No “Bad Mom” Parts

As the British pediatrician, child psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, there is no baby without a mother. Each of us requires mothering in order to grow and be well. Mothering is the heart of our humanity, which means that maternal wellbeing matters to all of us. When moms befriend their Parts, a certain kind of suffering ends—helping mothers heal becomes an investment in the foundation of humanity itself.

Traditional approaches to maternal depression, rage, and anxiety are geared toward symptom reduction (maybe also behavior modification). These approaches basically side with Manager Parts by trying to strengthen “good-mom” behaviors, while suppressing the “bad” ones. Anyone familiar with IFS knows that leaning into one side of a polarization only intensifies the opposing Parts, making the entire situation more tense. IFS offers a compassionate and powerful alternative that supports moms in effectively mothering both sides at the same time. Getting curious, listening, and respecting the good intentions of wayward strategies is what helps deescalate tensions.

IFS gives us the tools to meet mothers where they are—often exhausted, overwhelmed, and convinced they’re failing. This modality helps mothers discover that their Parts are understandable and approachable. Working with Mom Parts gives mothers an easy entry point into IFS and gives practitioners a roadmap for helping mom-clients. The Mom Parts framework sticks with core IFS principles—multiplicity, no bad Parts, and Self-leadership (reframed here as Inner Mom presence). It offers language and tools that land with the unique challenges of the maternal experience.

Mothers reporting poor or fair mental health surged 64% between 2016 and 2023, marking a significant decline in maternal wellbeing nationwide. (Daw JR, MacCallum-Bridges CL, Admon LK. Trends and Disparities in Maternal Self-Reported Mental and Physical Health. JAMA Intern Med. Published online May 27, 2025. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.1260) For new moms, the statistics are even more concerning: One in five receives a perinatal mental health diagnosis, and suicide is a primary cause of death during the first year postpartum.

It’s not because the moms themselves are a sorry lot. It’s not because they aren’t giving motherhood their all. In fact, the maternal mental health crisis may be partly attributable to moms really, giving motherhood their all—thereby experiencing the internal backlash that comes when Manager Parts are overworked and under-appreciated.

We live in a perfectionistic, social media-driven world, the implications of which are especially hard on moms, who are a highly vulnerable and often lonely, isolated population. Moms live with a lot of scrutiny, starting early on, in pregnancy (Don’t touch the cat litter! Stay away from lunchmeat! Make sure you eat all the right foods – but don’t gain too much weight!). They’re often made exclusively responsible for their children’s physical, psychological and spiritual well-being, and the world puts a ton of pressure on moms to make sure their kids are healthy and high achieving. Moms get the message loud and clear, from their first pregnancy visit: Your child is vulnerable and there are many ways you can screw this up.

Of course, women enter motherhood with all their own messy, unhealed pain and unfinished psychological business.

Yet many moms expect themselves to do everything right and look good doing it. The Parts of moms who show up hoping for perfection and striving to prevent or fix all kid-related-problems are valiant Parts, but they inevitably get crushed by the weight of reality. Kids are randos. They come in with their own weird hardwiring, their needy natures and their demands for recognition of their uniqueness. Trying to mother small creatures who fight against your Perfectionist Part’s longing for smooth sailing is hard enough, but living out that struggle in a patriarchal culture that pushes “good mom” propaganda is even harder.

The Mom Parts method guides clients through five steps: identify their Parts, speak Truths on behalf of those Parts, determine whether shame or grief is at the root, chose Remedies from the C’s of Self (plus one more, Choice), and connect those Remedies to their Inner Mom capacity. These five steps can be moved through in an hour, illuminating hopeful new trailheads even for clients who have never heard of Parts work. We help moms connect their vulnerable, wounded Parts with their considerable maternal know-how to harvest more of their internal resources for themselves. We make sure to clarify that moms deserve to feel safe, understood and loved, separate from the mothering they provide.

Manager Parts—the Perfectionist, the Caretaker, and the Inner Critic (to name a few)—try to maintain control and meet these impossible standards. They’re determined to keep moms patient, responsive, and essentially selfless. But Managers inevitably burn out (because you can’t be selfless in perpetuity), and when they do, Firefighter Parts take over. Rage explodes. A Numbing Part dangles tantalizing options for zoning out with substances, food, TV, dissociation…Sometimes a “Fuck-it” Part shows up (yes, that’s a legitimate Mom Part) offering ideas for making a clean break from it all. And then the shame piles on, because good moms aren’t supposed to have these kinds of Parts. As the Inner Critic starts its internal rant about how good moms shouldn’t explode or freak out or withdraw, a cycle is set in motion of “good” Mom Parts cleaning up after “bad” Mom Parts in a polarized frenzy.

So much about the experience of motherhood is universal. And it’s quite popular – roughly 85% of women in the United States become mothers by the end of their childbearing years. As a therapist who has specialized in working with moms over the past 15 years, I can tell you with great confidence that moms have similar Parts. Once I started seeing these clear patterns emerge, I took the liberty of naming some of the Parts that are frequent flyers in the maternal system. I found that identifying those Parts and offering moms a sort of ‘Mom Parts menu,’ helped them quickly start to unblend and shed shame. Moms – especially those with babies and young children – don’t have a lot of time or mental space for depth work in therapy. They’re tired, they’re struggling and efficiency is valued. By simplifying some of the IFS language and providing intuitive prompts, I was able to guide them from being blended with their intense emotions to a new level of internal relationship building.

For too long, maternal mental health treatment has sided with Manager Parts, quietly agreeing with the patriarchal notion that moms shouldn’t get angry, feel panicky or be depressed. The medical model shares the common goal of trying to help moms feel better, but inadvertently adds to the collective pressure for moms to ‘buck up’ and get back to being selfless and churning out good mothering.

When moms present for therapy with “depression,” “rage,” or “anxiety” and they discover that their distress can be better understood as protector Parts contending with massive vulnerability – they get interested. When they learn that their Parts are trying to help them and that there are no bad Mom Parts, some of their shame starts to dissolve. When moms are encouraged to share about their Parts with each other, they connect deeply with each other and the competitive mothering falls away, replaced with compassion and relief.

Incorporating the liberating, healing principles of IFS into our work with mothers offers us a hopeful new path: we help moms understand that their struggle isn’t a personal failing—it’s a predictable response to neglect and to overwhelm. We validate all of the Mom Parts that show up to deal with the shit-show and start listening to the truth that those Parts need us to hear. These truths are offered as part of a gentle unburdening process that sends a message that it’s safe to be honest and that motherhood includes all of these Parts.

Jessica’s new book When Good Moms Feel Bad: An Empowering Guide for Transforming Guilt, Anxiety and Anger into Compassion, Confidence and Connectedness (Hachette/Balance) comes out in February 2026.