Come Tribe With Me

“What if she dies and I regret it?”

This is the fear that keeps so many women stuck.

But here is what I have learned from women who have been on both sides of that grief.

The ones who held their boundary and kept doing the inner work? They grieve cleanly. They grieve what was, and what wasn’t, and they move through it.

The ones who kept overriding themselves to avoid future regret? They often arrive at the funeral exhausted, resentful, and grieving the years they gave away on someone else’s terms.

You are allowed to make decisions based on the life you are actually living. Not the funeral you might one day attend. 🧡

The guilt that comes after a boundary is not feedback.

It is grief.

Grief for the version of yourself who used to keep the peace at any cost. Grief for the relationship you thought you had. Grief for the part of you that learned love had to be earned.

Sit with it. Don’t run from it.

That guilt is not telling you to go back. It is telling you something old is finally ending.

Comment “boundary” if this is where you are right now. I’ll send you something. 🧡

“But she’s your mum.”

The five words that have kept thousands of women silent and suffering.

They sound caring. They feel like a moral checkpoint. But really, they’re a way of asking you to keep abandoning yourself for someone else’s comfort.

Love and biology are not the same thing. Loving someone does not mean tolerating what hurts you. And needing space from a parent does not make you a bad daughter.

It makes you a woman who is finally listening to herself.

If this landed, comment with a heart below. It tells me you needed it. 🧡

People-pleasing with ADHD is a specific kind of tired. 🥲

One part of me is scanning every room: is everyone okay, did I upset anyone? The other part never stops overthinking. So I’m managing everyone’s feelings on a brain already running at full volume.

Then the impulsivity kicks in, I make a rash decision to escape the noise, and the people-pleaser wakes up panicking that I got it wrong. Overthinking the impulsive choice I made to stop overthinking. The loop is real.

What I’m learning: I can’t please everybody. My brain isn’t broken. And not every decision needs to be agonised over.

If this is you too, you’re not too much. You’re running two systems at once, and you’re allowed to rest 🧡

cometribewithme

One comment. And I spent the whole day parenting from someone else’s standard instead of my own 🥲

I didn’t argue with her in the moment. I thought I’d let it go. But her judgment moved into the back of my mind and quietly rewrote how I showed up - stricter, sterner, more “authoritative.” None of it mine.

This is the fawn response people miss. It’s not always the over-explaining in the moment. Sometimes it’s absorbing someone’s disapproval and becoming it for hours afterward.

And the hardest part? It’s exactly what my mom used to do to me. The seed of doubt. The slow erosion of trusting my own knowing.

I almost passed it straight down to my kids.

The work isn’t never getting activated. It’s catching it and asking: whose standard am I living from right now? 🧡

cometribewithme

5 ways to respond to your own fawn response (in the moment):

1. Name it to yourself.
“My back just went up. That’s the fawn response. I don’t have to explain myself to feel okay.”

2. Pause before the justification.
“I notice I want to defend this. I’m going to not do that.” The pause is the whole win.

3. Choose the non-answer.
“We just do it differently, and I’m good with how I do it.” No case-building. No evidence.

4. Hand the mirror back.
“I can feel myself wanting to justify this to you. What makes it matter so much to you?”

5. Let the silence sit.
You don’t have to fill it. Their disapproval is theirs to hold, not yours to fix.

The pattern doesn’t break by caring less what people think. It breaks in the half-second you catch yourself reaching for their approval, and choose not to 🧡

My mum thought soap taught a lesson. It taught me to hide.

With my son, I’m choosing boundaries WITHOUT fear, and he’s funding his own college education at 50p a swear 😉

This is what breaking the cycle actually looks like ❤️

Conscious parenting isn’t about your kids never getting it wrong.

It’s about what you do when they do.

This week tested me - here’s how we turned a school phone call into a real lesson ❤️