How to Heal Mom Rage: Advice from a Psychologist
Mom rage makes perfect sense sometimes. Our culture persists with a lack of support for mothers, leaving many of us stuck, angry, and on high speed toward maternal burnout. It’s time to get in touch with our feelings, accept anger as normal for women, and learn how to hone our feminine power.
Healing Motherhood
“I believe almost everything in the world would be solved by taking care of mothers, because that’s where everything begins.” – Yara Heary
In an interview for the Raised Good Summit, Tracey Gellert speaks with perinatal psychologist and mother Yara Heary from the Life After Birth Psycology website and podcast. The wisdom Heary brings to this interview is brilliant and incredibly empowering, and I’m so excited to share it with you.
Mothers need a voice to speak powerfully and straightforwardly to challenge the way we think about how mothers are struggling. Now, more than ever, it is important to have a strong voice and for other mothers to hear that and follow the lead.
There is so much in parenting that women are truly unprepared for. The way our lives change internally and externally can be a shock. The way society views mothers, the way our lives become less flexible, and the ways that we are oppressed.
Mother’s struggling in our culture. We are expected to have no feelings amidst one of the most major life changes amidst a complete lack of support on all levels.
Why We’re Experiencing Righteous Anger
Anger comes up in motherhood, just as it does in all walks and seasons of life. It is a normal emotion for all people to have at times.
Getting angry is not a failure, and it doesn’t make you a ‘bad mother’ or a ‘hysterical woman.’ It means you are human who has a need that isn’t being met.
The ideology that mothers don’t or shouldn’t get angry is false and damaging. It leads women to suppress their anger, which can spark a whole host of issues, including emotional or rage outbursts when stress is high.
Anger is a common emotion and should be normalized for women and mothers. Anger itself isn’t pathological, although once we have children, the world places its own perceptions on us as mothers when it comes to anger. In reality, anger is a normal response to a variety of things that are happening in our lives, and the shift to motherhood can be triggering for a lot of women.
Enter: Mom Rage
Some of the structures of oppression that come up for women when we become mothers may not be as apparent before we have children. Once we become mothers, we have reduced life flexibility and cannot keep up with working late hours, make our own schedule, or care for ourselves when our own needs come up.
With a pervasive lack of support for mothers as human beings, these social constructs frustrate women once they are mothers, understandably. I find anger a perfectly reasonable response to not being treated with support and care, and as a human with needs during one of the most significant life transitions a woman may ever go through.
So, what exactly needs to be fixed here?
The mother or the people and systems surrounding the mother? When a plant struggles to grow, do we fix the plant or tend to the soil?
Healthy Ways To Respond
When we have children, we often have to reconstruct the coping mechanisms we used to use. We might become triggered differently than we used to, and need to reframe the way we cope with intense emotions. Maybe we used to binge watch our favorite show, go for a run, or out to drinks with a friend when we felt upset about something. With a newborn, toddler, or young child in tow, these coping strategies are not always possible.
Plus, if a situation arises and our children trigger us, it’s not possible to just leave the situation. If it is a friend triggering you, there is the option to take space and not call them back, or a triggering boyfriend we could just break up with. We are tied to our children in a completely different manner, and might need to do some inner work to attend to the way we are now triggered, as well as reframe the way we cope with frustrating situations.
Knowing that anger often comes out when we have an unmet need, and many moms have some reframing to do to cope with feelings of anger and rage as they enter the role of motherhood, the first thing recommended by Heary is to get comfortable setting healthy boundaries.
Then, identify what practices we can bring into our lives that will help our nervous systems be flexible and stay out of fight or flight mode. Here are some great tools to use in moments of anger and some to bring into daily practice as we learn to cope.
In The Moment
When we find ourselves in the moment of feeling anger or mom rage:
- First, notice where the sensation lives in your body. Is it heat in your chest? Electricity in your arms? Tension in your jaw? Just witness the physical experience without judgment.
- Signal safety to your nervous system before moving forward. Place a hand on your heart, take a deep breath expanding your lower back ribs like filling a balloon, or use the butterfly hug. Remember: regulation comes before logic or strategy.
- Honor that your anger is valid information from your body – it’s not something to control, but energy that needs to metabolize. Have a menu of emotional metabolism tools ready: perhaps a 90-second timer to scream into a pillow in your closet, a fierce 3-minute dance to an anger playlist, or vigorous movement like pushing against a wall.
- Remember that anger stuck in the body is one way women get profoundly held back. When we process this energy through our bodies first (not our minds), we create space for clarity, connection, and inspired action from a regulated state.
Remember to have self-compassion and acknowledge what happened in the moment. Nurture the part of yourself that had a need, and know that there is nothing wrong with you for feeling angry sometimes.
