

This is the parent wound: when a child can’t be both close and true, they choose closeness and shelve the real self and pay for it as an adult.

The weekly calls. These one-sided monologues went on, and on, and on. My mum breezed ninja-like from topic to topic without pausing for breath. The bin men leaving half the rubbish. The next-door neighbour’s latest mind games. And then, without fail, the ask.

“Can you buy, organise, speak to, arrange or do X for me and let me know when it’s done,” she’d say, sweetly. It sounds so harmless it feels almost petty to raise it. But that was how I stayed emotionally captive for days, a hundred miles away. Miss an update, and she’d ring seven or eight times until she was satisfied the mission was complete.

My brain would be saturated.

I’d get off the phone, feel instant relief, then do anything to escape it. Tea and biscuits. Or I’d dissociate into a grey, numb twilight, an escape with none of the relief.

These conversations were a well-rehearsed dance. She made her moves, I made mine. We fell helplessly into a pattern that existed long before I knew our relationship was lopsided. Neither of us aware there was another way.

Sometimes the distraction wasn’t enough, and I’d relive the call on a loop ten more times until it had taken the last few joules motherhood hadn’t already drained.

There was no respite. Missed calls at 6pm, 8pm, 11pm, and honestly, I couldn’t pick up. “I’ll be better in the morning. I’ll call when I’m not so exhausted.” Little pep talks. I’d go to bed carrying guilt, shame, anger at her, anger at me. Somewhere in the night I’d fall asleep, and finally there was quiet.

I wasn’t too sensitive my body was never safe

On reflection, I was angry. Not the loud, messy, shouting kind. The other side of anger   bitterly let down, betrayed, numb. The cause, every time: Mum forgetting to ask how I was. Or asking and not waiting for the answer. Or letting me answer, then interjecting, minimising, comparing.

Those calls switched on a lifetime of being made to feel I didn’t matter. Compared to my brothers, who were born superior simply for being boys. Them outside; me kept in after I turned twelve. Them wearing on-trend clothes; me in dresses I hated. Me doing the housework and the cooking because “no one will marry you if you can’t.” Not a day passed without being told off for being too outspoken for a Pakistani girl.

Share good news on a Sunday, and she’d find someone to compare me to. Sometimes the comparison fit. Mostly it was off by a mile, and I’d be left flat with her refusal to just see me.

It wasn’t a character flaw. It was a nervous system that had never felt safe in these conversations.

And there’s a reason for that. A real one, with a name. Long before you’ve decided how a call is going, your body has already voted. The neuroscientist Stephen Porges calls it neuroception: the nervous system reading a person as safe or unsafe beneath thought, “without our conscious awareness.” Your mind says: it’s only a phone call. Your body remembers every call that came before it.

So, you brace. Not because you’re weak, or too sensitive, or dramatic. Because a younger you learned, correctly, that these conversations cost something and she’s still on guard, waiting to pay.

(If the bracing before the call is the part you feel most, steadying your body first helps   I recorded a short hypnosis to stay calm around a parent for exactly that moment.)

Each call confirmed the old bias: I don’t matter.

And I’d mimic, without meaning to, the patterns I’d been raised in. The most common: comparing myself to friends. Never about looks or what they had. What I clocked was how they were with their mum or dad. The micro-moments. Eye contact, a softening in the voice, the easy nod of two people who trust each other.

Happy for them. Quietly in agony for me.

I’d ask what was wrong with me. How could I be better, easier to love? Those questions stole years and put a deep dent in my self-esteem. For a long time, I believed the crooked answers my inner critic gave back.

Maybe you’ve asked it too. Not what’s wrong with my parent? What’s wrong with me? It’s the cruellest question, because it sounds like taking responsibility, and it’s just the wound talking.

I wish I’d had someone to validate what I felt. To honour it. It would have been so much less lonely. Instead, I decided I was over-sensitive, and that I didn’t matter.

I put off facing the parent wound, afraid no one would understand my dynamic. I put it off because I was ashamed. If my own mum couldn’t love the real me, the way I craved, then something must be wrong with me and I didn’t want anyone finding out.

If I’m honest, I feared the full weight of my own feelings. How would I ever contain the grief, the anger, the betrayal, the humiliation, the sadness?

The work she never had to know about

From my mid-twenties, I worked on Project Roksana. I was a procrastinator, so I hired an expert for a few months. Anxious and controlling, worked on that for a few months. Overweight   nutritionists, personal trainers, the lot. I even did four days at a Tony Robbins seminar in London to “unleash the power within.” I came away believing I just needed to stop being a mardy arse and toughen up.

Every issue I thought I’d resolved came back with a vengeance the moment I became a mother.

My daughter was born in 2011, and something in me turned brave. A part of me wanted to face the wound. I didn’t understand why yet, I trusted the feeling.

I didn’t have the map. But I committed to one step after another until the day came when I no longer gave energy to this wound. I ached for an ordinary morning, to wake and sleep without long stretches of my mind occupied by my mum.

I had to go deeper into my own heart. I had to re-parent myself while learning to parent my little girl. Learning to love my baby, I learned to love my inner child too. It still brings happy tears.

I made room for my inner child to feel the whole range of it. And this’ll sound woo, but I’d talk to her. Ask what she needed. And she’d settle. Sometimes I’d be met with silence, but often I’d be met with a list of needs. After a solid twelve months, I knew I’d reached an inflection point. The maintenance is ongoing, but the hardest work was behind me.

