Episode 2: Honey, We Screwed Up The Family
There’s a conversation most people have been avoiding their entire adult lives.
Not because they don’t know it needs to happen. But because the moment you start pulling on that thread — the one connected to your mom — everything else starts to unravel with it. Your marriage. Your parenting. The way you shut down in arguments. The guilt you can’t explain. The boundaries you can’t hold.
I sat down with Ashley Oerman, author of Motherfucked: How to Stop Your Mother’s Toxic Trauma from Ruining Your Life, and we went there. All of it. And I’ll be honest — within five minutes we were already somewhere most people spend decades carefully walking around.
Hit play. This one’s going to hit close to home.
About Ashley
She is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, among other publications. She didn’t come to this topic from the outside — she came to it the hard way, through her own therapy, her own relationship with her mom, and the slow realization that the social anxiety derailing her career at her dream job had a return address she hadn’t expected.
Her book Motherfucked is what she describes as the book she needed fifteen years ago — grounded in interviews with licensed therapists, grief researchers, and attachment theorists, and written like a person, not a textbook. It’s for anyone who has ever felt like something is off in their relationship with their mom but couldn’t quite name it, justify it, or get anyone to take it seriously.
The book releases April 28th and is available anywhere books are sold.
📖 Grab it on Amazon (affiliate link — I only recommend things I’d actually send clients toward) 📬 Ashley’s Substack — Motherfucked, the Emotional Support Newsletter 📸 Ashley on Instagram
What We Get Into
This isn’t a surface-level conversation about “setting boundaries with difficult mothers.” We went clinical. We went personal. Here are the moments worth showing up for:
The panic attack that started it all. Ashley landed her dream job at Cosmopolitan and discovered she couldn’t breathe in pitch meetings. When she finally got to the bottom of it in therapy, the answer wasn’t what she expected. The thread led straight back to her mom — and her reaction to that realization was equal parts relief and oh god, I’m such a cliché. It’s a perfect entry point into how this stuff actually works.
The gray zone nobody talks about. Most people think the options are: great mom, or abusive mom. Ashley’s research introduced her to the “healthy relationship spectrum” — and the massive, largely unacknowledged middle ground called unhealthy. I push back on the binary thinking I see constantly in my practice, and we dig into why that all-or-nothing framing is one of the biggest things keeping people stuck.
Pleasers, acquiescers, and the kids who manufacture chaos. When a parent can’t consistently co-regulate, kids adapt. Some become pleasers. Some become acquiescers — which looks similar but is a different animal entirely. And then there’s a third pattern I describe that surprises people every time: kids who learn to engineer the explosion rather than wait for it. Once you’ve mapped a pattern, you play into it. This section of the conversation is one I’d make required listening for any parent.
Why comparison is making this harder than it needs to be. Ashley shares a story about her sorority’s Mom’s Weekend in college that is going to hit a lot of people in a specific, uncomfortable way. We talk about why we measure our family relationships against what we see on the surface of other people’s — and why that data set is almost always wrong.
Boundaries as experiments, not declarations. Ashley’s framework for actually changing the dynamic with your mom is one of the most practical things I’ve heard on this topic: treat every boundary like an experiment. Set it. Watch what happens. Take in the data. Adjust. We also get into why the covert guilt and passive-aggressive shame spiral is almost always worse than open conflict — and what to do when the pushback comes, because it will.
Families are kind of like cults. I said it. Ashley loved it. We went there.
Before You Go
If this conversation opened something up for you — or confirmed something you’ve been sitting with for a long time — Ashley’s book is the next right move.
She wrote it for the people in the gray zone. The ones who were fed and clothed and taken to soccer practice and still feel like something isn’t right. The ones who love their moms and also dread the phone calls. The ones who can’t figure out why a relationship with their mother takes up so much space in their brain when they’re not even in it.
That’s not weakness. That’s a pattern. And patterns can change.
📖 Motherfucked — available April 28th (affiliate link) 📬 Ashley’s Substack 📸 Ashley on Instagram
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