Out Of The Moment
These practices can be life-changing for new mothers as we find ourselves in a constant lack of sleep, lack of showers, lack of space, lack of personal time, paired with a healing body and visitors expecting you to be their hostess.
Until the support for new mothers changes, we can practice setting boundaries and coping with distress. Try to practice some of these methods regularly when you’re not feeling angry, to increase your distress tolerance:
- Breath work directly connects to our nervous system and works beautifully in the moment. Making it a habit before stress arises makes accessing the skills easier during distress. Heary recommends a free app called Insight Timer.
- Somatic movement relieves the stress we hold in our bodies. Exercise, dancing, taking time alone to scream and punch pillows, and shaking, are all movements that help get stored anger out of the body. Heary recommends looking into tension release exercises, also known as TRE.
If you find yourself in ongoing and repetitive anger, it’s a sign that there are bigger issues to tend to. Deeper work should be done with a therapist. Motherhood can bring many past wounds and current inequities to the forefront. It does not mean something is wrong with you, but your entire support system may need some healthy change.
If setting healthy boundaries and using these techniques don’t help you cope and bring relief, there is zero shame in talking to a therapist. They can help change your life systems to work for you instead of against you.
How Lack Of Support Harms Mothers
There is a pervasive lack of support for mothers in our culture. It seems as if all external expectations point in the direction that we should accept healing bodies, hormonal changes, a significant life paradigm shift, and an excess of work all hours of the day and night seamlessly. Without complaint. Without any bumps in the road. And without support.
Even if mothers do inner healing work, we live in a society that doesn’t support women in motherhood. It’s challenging to tackle workplace policies, work imbalances in and out of the home, and societal shame for everything we do. It seems never to end!
When our focus is on sustaining a small child, opportunities to care for ourselves are scarce. Basic needs, like hydration, regular meals, sleep, and showering, are challenging for some mothers if they have a lack of support.
I think there is truth in the desire to survive and keep our infants fed and thriving. But who takes care of the mothers so we can be present and able to care for our infants? Who holds the mothers?
Motherhood In A Patriarchal Society
Patriarchy is a system in which traditionally male roles and traits have been given greater value and influence. It shapes everything from policy to personal relationships. This societal structure impacts all of us, but especially mothers, who often carry logistical, emotional, and mental loads that go unseen and unsupported.
The unspoken expectations of this system tell mothers to prioritize others’ needs above their own, to always be nurturing, calm, and available, often without space to express their own emotions or ask for help. This cultural messaging can make it incredibly difficult for mothers to acknowledge, let alone meet their own needs without guilt or judgment.
Many families are doing their best within a structure that wasn’t designed to support caregiving or the full humanity of women. While some partners may actively share responsibilities, the broader culture still tends to default the weight of childcare, household management, and emotional labor to mothers. This imbalance often arises not out of malice but from generations of social conditioning and lack of structural support.
When one parent is expected to carry the bulk of the care, it can lead to burnout, resentment, and a deep sense of invisibility. These feelings are not personal failings but reflections of a system that needs to change.
If we want mothers to feel supported, resourced, and whole, we must reimagine a culture that values caregiving, shares responsibilities equitably, and gives mothers the space and support they deserve.
Hone Your Feminine Power
“Taking care of myself doesn’t mean ‘me first.’ It means ‘me too.’” – L.R. Knost
What can we do as women, mothers, sisters, and friends to hone our feminine power and help other women? There is power in even one woman setting boundaries, taking her space, expecting better, and caring for herself. It can open another new mother’s eyes and help reset the standard of how we feel about support.
Heary recommends these 5 steps to hone your feminine power:
1. Recognize we are in this culture with a massive lack of support.
2. Get clear on what our values and needs are as humans, not just mothers.
3. Center women and their needs and put boundaries in place that are supportive to the mother.
4. Challenge oppressive cycles for mothers in workplaces. Ask our partners to challenge their workplace so they can provide more support to mothers. Men need to be supported so they can support mothers.
5. Set clear boundaries, and push to meet your needs. This will set an example and have a butterfly effect on other women.
The Revolution Begins Within
When we acknowledge the anger, the depletion, the overwhelm – not as personal flaws, but as natural responses to an unsupportive system – we begin to reclaim our power.
Your anger is valid. Your needs matter. And your healing is powerful.
Every time a mother sets a boundary, asks for help, says no to the unrealistic expectations, or simply takes a deep breath instead of pushing through, it ripples. It changes the conversation. It creates space for more honesty, more compassion, more collective care.
So let this be a reminder: You are not too much. You are not broken. You are waking up in a culture that has long asked you to stay small. Your power, your voice, your care, and your anger are all part of what will shift it.
This is how we begin to reimagine motherhood.