The Emotional Struggle
Renee carried a specific and painful
form of guilt that is common among mothers who have been through difficult relationships: the belief that her own pain was a betrayal of her child. That she did not have the right to be struggling when she had a little girl who needed her to be okay. That her healing was somehow in competition with her mothering.
This belief was keeping her from seeking or accepting any real support, because accepting support felt like admitting she was not okay, and not being okay felt like failing her daughter. The guilt and the depletion were feeding each other in a cycle that she could not break alone.
The Process
The Coaching Process
Gina addressed the guilt directly and early because it was the gate through which everything else needed to pass. Renee needed to understand, not intellectually but at a felt level, that her healing was not separate from her daughter’s wellbeing but foundational to it. That the most important thing she could model for a seven-year-old girl was a woman who valued herself enough to take her own pain seriously and do something about it.
That reframe did not dissolve the guilt immediately. But it gave Renee a different story to hold alongside it. A story in which seeking support was an act of mothering rather than a retreat from it.
The Reconnect work focused on identifying what the relationship had taken and naming it clearly. The Rebuild phase focused on reconstructing her sense of her own perception and judgment, which the relationship had significantly eroded, and on establishing what she would and would not accept going forward, in relationships, in friendships, and in her relationship with herself.