Choosing to sink into the wound, to repair the parts of me still suffering, was the most monumental decision of my life. I had no idea how much energy that work would pour back into me.

This deeper work, re-parenting the younger you, building safety from the inside is what I now walk women through, step by step, in Liberated Daughter.

Can you heal if your parent never changes?

And here’s what parted the clouds: my mum had no idea I was doing any of it. The work didn’t need her participation. It didn’t need her to change.

Harriet Lerner spent decades watching women caught in exactly this choreography. Her conclusion was blunt and freeing: you can’t make the other person learn new steps but change your own, and “the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.”

I changed my steps. The dance changed. She never had to.

That belief that I needed her on board before I could heal was the thing that had kept me circling the same conversations, dimming my light, year after year.

I repaired the parts of me that hurt in those everyday calls. I finally understood why it hurt, and I made it my job to meet it with compassion.

I wasn’t too sensitive. I was a ‘Delicate Daughter’, caught in a specific pattern with my mum, one I eventually untethered from. That was the relief of it: there was a name for what I was, and a map out of it. The blaming stopped. The self-blame stopped. It wasn’t her fault, and it was never mine.

I’d been doing reps with no map. The relationship only changed once I integrated the repair, the honouring, the building of safety, the slow work of empowering myself.

And the cherry; I have an amicable relationship with my mum now. On my terms. Self-compassionate. Safe. Calm. Detached, with love. It took me the best part of a decade largely because I had no map and walked it alone and married approaches from different experts. It’s not going to take you so long.

What my daughter saw

I’m a mum to two teenagers now my girl is fifteen, my boy almost thirteen. We’re deep in mood swings and the fight for independence. If I hadn’t done this work, I’d have taken it all to heart, reverted to the hurt girl I was, and reacted disproportionately. The wound would have run the show. I might have handed the whole pattern down again.

This work is as much about coming home to yourself as it is about ending the legacy of suffering.

My daughter knows only snippets about me and my mum. Recently, she watched us together and said she was struck by how loving and generous I am with her grandmother despite everything. That meant everything. It was proof, in my own child’s eyes, that the effort had shifted something real. That relationships can evolve.

Here is the truth I’d hand my younger self: your parent may never change. Your life can change anyway.

But there’s a part that took me longest to see and it’s where I want to take you next.

The call ends. And she’s still there. Not on the phone but in my head. Narrating. Picking. Not seeing the real me. That voice doesn’t hang up when she does.

Where to start

If any of this was your Sunday, start by seeing the pattern for what it is. The 3-minute Daughter–Parent Quiz names the dance you’re caught in and the kind of daughter you’ve become inside it.

And when you’re ready to learn the first steps out of it, The Daughter Reset workshop is where that begins gently, and at your pace.

Next time: Rent-Free the parent who lives in your head long after you’ve put the phone down, and what it finally takes to stop paying board.

Questions women ask me about the parent wound

Why do I feel like a child again around my parents?

Because your nervous system remembers before your mind does. Long before a call “goes” a certain way, your body has already read the other person as safe or unsafe   Stephen Porges calls this neuroception. If those early conversations rarely felt safe, you can run a company as an adult and still brace on the phone with your mum. It isn’t weakness. It’s a younger you, still on guard.

Can I heal the parent wound if my parent never changes?

Yes and this is the part that freed me. The psychologist Harriet Lerner found that when you change your own steps, the old pattern can’t continue in the same way; the other person doesn’t have to take part. I did the work quietly, for years, without my mum knowing. The relationship shifted because I did. She never had to.

What is the parent wound?

It’s the ache left when a parent couldn’t meet you the way you needed not seeing you, comparing you, asking how you are and then talking over the answer. Over time you learn, without realising, that you don’t quite matter. It isn’t a character flaw or being “too sensitive.” It’s an old, learned pattern and patterns can be unlearned.

Why do I dread calling my parent?

The dread is anticipation your body bracing for a cost it has paid before. Mine arrived every Sunday, hours ahead of the call. Steadying your nervous system before you pick up helps; a short hypnosis to stay calm around a parent is one way in. The deeper relief, though, comes from tending to the pattern underneath, not just surviving the next call.

Do I have to go no-contact to heal? No. Estrangement is one path, but it isn’t the only one, and it wasn’t mine. I didn’t want to cut my mum off. I just couldn’t relate to her without suffering. It’s been the same for so many of the Women I have coached. Today we have an amicable relationship, on my terms: warm, calm, with boundaries. Healing is about coming home to yourself, whatever you choose to do about contact.

Hi I’m Roksana, an ACCPH accredited Transformation Coach blending coaching and therapeutic tools to help women through the challenging emotional passages of a life. Eight years of this work and lived experience of most of it: the parent wound, grief, motherhood, marriage, leaving a career, building a business. I’m British Asian, raised in Derby, shaped by the big smoke, settled now in St Albans. Each place a different season of becoming.

I’m writing this series because not long ago I was alone with the parent wound. I didn’t want to be estranged; I just couldn’t relate without suffering. It was taboo to say any of it out loud, let alone find somewhere to belong. So, I’m building the soft place I needed, for adult daughters who want to land before they gear up to do the work. Welcome.

Sources

• Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (Avery, 2022)   the attachment-versus-authenticity tension; the child sacrifices the authentic self to keep the bond.
• Stephen Porges, “Neuroception: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety,” Zero to Three (2004)   the nervous system reads safety or threat beneath conscious awareness.
• Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (Harper & Row, 1985)   change your own steps and the pattern can’t continue.