A Letter to the Mother Who Feels Disconnected
Busy Mum Takeaway Summary
Feeling disconnected in motherhood is often a nervous system response
Disconnection can be the body’s way of managing overwhelm, fatigue and constant demand
Reconnection comes from safety, pace and relationship
Noticing the distance you feel can be the first sign that awareness is returning
Your body has has been protecting you
To the mother reading this
If you feel disconnected, it is likely not because you have lost yourself, but because your body has been asked to carry more than it could metabolise in real time, and so it adapted in the only way it knew how.
Disconnection is actually a creative adaptive nervous system response.
It often arrives after birth, not just because of the physical intensity of pregnancy and labour, but because motherhood requires a level of continuous orientation to another human nervous system that leaves very little space for your own sensations, impulses and rhythms to be felt or completed. When this happens over weeks and months, especially in the context of sleep deprivation, pain, medical intervention, feeding difficulties or a sense that you must keep functioning regardless of how you are actually doing, the nervous system begins to prioritise survival over presence.
What Mothers Call “Losing Themselves”
So the body narrows, sensation dulls and awareness shifts outwards. The inner world becomes quieter, flatter or harder to access because it is too much to feel all at once while still needing to show up, care, respond and endure.
What many mothers describe as feeling lost or disconnected is often the experience of living from a state where the body has learned that staying slightly removed is safer than fully arriving. This can look like moving through the day efficiently but without texture, holding your baby while feeling oddly far away, struggling to name what you feel because what you feel is not one clear emotion but a layered mix of exhaustion, vigilance, grief and love that never quite gets the space to land.
Why Safety Is Key
Your body is not asking you to push harder toward connection or to try to feel more. It is asking for conditions that signal safety slowly enough that it can begin to come back online without being overwhelmed again. This means less doing and more allowing. Less effort and more permission. Less focus on techniques and more attention to the subtle cues your body is already offering, such as the way your breath changes when you finally sit down, or how your shoulders soften when you feel genuinely met by another.
Reconnection Happens Through Relationship
Reconnection does not happen through willpower. It happens through relationship. Relationship with your own sensations, with time that is not rushed, with another nervous system that can be steady enough to hold you while you are not.
There is a part of you that has been waiting quietly for the moment when it no longer has to stay braced. When it no longer has to stay small or numb or organised around coping. That part needs safety, connection and it needs pace.
If All You Can Feel Is the Distance
So if all you can sense right now is the distance itself, please know that this is awareness returning. And awareness, when it is allowed to stay embodied and kind, is the beginning of contact.
You are in a body that adapted to keep you going, and now may be ready, slowly, to come home again.
With you, Lauren
